15 ms·

The Death of Unity

290 points by sp332 3y ago

ghostzilla 3y ago
About time. What makes a game unique in spirit is its engine.
- rexpop 3y ago
  What an absurdly facile perspective. While it's true that developers like Valve develop games only to take advantage of or exhibit new engine developments and Minecraft's revolutionary voxel engine likewise enabled a game that could not be built otherwise, you seem to be suggesting that eg all UE games throughout the last thirty years are undifferentiated "in spirit" because they share an engine. What an insult to writers, artists, and game designers! None of them have managed to imbue their works with "unique spirit?"
  - kevingadd 3y ago
    Minecraft's engine wasn't remotely revolutionary, it was basically a 1:1 riff on an XNA game called Infiniminer that predated it. And its engine wasn't especially good. Minecraft's success is almost entirely due to its accessibility and the fundamental strength of its design - both things that are possible in any game engine. These days a large % of Minecraft installs are a C++ version of the game and not the original Java version, because it's really not about the engine.
    - outworlder 3y ago
      I am not sure I would even call Minecraft as having a "game engine". An engine is usually generalized so it can be extracted and used for many games. > And its engine wasn't especially good. It was good enough. It's non trivial to do, despite appearances. > These days a large % of Minecraft installs are a C++ version of the game and not the original Java version, because it's really not about the engine. But is the Bedrock version even the majority? It's been out for years and adoption is very slow. If it was not for game consoles it might not have taken off at all. And the main reason is mods. Which are not part of the "engine" as you put it, and were enabled by the technology choice.
      - kevingadd 3y ago
        We would need to know how many Minecraft installs are on mobile and console, where Java isn't an option. I would expect it's a large % of the overall userbase, but I don't have access to the numbers. Switch and Android both open Minecraft up to a huge number of people who either don't have a PC or can't install Minecraft on it. Agreed that mods are a big part of the experience and would only really have flourished using technologies like Java (what Notch chose), C# or JavaScript, not C++.
    - rexpop 3y ago
      Fine, "Infiniminer's revolutionary voxel engine."
  - ghostzilla 3y ago
    "What an insult to writers, artists, and game designers! None of them have managed to imbue their works with "unique spirit?" As someone said, to the extent they have managed to do it -- and many have -- it was not because of engines like unity but despite them. I imagine all those people would have been happier if the engineers had made a custom engine for them (and quick).
- qayxc 3y ago
  There's two types of game developers: those who finish and publish games and those who write their own game engine. Every minute spent on re-inventing the wheel for the umpteenth time is time lost on actually writing and polishing the actual game. Tools like Unity were a godsent for small teams and solo devs who just wanted to write and publish games. While libraries like SDL can lighten the burden somewhat, they are still no replacement for solid asset pipelines, visual editors, performance analysing tools, and a mature pipeline for multi-platform packaging and publishing.
  - badsectoracula 3y ago
    > There's two types of game developers: those who finish and publish games and those who write their own game engine. This is wrong, there are tons of finished games that use custom engines. For example one of the most recent indie games i bought was Zortch which was made by a single person and used a custom engine. EDIT: actually here is a page that collects some custom engines, ranging from big studios down to one man efforts, all with released games: https://gist.github.com/raysan5/909dc6cf33ed40223eb0dfe625c0de74 https://gist.github.com/raysan5/909dc6cf33ed40223eb0dfe625c0...
    - aaaaaalop 3y ago
      This is meaningless without percentages. How many devs didn't release their games for each game in this list?
      - badsectoracula 3y ago
        This is not meaningless as the message i replied to claimed that developers who write their own game engine do not finish and publish games. That was factually incorrect. What you are asking for is something completely different and unless humanity had some sort of hivemind to have universal knowledge, we can't really know as people start and abandon projects all the time. The best we can do is some heavily biased guesses - and mine would be that the abandoned games in engines like Unity, GameMaker, etc where it is trivial to start a new project would be much more than even other engines (let alone custom engines).
- newobj 3y ago
  You sure 'bout that?
- derstander 3y ago
  > What makes a game unique in spirit is its engine. This isn’t true about websites and frameworks or sculptures and chisels. There’s no reason why it should be true of games and their engines. It is a poetic statement though. My opinion is that, in all of these processes, people are the ones that bring the spirit and thus are its source in the final product.
bluescrn 3y ago
The decline of Unity is sad. Unity got so many things very right in their pre-IPO years. They made rapid prototyping and development of 3D games much easier than anything that came before. Being able to develop in C# was a huge win, especially for small teams and solo indie, and it made developing for multiple platforms easy, and took away a lot of the pain of native mobile development for Android/iOS. But Unity has been declared dead/dying before, I suspect it'll have a long future ahead in some form even if it's no longer the obvious go-to engine choice for indies and mobile developers. A lot of people have invested a lot of years into their Unity skills as well as projects/codebases.
- hadlock 3y ago
  Bringing John Ricitiello on as CEO (former disgraced EA CEO) should have been a yellow (or red?) flag that things had reached their peak.
  - gmerc 3y ago
    I wonder how many company funds went to reputation management to drive an obscure NY Pizza Palor on google above his name on a direct search after the molestation charges leveraged by one of their C-Levels
- tick_tock_tick 3y ago
  > the obvious go-to engine choice for indies and mobile developers What do you think has taken it's place?
  - bluescrn 3y ago
    There's a lot more indies talking about Unreal, and also Godot. Too early to see how much of that talk will translate to shipping finished games, though. Artists are excited by the potential of UE5, as Unity's rendering tech has stagnated somewhat. But making a UE5 Nanite/Lumen game is likely to be limiting your audience rather a lot, with high hardware requirements.
pjmlp 3y ago
The biggest issue, unfortunely is that all the other engines that offer C# support as the main language, lack the AOT compilation toolchain (including game consoles), the graphical tooling including debugging and profilers, asset store with people living from it, and above all, being fully endorsed by all major game platform owners and VR/AR hardware. So anyone that wants to replace Unity, despite their missteps, has a long to catch up to.
- kkukshtel 3y ago
