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The Death of Unity

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Re: The Death of Unity

#101

Post by __loam »

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #10
bluescrn wrote: post #2

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…

> the obvious go-to engine choice for indies and mobile developers What do you think has taken it's place?

Definitely Godot.

Re: The Death of Unity

#102

Post by nitrix »

bluescrn wrote: post #47
KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #30

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

AFAIK, UE is completely free until you make your first $1,000,000 revenue? (then a 5% royalty rate beyond that). These new Unity per-install fees could hit developers who aren't making money - for example F2P games, free demos, very cheap games (e.g. charity bundles), potentially even pirated copies (if Unity intend to track installs via analytics sent from the runtime?) In reality, most indies fail and won't hit the…

> These new Unity per-install fees could hit developers who aren't making money

There's a revenue threshold to meet to pay the fee.

Re: The Death of Unity

#103

Post by TylerE »

kllrnohj wrote: post #78
TylerE wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now imagine Factorio in Unity. Do you expect that to be better or worse than factorio on unreal?

I'd expect it to be equivalent since the task the engines are doing is well within both of their respective capabilities. The engine is not simulating any of the factory logistics, that's all going to be bespoke code by the game dev and so there's no major reason to expect unity or unreal to behave meaningfully different here.

Sure there is: C# is substantially less performant than C++ code.

Re: The Death of Unity

#104

Post by bluescrn »

KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #76
bluescrn wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK, UE is completely free until you make your first $1,000,000 revenue? (then a 5% royalty rate beyond that). These new Unity per-install fees could hit developers who aren't making money - for example F2P games, free demos, very cheap games (e.g. charity bundles), potentially even pirated copies (if Unity intend to track installs via analytics sent from the runtime?) In reality, most indies fail and won't hit the…

Unity's install fees don't start until you hit 200k installs AND $200k revenue. If you buy the $1800/yr PRO then it doesn't start until $1 million just like UE. There isn't any concern for the hobbyists.

Ah, wasn't obvious whether it was an || or an && with those thresholds. Not so bad in most cases if it's an or.

There were also people who'd read it as a 'per install per month' (e.g. monthly active users) charge, as the pricing table refered to 'Standard monthly rate', which made it look pretty awful...

Re: The Death of Unity

#105

Post by badsectoracula »

aaaaaalop wrote: post #84
badsectoracula wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This is meaningless without percentages. How many devs didn't release their games for each game in this list?

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).

Re: The Death of Unity

#106

Post by KaoruAoiShiho »

r_hoods_ghost wrote: post #57
KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #30

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

Unity is cheaper only in certain circumstances. UE5 is free and then you pay a 5% royalty on gross revenues over $1m. This avoids a lot of the issues faced by indie developers with the new pricing model (having to pay for copies you give away, having to pay a flat fee that eats the profit margin of 99p games, needing to pay for a subscription up front etc.)

Unreal is cheaper if you intend to stay within the free threshold of less than $1 million in sales, you can't beat free. But if you have dreams of having a hit with more than $1million then I can't find any scenarios where unreal is cheaper. Let me know if you can think of an example. And very very quickly unreal is more expensive.

For example at $2 million in revenue unreal would cost $50k in royalties. Assuming a game with a price of $1 and 2 million installs unity is $10k in install fees. If your game is priced at $10, that's just $1k in install fee vs the same $50k in fees to unreal.

Re: The Death of Unity

#108

Post by bluescrn »

msla wrote: post #88
qayxc wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> There's two types of game developers: those who finish and publish games and those who write their own game engine. Which is why that silly "Quake" thing never went anywhere. What was John Carmack thinking? How did he ever imagine "Doom' and "Quake" could ever get released?

That was a very different time. That era of pushing hardware to it's limits is mostly history when it comes to games.

These days, hardware is almost limitless* , the real scarce resource is person-hours of development time.

(*Ok, not limitless, there's still some people doing serious optimisation work on games. But for an average indie/mobile developer, it's more about avoiding fairly well known performance pitfalls than worrying about low-level optimisation or inventing really clever algorithms to gain back some speed)

Re: The Death of Unity

#109

Post by causality0 »

kllrnohj wrote: post #72
causality0 wrote: post #35

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…

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…

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

Re: The Death of Unity

#110

Post by kilolima »

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.

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