6 ms·

Had the same thought, my experience with unity support is its a blackhole. Good that there are some good examples even if from times past.

fxtentacle 5y ago
I think it's a sort of tragedy of the commons situation. When I first met some of the Unity people at the Nordic Game Jam in 2012, they seemed like an awesome team making game development accessible to everyone. At that time, UE was still closed source and out of every indie's reach. And Unity was Mac-only. Since then, Unity has become the de-factor platform for cheap outsourced mobile games, reskin spam, and app store gambling scams. They now have millions of developers using their game engine, but it's an army of people building 1€ apps. Obviously, you can't charge them much because their revenue is so low. And so they had to make support cheap to compensate. But the part which I don't get is why Unity doesn't offer paid support for medium-sized indie studios. And why they don't publicly sell source code access. I mean their biggest competitor UE4/5 already has all source code on GitHub.
- gfxgirl 5y ago
  They do sell support https://unity.com/success-plans https://unity.com/success-plans
  - franknine 5y ago
    The paid support is not cheap and mostly useless, at least in Asia region. We still need to go through normal bug report system, create reproduction steps for them, and get denied for back-porting bug fixes every single time. The only thing changed is that there's a "bug fix progress update" to make you feel a little bit better. We terminated the support right after the term expired.
- Karliss 5y ago
  They sell both paid support and source code for extra money in addition to the subscription. It's in the plan comparison table.
  - fxtentacle 5y ago
    I contacted them about it in the past and they refused to even tell me the price. That's why I said they need to publicly sell it, because as-is I don't know anyone who succeeded in buying it.
    - Jasper_ 5y ago
      It's determined on a per-contract basis. Expect to spend quite a few months making a deal, and having it come with a bunch of strings attached. The company I worked for had Unity source access, but we were required to submit any source changes back to Unity (even if they chose not to integrate them), and announce our game at UnityCon 2018. They also wanted us to help write some of the cutscene timeline tools. I don't know if they used any of the code we wrote, but we definitely did a bunch of work on those timeline tools and sent them back to them.
      - franknine 5y ago
        This is worse than I could possibly imagine. Did your studio at least get credited for the work on timeline tools?
        Jasper_ 5y ago
        I don't see why we would -- I don't think Unity has any individual credits listed for their engine developers. That's standard for software development, AFAIK Adobe is really the only mainstream software company that still has credits listed in their product releases.
- iandanforth 5y ago
  "De facto" - No hyphen, no 'r'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_facto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_facto Post left in the spirit that the OP was a typo, but that someone else might not know and be interested in the Latin roots of this phrase.
  - fxtentacle 5y ago
    Thanks :)
- Nition 5y ago
  > In 2012...Unity was Mac-only The timeline is a bit off here. Unity was initially Mac-only, but only for a short time. It ran on Windows from version 2.5 in 2009.[1] [1]https://blog.unity.com/technology/unity-25-for-mac-and-windows-now-available https://blog.unity.com/technology/unity-25-for-mac-and-windo...

fxtentacle 5y ago

I think it's a sort of tragedy of the commons situation. When I first met some of the Unity people at the Nordic Game Jam in 2012, they seemed like an awesome team making game development accessible to everyone. At that time, UE was still closed source and out of every indie's reach. And Unity was Mac-only. Since then, Unity has become the de-factor platform for cheap outsourced mobile games, reskin spam, and app store gambling scams. They now have millions of developers using their game engine, but it's an army of people building 1€ apps. Obviously, you can't charge them much because their revenue is so low. And so they had to make support cheap to compensate. But the part which I don't get is why Unity doesn't offer paid support for medium-sized indie studios. And why they don't publicly sell source code access. I mean their biggest competitor UE4/5 already has all source code on GitHub.

gfxgirl 5y ago
They do sell support https://unity.com/success-plans https://unity.com/success-plans
- franknine 5y ago
  The paid support is not cheap and mostly useless, at least in Asia region. We still need to go through normal bug report system, create reproduction steps for them, and get denied for back-porting bug fixes every single time. The only thing changed is that there's a "bug fix progress update" to make you feel a little bit better. We terminated the support right after the term expired.
Karliss 5y ago
They sell both paid support and source code for extra money in addition to the subscription. It's in the plan comparison table.
- fxtentacle 5y ago
  I contacted them about it in the past and they refused to even tell me the price. That's why I said they need to publicly sell it, because as-is I don't know anyone who succeeded in buying it.
  - Jasper_ 5y ago
    It's determined on a per-contract basis. Expect to spend quite a few months making a deal, and having it come with a bunch of strings attached. The company I worked for had Unity source access, but we were required to submit any source changes back to Unity (even if they chose not to integrate them), and announce our game at UnityCon 2018. They also wanted us to help write some of the cutscene timeline tools. I don't know if they used any of the code we wrote, but we definitely did a bunch of work on those timeline tools and sent them back to them.
    - franknine 5y ago
      This is worse than I could possibly imagine. Did your studio at least get credited for the work on timeline tools?
      - Jasper_ 5y ago
        I don't see why we would -- I don't think Unity has any individual credits listed for their engine developers. That's standard for software development, AFAIK Adobe is really the only mainstream software company that still has credits listed in their product releases.
iandanforth 5y ago
"De facto" - No hyphen, no 'r'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_facto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_facto Post left in the spirit that the OP was a typo, but that someone else might not know and be interested in the Latin roots of this phrase.
- fxtentacle 5y ago
  Thanks :)
Nition 5y ago
> In 2012...Unity was Mac-only The timeline is a bit off here. Unity was initially Mac-only, but only for a short time. It ran on Windows from version 2.5 in 2009.[1] [1]https://blog.unity.com/technology/unity-25-for-mac-and-windows-now-available https://blog.unity.com/technology/unity-25-for-mac-and-windo...