  The .NET ecosystem has recently added "NativeAOT" compilation as a first class feature, and Unity's gall-bladder relationship to Mono (instead of migrating to Dotnet Core, they continue to work off their own Mono fork) has opened up a space where anyone programming C# now has the once-hard-to-reach AOT holy grail for consoles now just behind an XML flag. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/deploying/native-aot/?tabs=net7%2Cwindows https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/deploying/nati...
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    Native AOT is still WIP, behind .NET Native, and someone has to implement the consoles backend, and runtime support.
    - throwuxiytayq 3y ago
      Unity’s software is permanently in a WIP prerelease state (and then it usually gets obsoleted in favor of something even less stable). Good luck making a game with their multiplayer package. I have full confidence that better .NET game development stacks (plural!) will emerge. Maybe even ones not based on some ungodly mutated version of Mono from decades ago.
- kevingadd 3y ago
  C# has had multiple non-Unity AOT solutions [1] for a while. I worked on multiple shipped C# games for the PS4 and PS Vita that didn't use Unity. 1: BRUTE, Mono AOT, and CoreCLR NativeAOT among others
mdtrooper 3y ago
Well, I write one thing: https://godotengine.org/ https://godotengine.org/
- Thaxll 3y ago
  People believing that in the mobile space Godot can be a replacement to Unity are delusional, in 10 years maybe? Godot is a "mature" toy engine. There is not a single quality / money maker game that shipped on Godot.
  - all2 3y ago
    > Godot is a "mature" toy engine. This does not seem to be related to this: > There is not a single quality / money maker game that shipped on Godot. There's some missing context in the middle. I'm curious how one implies the other? I'd be game for chains of logic going from first -> second or vice versa. I'm specifically curious, what is Godot missing?
    - Thaxll 3y ago
      Godot is missing the game that shows this engine is a viable alternative to Unity at large. I mean look at the showcase: https://godotengine.org/showcase/ https://godotengine.org/showcase/ It all looks amateur. All the mobile dev work on Unity so you better have good reasons to change the entire pipeline.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - unleaded 3y ago
        so nobody wants to make a fancy looking game because nobody's made a fancy looking game... hmm...
        Thaxll 3y ago
        You don't want to be the first one to make the jump.
koromak 3y ago
I agree, but wow this is a poorly written article
- bjord 3y ago
  what was so terrible about it? I thought it was fine when I read it
sakopov 3y ago
Unity's site is all about real-time development, visualizations and things of that nature, not game development. Did they recently rebrand or has it always been this way? Could this have something to do with the perceived downfall? Are they now just targeting a different audience?
- troupo 3y ago
  They are trying to compete with Unreal. It really is "monkey see, monkey do". They see Unreal develop tech for movies and TV, they buy Weta Digital. They see Unreal advertise tools for visualization, architecture etc., they do the same.
- bluescrn 3y ago
  They've been trying hard to expand their userbase beyond games. And as a result, losing focus on the needs of game developers.
omoikane 3y ago
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37481344 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37481344 - "Unity plan pricing and packaging updates" It's linked in this article as "the latest and final straw".
monero-xmr 3y ago
It’s the endless struggle. Make developer tool backed by a corporation. Charge nothing / very little. Venture capital stops flowing. Start charging. Get increasingly expensive. Milk giant companies with stable revenues who don’t think it’s worth switching. Repeat forever. The solution is only use open source for dev tools, or pay one-time fees.
KaoruAoiShiho 3y ago
The thing is it's still far cheaper than Unreal, so unless Unreal is dying too calling it death doesn't make sense.
- bpye 3y ago
  Maybe? It seems like Unity is charging the fee per install [0], not per unique user. So when I install my Steam games on my desktop, my laptop and my Steam Deck that's 3 installs. If I reinstall the OS, that'll be another install - or if I clean up my Steam library and reinstall later, etc. Maybe this is acceptable if your title has microtransactions because you may get some ongoing revenue stream for that user - but otherwise? And it's entirely unclear to me how this works with Game Pass, streaming, etc. [0] - https://twitter.com/stephentotilo/status/1701679721027633280 https://twitter.com/stephentotilo/status/1701679721027633280
  - oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
    It's even worse according to the original announcement - it talks about a monthly rate per install.
    - ummonk 3y ago
      I think the announcement is using confusing verbiage. From the looks of it it's a monthly fee for installs made that month.
  - TheRealPomax 3y ago
    And then Epic goes "this week's free game" and now it's several million installs and the game studio's bankrupt. Because weaponizing this will happen if given the chance.
    - oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
      Does the studio not have to agree to Epic making their game free?
  - 3y ago
causality0 3y ago
Before the popularity of commercial game engines, each game was built bespoke, which had some advantages, but took a lot of time, and made each port a chore. One of the greatest things Unity provided was a relatively easy pipeline to console releases, making ports more about platform quirks than full recoding. This heavily implies Unity was responsible for the advent of commercial game engines and game engines being licensed to third party developers, which is bullshit. This was done with many game engines long before Unity, such as iD Tech, RenderWare, the Build engine, GoldSrc, the Unreal engine, even the GameMaker Studio engine.
- yvdriess 3y ago
  Source, GameBryo, LithTech, ...
- kllrnohj 3y ago
  Unreal is the best comparison but the original statement isn't entirely bullshit. What Unity did (as does Unreal) is make the game engine more as a platform as the goal in and of itself. That is, wide feature set, mostly stable APIs, incorporating developer feedback, deprecation/evolution paths, etc... whereas other engines like idTech are more like a static library drop that you're expected to then tweak & adjust to your needs. And those other engines were often developed for a specific game, and then sold as more of a "why not?" than being the goal of the development. idtech, for example, was consistently developed very specifically for the id flagship game of the generation, and it's design decisions & tradeoffs reflected that. There's a reason that as widely used as the idTech 3 was at the time, it also was nearly exclusively used with FPS games - the engine wasn't a good fit for other things, and id wasn't really investing in changing that. It's not unlike the library vs. framework debate of the modern JS world. Unity & Unreal are more frameworks, while most other engines are libraries.
  - causality0 3y ago
