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I see Unity lasting a long time. There are basically only two companies to consider if you want to make a 3D game: Unity and Unreal. Unity is so much easier to

I see Unity lasting a long time. There are basically only two companies to consider if you want to make a 3D game: Unity and Unreal. Unity is so much easier to pick up for newer game developers, which means Unity will always have a funnel of new users that will help the company stay afloat. The decision to use C# is a major factor in Unity's success. Not only do you get the benefit of an existing ecosystem, and you also don't need to worry about the insanity that is C++. The biggest threat to Unity is probably Godot achieving a Blender-like success story where Godot achieves parity with Unity but is free.

acchow 4y ago
> There are basically only two companies to consider today.
golergka 4y ago
Unreal has Blueprints that are superior to all Unity's visual scripting solutions, so if you're a beginning indie dev, you don't need to write code at all. If, however, you're a professional game developer who tries to get his game to run 60 FPS on a 6-year old phone (not a hypothetical example, I've led a project that had 60 FPS on iPhone 4 in 2016 with Unity), then you WANT the C++ and engine source code. I've been working with Unity since 2009 and hope to never touch that giant flaming pile of shit again in my life. Having moved to frontend development still, I'm very happy to work with tools that mostly work, and if they don't, you can actually dig in and debug them, with healthy development culture that actually encourages you to do so. Sorry for the emotional rant; 10 years of Unity experience (not really though, I've done other things in this time as well) do that to a person.
- jnash 4y ago
  Not my experience at all. I prefer Unity over Unreal.
TulliusCicero 4y ago
Hopefully Godot can make some progress there once 4.0 is out. They're making some very large changes that are supposed to drastically improve 3D performance.
wild-eep 4y ago
I think that's where Godot is headed. The Godot editor is so much more enjoyable to use, the docs are good, the script editor is nice, and the node system makes it really simple and fun to iterate and build stuff. Very lightweight and beginner friendly. I would be surprised it Godot + Blender don't become the future pipeline for indie devs. But they do have a ways to go. 4.0 is showing a lot of progress.
blensor 4y ago
I know most won't take that seriously, but GodotEngine is a pretty nice alternative. Godot is kind of the Unity of Unreal. Meaning it is the runnerup but is picking up the pace quite quickly. And from also working with Unity my personal experience is that the stuff in Godot is a lot more logical than how it's done in Unity. This is of course a personal preference but it feels like Godot has a lot more "eat your own dogfood" going on
ParksNet 4y ago
New game developers don't make any money. The gaming industry, both free and paid titles, is overwhelmingly hit-driven, and bigger professional teams can more consistently deliver high quality content. The median title on Steam earns only $3,000 in sales over the first year: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/blogs/analyst-your-first-week-and-first-year-s-steam-sales-might-be-correlating https://www.gamedeveloper.com/blogs/analyst-your-first-week-... Considering cost of development and time, the average title most likely loses money. People were basically LARPing as game developers, and throwing money at Unity for the privilege. As economic conditions deteriorate, its reasonable to expect people to stop doing that.
- rozab 4y ago
  Steam is kind of irrelevant. If you look through Unity job postings, almost all of them are in the mobile market (where Unity dominates) with the rest being gambling or web3 vaporware
- georgeecollins 4y ago
  >> LARPing as game developers That's harsh in my opinion. In entertainment and media there are always more people who want to do a thing than can be supported: musicians, actors, comedians, artists, etc. Sometimes amateurs become pros. Sometimes people "LARPing" -- as you call it --make games I really enjoy. So I think its cool that people try their luck at game development even knowing most won't make a living at it.
  - kjs3 4y ago
    Ya. Am I LARPing as a developer for creating OSS things that scratch and itch and not working at Oracle or some such.
  - DonHopkins 4y ago
    Most of the people actually "LARPing" don't actually ever finish and publish their games, so you can't enjoy them.
    - 4y ago
sleepybrett 4y ago
Unreal seems to have made great strides to make their engine more approachable by outsiders. Five years ago you had a stronger argument, these days I'm not so sure.
- jbluepolarbear 4y ago
  Although blueprints are great, once you have to touch C++ it’s not so great. Tools like Rider for Unreal make it much, much better though. C++ is king of game dev and everyone hates it. Unreal is not regular C++ and handles a lot of resource management for you, but it’s still C++.
  - chunkyguy 4y ago
    Am I the only one who prefers C++ over C#?
    - FpUser 4y ago
      nope
    - bena 4y ago
      I want to say this, but it's honestly been close to a decade since I've seriously touched C or C++. I've used Objective-C more recently than C/C++. These days, if I'm thinking about creating an application, I'm defaulting to C#.
      - DonHopkins 4y ago
        ...And Objective C was designed to say "[self fuck]" to C.
    - dilap 4y ago
      you've used both and still feel that way? i admit, i'm surprised! why the love for c++?
    - jokethrowaway 4y ago
TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
> if you want to make a 3D game: Unity and Unreal Speaking of which, whatever happened with iDTech?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- formerly_proven 4y ago
  Bethesda/Microsoft bought them and took it off the licensing market, but it also seems questionable to me if it had a future there anyway, because they seemed to have gone all-in on large but totally static environments with Rage, something which has not changed with Doom. That's not something that really works for many games. Looking at the family chart you can see that the last version that was widely licensed was idTech 3 - from 1999: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/85/Quake_-_family_tree_2.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/85/Quake_-_...
madrox 4y ago
The big risk to products where better UX is a differentiator is that it's easy for competitors to catch up and you need to keep moving. I tend to agree that Unity will be around for a while, but I'm not sure it will keep its same prominence. It's losing its first mover advantage.
wilg 4y ago
God I would love for Unity to offer a Swift (no GC, fully type safe, compiled, fast) API with a rethought API surface. And have only one renderer to choose from instead of 3 with all different features.
- andrewf 4y ago
  And have only one renderer to choose from instead of 3 with all different features. So you want a fourth renderer? :)
- Pulcinella 4y ago
  I’m not sure how much of a performance hit ARC traffic would be. Though I think at least some of Unity’s DOTS systems really on structs instead of reference counted objects so it shouldn’t be a problem there.
  - wilg 4y ago
    Swift structs should work for that too. But also DOTS is like years away from being ready it seems like. Basically hacked into the engine and language and kinda over complicated and confusing at the moment.
  - Arcanum-XIII 4y ago
    Not ARC per se but the message dispatch mechanism was the biggest hurdle to high performance Objective C. The solution was easy : drop to C. Not really the best options for ease of approach :)
- oaiey 4y ago
  C# on Unity is very different then what you expect. Different base class library, stack instead of heap objects, heap arranged to allow fast iterating over them. It is C# but it is not your typical .NET. And .NET done right is in the performance region where other aspects kick in (like network or UI bottlenecks).
  - wilg 4y ago

