The Death of Unity - Opinion
The Death of Unity - Opinion
I can say, unequivocally, if you're starting a new game project, do not use Unity. If you started a project 4 months ago, it's worth switching to something else. Unity is quite simply not a company to be trusted.
It's on developers to sort through these two types of costs, meaning Unity has added a bunch of admin work for us, while making it extremely costly for games like Vampire Survivor to sell their game at the price they do. Vampire Survivor's edge was their price, now doing something like that is completely unfeasible. 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. As a developer who starts a game under the personal plan, because you're not sure how well it'll do, you're punished, astoundingly so, for being a breakout success. Not to mention that sales will now be more costly for developers since Unity is not asking for a percentage, but a flat fee. If I reduce the price of my game, the price unity asks for doesn't decrease.
Really sucks to be a Unity developer right now. I've been working with mostly Unity for around 10 years now, and while I'm not directly affected by the recent changes, it really feels like the engine has been dying a slow death for a few years now. Hopefully Ricitello will leave eventually and they can turn this around, otherwise many of my skills will be useless in a few years...
Nintendo has a few games made in Unity
Noteably, one of the Pokemon games is made in Unity
I don't think that CEO will last long once Nintendo realizes their biggest cash cow gets hit by this
If I were running a Unity project, I'd be tempted to just jump to Unreal. No matter what promises Unity makes you don't have any actual guarantee that they'll keep them while Unreal has the "non-retroactive" clause directly in their contract. However painful the switch is, you'll only have to do it once.
Nintendo would probably prefer the 20 cent per copy license fee to a percent based one. New Pokemon games are sold at 60 dollars in the US and sell millions of copies. This is a bigger issue for indie developers looking to sell for a cheaper price to bring in sales.
are unity and unreal so different that your 10 years of experience in one isn’t helpful for the other? i’m not a game developer but I had assumed it was similar to web frameworks - definitely high switching costs for porting an existing project, but as a developer looking for a job there are still many portable skills.
i’d guess it also depends on what parts of the engine you are working in?
To an extent I can apply my knowledge to other engines, sure. I'm working on my third Unreal project currently, and while it's not like starting from scratch, I'm definitely way slower working with it. It also doesn't replace Unity completely. It's great for high-spec 3D stuff, but almost useless for mobile 3D/AR apps, which is a lot of what I do (not making games but mainly industrial interactive 3d applications).
I heard from a friend that, allegedly, Riccitiello sold a load of his shares in Unity last week, almost like he knew those shares would be worth less this week... No idea if there's any truth to it. You know how rumours can be.
I'm starting a game design degree on Monday, and I know Unity is on the syllabus (though not until later in the year). Guess it'll be interesting to start the term with a conversation about how useful knowledge of Unity will be long term. Since the majority of graduates from this university go into or start indie studios (due to geography), how Unity treat smaller developers is definitely going to be relevant.
Knowing the sort of person JR is, I absolutely wouldn't be surprised. He's a shit human
The reality is that it's a lot of fuss for a game development company to switch engines but for an experienced individual developer it's not a huge deal to switch engines. If you learn game development and design today using Unity then 100% of the game design knowledge is exactly transferable and 80-99% of the game development knowledge (depending on exactly what you're doing) will transfer to Unreal or Godot or whatever else you might need to use later.
It's like a musician switching from one audio production suite to another. The musical theory stays the same and while the exact details of how to make each bit of software do stuff is different, the actual stuff you're making it do is broadly the same.
I don't quite get how the changes are so bad for indies. You must have both $200k revenue and 200k installs before the fee starts ticking on the excess installs. Do indies really sell that kind of numbers?
I can see how the flood of ad-based mobile F2P games are hit, but I don't feel sorry for those that run that kind of model.
Do indies really sell that kind of numbers?
Some do and can you risk to be one of them if Unity takes that much after the first week?
Terraria, a game that got fresh content for years, meaning people were each update reinstalling the game, installing it on multiple platforms etc.
During its first week of release, the game sold over 200,000 copies. That number increased to 12 million by June 2015. As of the end of 2020, the game has sold over 35 million copies worldwide. Read more: https://www.tuko.co.ke/421556-top-20-selling-indie-games-time-out.html
That dead eyes smile tho...
He sure is a Starfield NPC lookin' motherfucker.
Correct me if I'm wrong but lots of game developers simply do bootcamps or short courses where they learn Unity. They don't have background in software development and switching tools/languages will require lot of learning from them. They will only switch when using Unity will actually become unaffordable. Bigger studios that can afford to retrain people/hire new experts can change tools like that, smaller studios will just keep using Unity.
Sounds like those game developers are about to become unemployable without further education
I think the game "development" industry is run by people who don't understand the difference between a game designer and a game developer. As such there's lots of people who only know as much about game design as the average developer does being tasked to do game design work and vice versa.
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