    RenderWare is a better comparison than Unreal, since Unreal was developed first as an engine for a flagship game and only later licensed out. From Wikipedia on RenderWare: It was licensed over 200 times. The scope went towards an integrated middleware with low level APIs for rendering, physics, audio, AI all of which are extensible through plug-ins which also serve the official high-level API. The aim was to reduce the learning curve by also including service and support for licensees. With RenderWare Studio an integrated development environment including a debugger was included.[3] RenderWare themselves claimed a 70 % marketshare across studios that choose an external engine in 2003
MenhirMike 3y ago
I believe it when I see it. I would like to see it, but I doubt that a significant enough portion of developers are going to jump ship. For smaller indie studios, there are definitely better alternatives, but when it comes to the big packages, there's really just Unity and Unreal.
- TheRealPomax 3y ago
  This change really only hits the small studios and especially solo game devs, game conglomerates can probably just go "k, that's another 100k on top of a several million budget, raise the unit price by another $5 and call it a day".
  - Ekaros 3y ago
    Medium and big devs have much better rates... This actually really hits hardest the solo and tiny devs that make reasonably successful game. 200k revenue is not that much in over a few years or split between couple people.
    - hnthrowaway0328 3y ago
      The 200k is over last 12 months AFAIK, and there is an install wall you have to breakthrough to be eligible.
- dgb23 3y ago
  Many of my favorite games aren’t built on licensed engines.
  - dingdong33 3y ago
    Yes, xbill and tuxracer are my favorite games too.
    - oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
      Or, just one single example: Tears of the Kingdom.
sydbarrett74 3y ago
IPO's are usually the beginning of the end as far as a company being responsive to its customers and producing quality. From the time an IPO is made, the company is responsive only to its shareholders and that's it. Thanks, Bork and Friedman!
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
  A thought occurred to me a few weeks ago... it was another Hacker News thread, forget which, but someone had mentioned the specific case law which cemented this fact. Maybe it was Ford himself? The details escape me, but afterwards, companies were forced to prioritize shareholders above all else. But legislators aren't exactly forbidden from creating new types of companies. As ignorant as I am of most things business, there is today more than just the "Inc." and LLC. They've even created various non-profit and charitable corporations that are prohibited, by law, from distributing profits. This being the case, why not a new type of corporation that was somewhere in the middle? Able to distribute profits (perhaps even with limitations on when they can withhold them, like so many of the big tech companies). Ones where the shareholders still get some (statutorily defined, so that case law can't come in and fuck it up) priority, but that when shareholders are acting only in short term interest, they can be overruled by those in charge of managing it.
  - __loam 3y ago
    I think you're talking about fiduciary responsibility. CEOs can be removed if they're shown to be acting against the interests of the shareholders which is why a lot of them look like ass holes. > This being the case, why not a new type of corporation that was somewhere in the middle? Able to distribute profits (perhaps even with limitations on when they can withhold them, like so many of the big tech companies). Ones where the shareholders still get some (statutorily defined, so that case law can't come in and fuck it up) priority, but that when shareholders are acting only in short term interest, they can be overruled by those in charge of managing it. There are of course alternate ways of structuring companies that prioritize the needs of groups of people besides shareholders like worker co-ops. The issue with these is that it can be difficult to raise capital to start or grow these businesses because there's less incentives for investors to give you their money.
hitpointdrew 3y ago
>Imagine releasing a game for 99 cents under the personal plan, where Steam takes 30% off the top for their platform fee, and then unity takes 20 cents per install, and now you're making a maximum of 46 cents on the dollar. Not only that, but with this predatory practice of taking any percent (steam, apple) or fix dollar value, makes just having a game up a potential liability. If you need to refund anyone you are refunding the full $0.99 from your account, despite you only made $0.46 (steam and unity are going to keep theirs, its on you as the publisher to make up the difference). If you had a disastrous launch and had a majority of people seeking a refund, well not only did you hard work and effort not pay off, you owe $$$$ on top of that. In theory this liability is like shorting a stock and the loss potential is virtually limitless, you could end up owing millions.
- byyoung3 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - kevingadd 3y ago
    In no universe is Unity responsible for 90% of the game. Their tech simply does not do that much for you.
  - samtho 3y ago
    If I bought a nail gun, a saw, a pile of wood, and proceeded to build a house, did DeWalt actually build that structure? Any reasonable person would say no. You seem to have the same thought process that people had about computer animation. For some reason, many people were under the impression that just because it happens on the computer, you can simply ask Maya to create a full-length animated feature. The platform the game was made on cannot take credit for the story, level design, character design, world design, game mechanics, game balance, art direction, vocal talent, cut scenes, and myriad of other assets and elements belonging to the game.
    - autokad 3y ago
      that's a good point
dang 3y ago
Related ongoing threads: Unity plan pricing and packaging updates - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37481344 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37481344 The New Godot Development Fund - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37481872 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37481872
jrflowers 3y ago
>I know one such developer who is stuck, who's estimating this new scheme will cost them $100,000/month on a free to play game, where their revenue isn't guaranteed. We can assume that this would mean running the game at a loss, because the author didn’t say that.
- al2o3cr 3y ago
  We can assume that this would mean running the game at a loss, because the author didn’t say that. A better assumption would be that they're likely to clear the $100k/mo, but as they said "not guaranteed" to do so. I suspect that if the author would have intensified the statement to "they would go out of business with the new scheme" if they were certain to lose money.
  - jrflowers 3y ago
    > A better assumption would be that they're likely to clear the $100k/mo, but as they said "not guaranteed" to do so. It’s funny that the vague $100k/mo figure is meant to evoke some sort of response from the reader. The implied assumption seems to be that Unity should not charge anyone this fee because free-to-play exists as an optional business model that a developer can choose to maximize revenue. Like the boogeyman lurking in the closet is that any indie developer could wake up one day and their game is EVE Online