acchow 4y ago

> There are basically only two companies to consider today.

golergka 4y ago

Unreal has Blueprints that are superior to all Unity's visual scripting solutions, so if you're a beginning indie dev, you don't need to write code at all. If, however, you're a professional game developer who tries to get his game to run 60 FPS on a 6-year old phone (not a hypothetical example, I've led a project that had 60 FPS on iPhone 4 in 2016 with Unity), then you WANT the C++ and engine source code. I've been working with Unity since 2009 and hope to never touch that giant flaming pile of shit again in my life. Having moved to frontend development still, I'm very happy to work with tools that mostly work, and if they don't, you can actually dig in and debug them, with healthy development culture that actually encourages you to do so. Sorry for the emotional rant; 10 years of Unity experience (not really though, I've done other things in this time as well) do that to a person.

jnash 4y ago
Not my experience at all. I prefer Unity over Unreal.

TulliusCicero 4y ago

Hopefully Godot can make some progress there once 4.0 is out. They're making some very large changes that are supposed to drastically improve 3D performance.

wild-eep 4y ago

I think that's where Godot is headed. The Godot editor is so much more enjoyable to use, the docs are good, the script editor is nice, and the node system makes it really simple and fun to iterate and build stuff. Very lightweight and beginner friendly. I would be surprised it Godot + Blender don't become the future pipeline for indie devs. But they do have a ways to go. 4.0 is showing a lot of progress.

blensor 4y ago

I know most won't take that seriously, but GodotEngine is a pretty nice alternative. Godot is kind of the Unity of Unreal. Meaning it is the runnerup but is picking up the pace quite quickly. And from also working with Unity my personal experience is that the stuff in Godot is a lot more logical than how it's done in Unity. This is of course a personal preference but it feels like Godot has a lot more "eat your own dogfood" going on