tschellenbach 3y ago
Tricky, company is losing money it seems. -192M last quarter according to google.
- dgb23 3y ago
  With such an incredibly popular product and rich ecosystem? I don’t understand…
  - bluescrn 3y ago
    They went on a company-buying spree over the last few years Growth of Unity but of questionable benefit to the core product.
- ummonk 3y ago
  They took on 4 billion in debt for their acquisitions so with current interest rates...
m0guz 3y ago
This is just Unity being Unity. I still remember Unity vs Improbable drama years ago when Unity changed the license without prior announcement. [0] > Heard from inside Unity that the blog post was reviewed for weeks and internal concerns about poor / confusing messaging, Game Pass, etc, were all ignored. It's resignation time for some folks.[1] [0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/dispute-between-unity-improbable-leaves-203500138.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/dispute-between-unity-improba... [1] https://twitter.com/georgebsocial/status/1701678249086992478 https://twitter.com/georgebsocial/status/1701678249086992478
kilolima 3y ago
Happy to see the end of Unity as a Linux user. The Linux versions of games were very poorly optimized, and instead of native ports we got buggy, slow, unstable games, for years. Also Unity games were mod unfriendly, meaning that those games are mostly dead by now. And I don't know what it was exactly, but Unity games (specifically the RPGs) seemed to lack some sort of gritty realism with character interaction and movement. It just seemed cartoony and missing some sort of UI feedback that made the game feel 'real'. Maybe because of lag because of the terrible engine, I don't know. Maybe one day a Linux engine remake of Unity will make all of the amazing RPGs playable and moddable again, like Pillars of Eternity 1/2 or Wasteland.
- stemlord 3y ago
  Is unreal any better on linux or do you expect foss platforms like godot to significantly increase in useage?
  - boppo1 3y ago
    Fwiw it wasn't very hard to get Unreal Editor to compile on Ubuntu. No issues running example files. I haven't really sunk my teeth in too far yet though, so I guess we'll see.
- Mikushi 3y ago
  > Also Unity games were mod unfriendly That's got nothing to do with Unity. A game being mod friendly is 100% a dev decision. For an example look at Cities: Skyline, lots of big mods and it's a Unity game.
- npteljes 3y ago
  I have the exact opposite experience, as a gamer. With random games and custom engines, it's a coin toss whether I could make Wine / Proton work. If it was a Unity game, then it would surely work. Unity games also have very active modding communities, for example see Valheim. I'm not sure about mod friendliness, there are a lot of mods, and applying the mods was straightforward, and they integrated with the game experience nicely.
- 3y ago
KTallguy 3y ago
It’s a shame. Hobbyist developers and smaller studios have very little time to sift through all of these complicated pricing situations. The pay-per-installs prevents giving away a semi-successful game for free in donation packages, and adds new admin overhead. I don’t understand the goal… what new revenue stream will magically spring forth from these changes? Unity is not my favorite engine to work with, and there was a long period of buggy, non performant console ports, but less choice is always worse.
6kVShitPost 3y ago
> Unity was once heralded as the savior of the video game industry. I’d expect more from GameDeveloper but I guess those years have long since passed.
dharma1 3y ago
I'm surprised Apple is so married to Unity as the main creation tool for their Apple Vision / MR stuff
- TrueGeek 3y ago
  There was a ton of content at WWDC about using SwiftUI for Apple Vision. Not just for 2D apps, but full 3D immersive apps.
- daveoc64 3y ago
  Unity has a lot of experience and marketshare in VR/AR. Something like 85% of VR games/apps are made in Unity.
SmartJerry 3y ago
Only in rare circumstances does a price increase kill something. More often will a company die because they don't increase prices when needed.
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
The new prices don't seem that huge.
- thesh4d0w 3y ago
  Not when compared to the website's font
- areoform 3y ago
  Yes, that's why it's clever. The cumulative effect stacks up as they charge for every install & re-install of the app. That's the subtle shift of per install v. per user. If the user has to reinstall the game due to the bug, the developer will have to cough up the fee. If they have to reinstall because of hard-drive space hijinks, then the dev coughs up the fee. If they get a new computer or a new device and install the game again... See, https://twitter.com/gekido/status/1701673963578130534 https://twitter.com/gekido/status/1701673963578130534
- dogline 3y ago
  It's higher than zero/game_sold, so it's significant.
- yedpodtrzitko 3y ago
  > According our last year numbers, we would owe Unity 109% of our revenue (1M of revenue against 1.09 of Unity Runtime fee), this means, more than we actually earn. And of course I'm not taking into account salaries, taxes, operational costs and marketing. from https://old.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/16hgmqm/unity_wants_108_of_our_gross_revenue/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/16hgmqm/unity_want...
manicennui 3y ago
Why is every article and discussion about this filled with misinformation? There are thresholds for the per install fee that I'm sure the majority of small indie developers will never hit. The idea that most Unity developers will switch to Unreal is laughable.
- bitec0de 3y ago
  > The idea that most Unity developers will switch to Unreal is laughable. Why? (I experimented with both, and preferred Unreal's interface, open source code, and ability to use a compiled language, but have never made a game.)
StrangeSmells01 3y ago
Are they fingerprinting machines? Seems like you could hurt a small dev by repeatedly install/uninstall a program.
jihiggins 3y ago
Unity has internal champions for its features. Once those champions leave the company, that feature languishes and falls apart. Unity buys competing products, and then if the owner of that product leaves the company, it is no longer supported. If the agreement changes underneath you as you're making the game, you can't budget for it, and trust is completely lost. I have it on good authority that they just today learned what charity bundles are and how they work. Imo, the price increase amount is basically irrelevant. Unity's reputation has already been rapidly shifting towards "untrustworthy" over the past few years because of the endless support problems and unfulfilled promises. At this point, I can't imagine pinning years of work on the hope that they won't pull the rug out from under you midway through production. It feels like they've broken an implicit contract. This probably won't hurt studios pumping out mobile games, but it probably won't help their long term reputation or with the loss of enthusiasm in the community
steakscience 3y ago
Wouldn't this model be better? Open source the engine and IDE, have inhouse teams and contributors working on it, ultimately it becomes the go-to for game dev. Then, provide best in class cloud services for using Unity, all the game backend stuff, comms, etc. Wouldn't this model work?

The Death of Unity

290 points by sp332 3y ago

ghostzilla 3y ago

About time. What makes a game unique in spirit is its engine.

rexpop 3y ago
What an absurdly facile perspective. While it's true that developers like Valve develop games only to take advantage of or exhibit new engine developments and Minecraft's revolutionary voxel engine likewise enabled a game that could not be built otherwise, you seem to be suggesting that eg all UE games throughout the last thirty years are undifferentiated "in spirit" because they share an engine. What an insult to writers, artists, and game designers! None of them have managed to imbue their works with "unique spirit?"
- kevingadd 3y ago
  Minecraft's engine wasn't remotely revolutionary, it was basically a 1:1 riff on an XNA game called Infiniminer that predated it. And its engine wasn't especially good. Minecraft's success is almost entirely due to its accessibility and the fundamental strength of its design - both things that are possible in any game engine. These days a large % of Minecraft installs are a C++ version of the game and not the original Java version, because it's really not about the engine.
  - outworlder 3y ago
    I am not sure I would even call Minecraft as having a "game engine". An engine is usually generalized so it can be extracted and used for many games. > And its engine wasn't especially good. It was good enough. It's non trivial to do, despite appearances. > These days a large % of Minecraft installs are a C++ version of the game and not the original Java version, because it's really not about the engine. But is the Bedrock version even the majority? It's been out for years and adoption is very slow. If it was not for game consoles it might not have taken off at all. And the main reason is mods. Which are not part of the "engine" as you put it, and were enabled by the technology choice.
    - kevingadd 3y ago
      We would need to know how many Minecraft installs are on mobile and console, where Java isn't an option. I would expect it's a large % of the overall userbase, but I don't have access to the numbers. Switch and Android both open Minecraft up to a huge number of people who either don't have a PC or can't install Minecraft on it. Agreed that mods are a big part of the experience and would only really have flourished using technologies like Java (what Notch chose), C# or JavaScript, not C++.
  - rexpop 3y ago
    Fine, "Infiniminer's revolutionary voxel engine."
- ghostzilla 3y ago
  "What an insult to writers, artists, and game designers! None of them have managed to imbue their works with "unique spirit?" As someone said, to the extent they have managed to do it -- and many have -- it was not because of engines like unity but despite them. I imagine all those people would have been happier if the engineers had made a custom engine for them (and quick).
qayxc 3y ago
There's two types of game developers: those who finish and publish games and those who write their own game engine. Every minute spent on re-inventing the wheel for the umpteenth time is time lost on actually writing and polishing the actual game. Tools like Unity were a godsent for small teams and solo devs who just wanted to write and publish games. While libraries like SDL can lighten the burden somewhat, they are still no replacement for solid asset pipelines, visual editors, performance analysing tools, and a mature pipeline for multi-platform packaging and publishing.
- badsectoracula 3y ago
  > There's two types of game developers: those who finish and publish games and those who write their own game engine. This is wrong, there are tons of finished games that use custom engines. For example one of the most recent indie games i bought was Zortch which was made by a single person and used a custom engine. EDIT: actually here is a page that collects some custom engines, ranging from big studios down to one man efforts, all with released games: https://gist.github.com/raysan5/909dc6cf33ed40223eb0dfe625c0de74 https://gist.github.com/raysan5/909dc6cf33ed40223eb0dfe625c0...
  - aaaaaalop 3y ago
    This is meaningless without percentages. How many devs didn't release their games for each game in this list?
    - badsectoracula 3y ago
      This is not meaningless as the message i replied to claimed that developers who write their own game engine do not finish and publish games. That was factually incorrect. What you are asking for is something completely different and unless humanity had some sort of hivemind to have universal knowledge, we can't really know as people start and abandon projects all the time. The best we can do is some heavily biased guesses - and mine would be that the abandoned games in engines like Unity, GameMaker, etc where it is trivial to start a new project would be much more than even other engines (let alone custom engines).
newobj 3y ago
You sure 'bout that?
derstander 3y ago
> What makes a game unique in spirit is its engine. This isn’t true about websites and frameworks or sculptures and chisels. There’s no reason why it should be true of games and their engines. It is a poetic statement though. My opinion is that, in all of these processes, people are the ones that bring the spirit and thus are its source in the final product.

bluescrn 3y ago

The decline of Unity is sad. Unity got so many things very right in their pre-IPO years. They made rapid prototyping and development of 3D games much easier than anything that came before. Being able to develop in C# was a huge win, especially for small teams and solo indie, and it made developing for multiple platforms easy, and took away a lot of the pain of native mobile development for Android/iOS. But Unity has been declared dead/dying before, I suspect it'll have a long future ahead in some form even if it's no longer the obvious go-to engine choice for indies and mobile developers. A lot of people have invested a lot of years into their Unity skills as well as projects/codebases.

hadlock 3y ago
Bringing John Ricitiello on as CEO (former disgraced EA CEO) should have been a yellow (or red?) flag that things had reached their peak.
- gmerc 3y ago
  I wonder how many company funds went to reputation management to drive an obscure NY Pizza Palor on google above his name on a direct search after the molestation charges leveraged by one of their C-Levels
tick_tock_tick 3y ago
> the obvious go-to engine choice for indies and mobile developers What do you think has taken it's place?
- bluescrn 3y ago
  There's a lot more indies talking about Unreal, and also Godot. Too early to see how much of that talk will translate to shipping finished games, though. Artists are excited by the potential of UE5, as Unity's rendering tech has stagnated somewhat. But making a UE5 Nanite/Lumen game is likely to be limiting your audience rather a lot, with high hardware requirements.

pjmlp 3y ago

The biggest issue, unfortunely is that all the other engines that offer C# support as the main language, lack the AOT compilation toolchain (including game consoles), the graphical tooling including debugging and profilers, asset store with people living from it, and above all, being fully endorsed by all major game platform owners and VR/AR hardware. So anyone that wants to replace Unity, despite their missteps, has a long to catch up to.