ParksNet 4y ago

New game developers don't make any money. The gaming industry, both free and paid titles, is overwhelmingly hit-driven, and bigger professional teams can more consistently deliver high quality content. The median title on Steam earns only $3,000 in sales over the first year: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/blogs/analyst-your-first-week-and-first-year-s-steam-sales-might-be-correlating https://www.gamedeveloper.com/blogs/analyst-your-first-week-... Considering cost of development and time, the average title most likely loses money. People were basically LARPing as game developers, and throwing money at Unity for the privilege. As economic conditions deteriorate, its reasonable to expect people to stop doing that.

rozab 4y ago
Steam is kind of irrelevant. If you look through Unity job postings, almost all of them are in the mobile market (where Unity dominates) with the rest being gambling or web3 vaporware
georgeecollins 4y ago
>> LARPing as game developers That's harsh in my opinion. In entertainment and media there are always more people who want to do a thing than can be supported: musicians, actors, comedians, artists, etc. Sometimes amateurs become pros. Sometimes people "LARPing" -- as you call it --make games I really enjoy. So I think its cool that people try their luck at game development even knowing most won't make a living at it.
- kjs3 4y ago
  Ya. Am I LARPing as a developer for creating OSS things that scratch and itch and not working at Oracle or some such.
- DonHopkins 4y ago
  Most of the people actually "LARPing" don't actually ever finish and publish their games, so you can't enjoy them.
  - 4y ago

sleepybrett 4y ago

Unreal seems to have made great strides to make their engine more approachable by outsiders. Five years ago you had a stronger argument, these days I'm not so sure.

jbluepolarbear 4y ago
Although blueprints are great, once you have to touch C++ it’s not so great. Tools like Rider for Unreal make it much, much better though. C++ is king of game dev and everyone hates it. Unreal is not regular C++ and handles a lot of resource management for you, but it’s still C++.
- chunkyguy 4y ago
  Am I the only one who prefers C++ over C#?
  - FpUser 4y ago
    nope
  - bena 4y ago
    I want to say this, but it's honestly been close to a decade since I've seriously touched C or C++. I've used Objective-C more recently than C/C++. These days, if I'm thinking about creating an application, I'm defaulting to C#.
    - DonHopkins 4y ago
      ...And Objective C was designed to say "[self fuck]" to C.
  - dilap 4y ago
    you've used both and still feel that way? i admit, i'm surprised! why the love for c++?
  - jokethrowaway 4y ago

TheRealDunkirk 4y ago

> if you want to make a 3D game: Unity and Unreal Speaking of which, whatever happened with iDTech?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
formerly_proven 4y ago
Bethesda/Microsoft bought them and took it off the licensing market, but it also seems questionable to me if it had a future there anyway, because they seemed to have gone all-in on large but totally static environments with Rage, something which has not changed with Doom. That's not something that really works for many games. Looking at the family chart you can see that the last version that was widely licensed was idTech 3 - from 1999: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/85/Quake_-_family_tree_2.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/85/Quake_-_...

madrox 4y ago

The big risk to products where better UX is a differentiator is that it's easy for competitors to catch up and you need to keep moving. I tend to agree that Unity will be around for a while, but I'm not sure it will keep its same prominence. It's losing its first mover advantage.

wilg 4y ago

God I would love for Unity to offer a Swift (no GC, fully type safe, compiled, fast) API with a rethought API surface. And have only one renderer to choose from instead of 3 with all different features.

andrewf 4y ago
And have only one renderer to choose from instead of 3 with all different features. So you want a fourth renderer? :)
Pulcinella 4y ago
I’m not sure how much of a performance hit ARC traffic would be. Though I think at least some of Unity’s DOTS systems really on structs instead of reference counted objects so it shouldn’t be a problem there.
- wilg 4y ago
  Swift structs should work for that too. But also DOTS is like years away from being ready it seems like. Basically hacked into the engine and language and kinda over complicated and confusing at the moment.
- Arcanum-XIII 4y ago
  Not ARC per se but the message dispatch mechanism was the biggest hurdle to high performance Objective C. The solution was easy : drop to C. Not really the best options for ease of approach :)
oaiey 4y ago
C# on Unity is very different then what you expect. Different base class library, stack instead of heap objects, heap arranged to allow fast iterating over them. It is C# but it is not your typical .NET. And .NET done right is in the performance region where other aspects kick in (like network or UI bottlenecks).
- wilg 4y ago