kkukshtel 3y ago
The .NET ecosystem has recently added "NativeAOT" compilation as a first class feature, and Unity's gall-bladder relationship to Mono (instead of migrating to Dotnet Core, they continue to work off their own Mono fork) has opened up a space where anyone programming C# now has the once-hard-to-reach AOT holy grail for consoles now just behind an XML flag. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/deploying/native-aot/?tabs=net7%2Cwindows https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/deploying/nati...
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Native AOT is still WIP, behind .NET Native, and someone has to implement the consoles backend, and runtime support.
  - throwuxiytayq 3y ago
    Unity’s software is permanently in a WIP prerelease state (and then it usually gets obsoleted in favor of something even less stable). Good luck making a game with their multiplayer package. I have full confidence that better .NET game development stacks (plural!) will emerge. Maybe even ones not based on some ungodly mutated version of Mono from decades ago.
kevingadd 3y ago
C# has had multiple non-Unity AOT solutions [1] for a while. I worked on multiple shipped C# games for the PS4 and PS Vita that didn't use Unity. 1: BRUTE, Mono AOT, and CoreCLR NativeAOT among others

mdtrooper 3y ago

Well, I write one thing: https://godotengine.org/ https://godotengine.org/

Thaxll 3y ago
People believing that in the mobile space Godot can be a replacement to Unity are delusional, in 10 years maybe? Godot is a "mature" toy engine. There is not a single quality / money maker game that shipped on Godot.
- all2 3y ago
  > Godot is a "mature" toy engine. This does not seem to be related to this: > There is not a single quality / money maker game that shipped on Godot. There's some missing context in the middle. I'm curious how one implies the other? I'd be game for chains of logic going from first -> second or vice versa. I'm specifically curious, what is Godot missing?
  - Thaxll 3y ago
    Godot is missing the game that shows this engine is a viable alternative to Unity at large. I mean look at the showcase: https://godotengine.org/showcase/ https://godotengine.org/showcase/ It all looks amateur. All the mobile dev work on Unity so you better have good reasons to change the entire pipeline.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - unleaded 3y ago
      so nobody wants to make a fancy looking game because nobody's made a fancy looking game... hmm...
      - Thaxll 3y ago
        You don't want to be the first one to make the jump.

koromak 3y ago

I agree, but wow this is a poorly written article

bjord 3y ago
what was so terrible about it? I thought it was fine when I read it

sakopov 3y ago

Unity's site is all about real-time development, visualizations and things of that nature, not game development. Did they recently rebrand or has it always been this way? Could this have something to do with the perceived downfall? Are they now just targeting a different audience?

troupo 3y ago
They are trying to compete with Unreal. It really is "monkey see, monkey do". They see Unreal develop tech for movies and TV, they buy Weta Digital. They see Unreal advertise tools for visualization, architecture etc., they do the same.
bluescrn 3y ago
They've been trying hard to expand their userbase beyond games. And as a result, losing focus on the needs of game developers.

omoikane 3y ago

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37481344 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37481344 - "Unity plan pricing and packaging updates" It's linked in this article as "the latest and final straw".

monero-xmr 3y ago

It’s the endless struggle. Make developer tool backed by a corporation. Charge nothing / very little. Venture capital stops flowing. Start charging. Get increasingly expensive. Milk giant companies with stable revenues who don’t think it’s worth switching. Repeat forever. The solution is only use open source for dev tools, or pay one-time fees.

KaoruAoiShiho 3y ago

The thing is it's still far cheaper than Unreal, so unless Unreal is dying too calling it death doesn't make sense.

bpye 3y ago
Maybe? It seems like Unity is charging the fee per install [0], not per unique user. So when I install my Steam games on my desktop, my laptop and my Steam Deck that's 3 installs. If I reinstall the OS, that'll be another install - or if I clean up my Steam library and reinstall later, etc. Maybe this is acceptable if your title has microtransactions because you may get some ongoing revenue stream for that user - but otherwise? And it's entirely unclear to me how this works with Game Pass, streaming, etc. [0] - https://twitter.com/stephentotilo/status/1701679721027633280 https://twitter.com/stephentotilo/status/1701679721027633280
- oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
  It's even worse according to the original announcement - it talks about a monthly rate per install.
  - ummonk 3y ago
    I think the announcement is using confusing verbiage. From the looks of it it's a monthly fee for installs made that month.
- TheRealPomax 3y ago
  And then Epic goes "this week's free game" and now it's several million installs and the game studio's bankrupt. Because weaponizing this will happen if given the chance.
  - oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
    Does the studio not have to agree to Epic making their game free?
- 3y ago

causality0 3y ago

Before the popularity of commercial game engines, each game was built bespoke, which had some advantages, but took a lot of time, and made each port a chore. One of the greatest things Unity provided was a relatively easy pipeline to console releases, making ports more about platform quirks than full recoding. This heavily implies Unity was responsible for the advent of commercial game engines and game engines being licensed to third party developers, which is bullshit. This was done with many game engines long before Unity, such as iD Tech, RenderWare, the Build engine, GoldSrc, the Unreal engine, even the GameMaker Studio engine.

yvdriess 3y ago
Source, GameBryo, LithTech, ...
kllrnohj 3y ago
Unreal is the best comparison but the original statement isn't entirely bullshit. What Unity did (as does Unreal) is make the game engine more as a platform as the goal in and of itself. That is, wide feature set, mostly stable APIs, incorporating developer feedback, deprecation/evolution paths, etc... whereas other engines like idTech are more like a static library drop that you're expected to then tweak & adjust to your needs. And those other engines were often developed for a specific game, and then sold as more of a "why not?" than being the goal of the development. idtech, for example, was consistently developed very specifically for the id flagship game of the generation, and it's design decisions & tradeoffs reflected that. There's a reason that as widely used as the idTech 3 was at the time, it also was nearly exclusively used with FPS games - the engine wasn't a good fit for other things, and id wasn't really investing in changing that. It's not unlike the library vs. framework debate of the modern JS world. Unity & Unreal are more frameworks, while most other engines are libraries.
- causality0 3y ago
  RenderWare is a better comparison than Unreal, since Unreal was developed first as an engine for a flagship game and only later licensed out. From Wikipedia on RenderWare: It was licensed over 200 times. The scope went towards an integrated middleware with low level APIs for rendering, physics, audio, AI all of which are extensible through plug-ins which also serve the official high-level API. The aim was to reduce the learning curve by also including service and support for licensees. With RenderWare Studio an integrated development environment including a debugger was included.[3] RenderWare themselves claimed a 70 % marketshare across studios that choose an external engine in 2003

MenhirMike 3y ago

I believe it when I see it. I would like to see it, but I doubt that a significant enough portion of developers are going to jump ship. For smaller indie studios, there are definitely better alternatives, but when it comes to the big packages, there's really just Unity and Unreal.

TheRealPomax 3y ago
This change really only hits the small studios and especially solo game devs, game conglomerates can probably just go "k, that's another 100k on top of a several million budget, raise the unit price by another $5 and call it a day".
- Ekaros 3y ago
  Medium and big devs have much better rates... This actually really hits hardest the solo and tiny devs that make reasonably successful game. 200k revenue is not that much in over a few years or split between couple people.
  - hnthrowaway0328 3y ago
    The 200k is over last 12 months AFAIK, and there is an install wall you have to breakthrough to be eligible.
dgb23 3y ago
Many of my favorite games aren’t built on licensed engines.
- dingdong33 3y ago
  Yes, xbill and tuxracer are my favorite games too.
  - oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
    Or, just one single example: Tears of the Kingdom.

sydbarrett74 3y ago

IPO's are usually the beginning of the end as far as a company being responsive to its customers and producing quality. From the time an IPO is made, the company is responsive only to its shareholders and that's it. Thanks, Bork and Friedman!

NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
A thought occurred to me a few weeks ago... it was another Hacker News thread, forget which, but someone had mentioned the specific case law which cemented this fact. Maybe it was Ford himself? The details escape me, but afterwards, companies were forced to prioritize shareholders above all else. But legislators aren't exactly forbidden from creating new types of companies. As ignorant as I am of most things business, there is today more than just the "Inc." and LLC. They've even created various non-profit and charitable corporations that are prohibited, by law, from distributing profits. This being the case, why not a new type of corporation that was somewhere in the middle? Able to distribute profits (perhaps even with limitations on when they can withhold them, like so many of the big tech companies). Ones where the shareholders still get some (statutorily defined, so that case law can't come in and fuck it up) priority, but that when shareholders are acting only in short term interest, they can be overruled by those in charge of managing it.
- __loam 3y ago
  I think you're talking about fiduciary responsibility. CEOs can be removed if they're shown to be acting against the interests of the shareholders which is why a lot of them look like ass holes. > This being the case, why not a new type of corporation that was somewhere in the middle? Able to distribute profits (perhaps even with limitations on when they can withhold them, like so many of the big tech companies). Ones where the shareholders still get some (statutorily defined, so that case law can't come in and fuck it up) priority, but that when shareholders are acting only in short term interest, they can be overruled by those in charge of managing it. There are of course alternate ways of structuring companies that prioritize the needs of groups of people besides shareholders like worker co-ops. The issue with these is that it can be difficult to raise capital to start or grow these businesses because there's less incentives for investors to give you their money.

hitpointdrew 3y ago

>Imagine releasing a game for 99 cents under the personal plan, where Steam takes 30% off the top for their platform fee, and then unity takes 20 cents per install, and now you're making a maximum of 46 cents on the dollar. Not only that, but with this predatory practice of taking any percent (steam, apple) or fix dollar value, makes just having a game up a potential liability. If you need to refund anyone you are refunding the full $0.99 from your account, despite you only made $0.46 (steam and unity are going to keep theirs, its on you as the publisher to make up the difference). If you had a disastrous launch and had a majority of people seeking a refund, well not only did you hard work and effort not pay off, you owe $$$$ on top of that. In theory this liability is like shorting a stock and the loss potential is virtually limitless, you could end up owing millions.

byyoung3 3y ago
[flagged]
- kevingadd 3y ago
  In no universe is Unity responsible for 90% of the game. Their tech simply does not do that much for you.
- samtho 3y ago
  If I bought a nail gun, a saw, a pile of wood, and proceeded to build a house, did DeWalt actually build that structure? Any reasonable person would say no. You seem to have the same thought process that people had about computer animation. For some reason, many people were under the impression that just because it happens on the computer, you can simply ask Maya to create a full-length animated feature. The platform the game was made on cannot take credit for the story, level design, character design, world design, game mechanics, game balance, art direction, vocal talent, cut scenes, and myriad of other assets and elements belonging to the game.
  - autokad 3y ago
    that's a good point

dang 3y ago

Related ongoing threads: Unity plan pricing and packaging updates - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37481344 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37481344 The New Godot Development Fund - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37481872 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37481872

jrflowers 3y ago

>I know one such developer who is stuck, who's estimating this new scheme will cost them $100,000/month on a free to play game, where their revenue isn't guaranteed. We can assume that this would mean running the game at a loss, because the author didn’t say that.

al2o3cr 3y ago
We can assume that this would mean running the game at a loss, because the author didn’t say that. A better assumption would be that they're likely to clear the $100k/mo, but as they said "not guaranteed" to do so. I suspect that if the author would have intensified the statement to "they would go out of business with the new scheme" if they were certain to lose money.
- jrflowers 3y ago
  > A better assumption would be that they're likely to clear the $100k/mo, but as they said "not guaranteed" to do so. It’s funny that the vague $100k/mo figure is meant to evoke some sort of response from the reader. The implied assumption seems to be that Unity should not charge anyone this fee because free-to-play exists as an optional business model that a developer can choose to maximize revenue. Like the boogeyman lurking in the closet is that any indie developer could wake up one day and their game is EVE Online

tschellenbach 3y ago

Tricky, company is losing money it seems. -192M last quarter according to google.

dgb23 3y ago
With such an incredibly popular product and rich ecosystem? I don’t understand…
- bluescrn 3y ago
  They went on a company-buying spree over the last few years Growth of Unity but of questionable benefit to the core product.
ummonk 3y ago
They took on 4 billion in debt for their acquisitions so with current interest rates...

m0guz 3y ago

This is just Unity being Unity. I still remember Unity vs Improbable drama years ago when Unity changed the license without prior announcement. [0] > Heard from inside Unity that the blog post was reviewed for weeks and internal concerns about poor / confusing messaging, Game Pass, etc, were all ignored. It's resignation time for some folks.[1] [0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/dispute-between-unity-improbable-leaves-203500138.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/dispute-between-unity-improba... [1] https://twitter.com/georgebsocial/status/1701678249086992478 https://twitter.com/georgebsocial/status/1701678249086992478

kilolima 3y ago

Happy to see the end of Unity as a Linux user. The Linux versions of games were very poorly optimized, and instead of native ports we got buggy, slow, unstable games, for years. Also Unity games were mod unfriendly, meaning that those games are mostly dead by now. And I don't know what it was exactly, but Unity games (specifically the RPGs) seemed to lack some sort of gritty realism with character interaction and movement. It just seemed cartoony and missing some sort of UI feedback that made the game feel 'real'. Maybe because of lag because of the terrible engine, I don't know. Maybe one day a Linux engine remake of Unity will make all of the amazing RPGs playable and moddable again, like Pillars of Eternity 1/2 or Wasteland.

stemlord 3y ago
Is unreal any better on linux or do you expect foss platforms like godot to significantly increase in useage?
- boppo1 3y ago
  Fwiw it wasn't very hard to get Unreal Editor to compile on Ubuntu. No issues running example files. I haven't really sunk my teeth in too far yet though, so I guess we'll see.
Mikushi 3y ago
> Also Unity games were mod unfriendly That's got nothing to do with Unity. A game being mod friendly is 100% a dev decision. For an example look at Cities: Skyline, lots of big mods and it's a Unity game.
npteljes 3y ago
I have the exact opposite experience, as a gamer. With random games and custom engines, it's a coin toss whether I could make Wine / Proton work. If it was a Unity game, then it would surely work. Unity games also have very active modding communities, for example see Valheim. I'm not sure about mod friendliness, there are a lot of mods, and applying the mods was straightforward, and they integrated with the game experience nicely.
3y ago

KTallguy 3y ago

It’s a shame. Hobbyist developers and smaller studios have very little time to sift through all of these complicated pricing situations. The pay-per-installs prevents giving away a semi-successful game for free in donation packages, and adds new admin overhead. I don’t understand the goal… what new revenue stream will magically spring forth from these changes? Unity is not my favorite engine to work with, and there was a long period of buggy, non performant console ports, but less choice is always worse.

6kVShitPost 3y ago

> Unity was once heralded as the savior of the video game industry. I’d expect more from GameDeveloper but I guess those years have long since passed.

dharma1 3y ago

I'm surprised Apple is so married to Unity as the main creation tool for their Apple Vision / MR stuff

TrueGeek 3y ago
There was a ton of content at WWDC about using SwiftUI for Apple Vision. Not just for 2D apps, but full 3D immersive apps.
daveoc64 3y ago
Unity has a lot of experience and marketshare in VR/AR. Something like 85% of VR games/apps are made in Unity.

SmartJerry 3y ago

Only in rare circumstances does a price increase kill something. More often will a company die because they don't increase prices when needed.

FrustratedMonky 3y ago

The new prices don't seem that huge.

thesh4d0w 3y ago
Not when compared to the website's font
areoform 3y ago
Yes, that's why it's clever. The cumulative effect stacks up as they charge for every install & re-install of the app. That's the subtle shift of per install v. per user. If the user has to reinstall the game due to the bug, the developer will have to cough up the fee. If they have to reinstall because of hard-drive space hijinks, then the dev coughs up the fee. If they get a new computer or a new device and install the game again... See, https://twitter.com/gekido/status/1701673963578130534 https://twitter.com/gekido/status/1701673963578130534
dogline 3y ago
It's higher than zero/game_sold, so it's significant.
yedpodtrzitko 3y ago
> According our last year numbers, we would owe Unity 109% of our revenue (1M of revenue against 1.09 of Unity Runtime fee), this means, more than we actually earn. And of course I'm not taking into account salaries, taxes, operational costs and marketing. from https://old.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/16hgmqm/unity_wants_108_of_our_gross_revenue/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/16hgmqm/unity_want...

manicennui 3y ago

Why is every article and discussion about this filled with misinformation? There are thresholds for the per install fee that I'm sure the majority of small indie developers will never hit. The idea that most Unity developers will switch to Unreal is laughable.

bitec0de 3y ago
> The idea that most Unity developers will switch to Unreal is laughable. Why? (I experimented with both, and preferred Unreal's interface, open source code, and ability to use a compiled language, but have never made a game.)

StrangeSmells01 3y ago

Are they fingerprinting machines? Seems like you could hurt a small dev by repeatedly install/uninstall a program.

jihiggins 3y ago

Unity has internal champions for its features. Once those champions leave the company, that feature languishes and falls apart. Unity buys competing products, and then if the owner of that product leaves the company, it is no longer supported. If the agreement changes underneath you as you're making the game, you can't budget for it, and trust is completely lost. I have it on good authority that they just today learned what charity bundles are and how they work. Imo, the price increase amount is basically irrelevant. Unity's reputation has already been rapidly shifting towards "untrustworthy" over the past few years because of the endless support problems and unfulfilled promises. At this point, I can't imagine pinning years of work on the hope that they won't pull the rug out from under you midway through production. It feels like they've broken an implicit contract. This probably won't hurt studios pumping out mobile games, but it probably won't help their long term reputation or with the loss of enthusiasm in the community

steakscience 3y ago

Wouldn't this model be better? Open source the engine and IDE, have inhouse teams and contributors working on it, ultimately it becomes the go-to for game dev. Then, provide best in class cloud services for using Unity, all the game backend stuff, comms, etc. Wouldn't this model work?