What Unity Is Getting Wrong

Ok yeah we were talking past each other initially, I see what you are saying now.

I never really mentioned AAA and the reply I made about Rust was also saying that they said "Not sure I saw a AAA game on the list" which is true in terms of budget/team size but not playtime/playercount for a few games on the list.

The biggest games in Unity are probably Rust and Kerbal Space Program merely in terms of playercount/playtime and they do compete with AAA on those metrics, not team or budget size. Both teams have complaints about Unity, as everything, as long as those are addressed things progress.

That is the problem though, Unity is chasing AAA/more licenses when their main target is mobile/smaller scale games and doing that simply. That is the reason both Rust and Kerbal started using Unity, simplicity.

Garry picked Rust in 2013 for the simplicity as he says

> "Unity was about that when we first started with it. They hid all the hard stuff in c++ so we didn't have to think about it. The more time has gone on, the more bullshit has crept to the forefront. The've gone from hiding the hard stuff to moving more and more stuff into C#."

With Unity Rust is competing at the level of playercount/playtime with AAA. That is literally the thing Unity wants the most and their selling point. Unity you can have smaller developers, able to make games that can compete with less team, with a focus on simplicity and being the engine team that makes transitions easy. It is also ok if they are hard transitions if there are major improvements. Unity is many times asking you to update to a new system that is the same or sometimes less than what you need in terms of benefit, and then only to be half complete and then changed again.

As Garry said

> "So while other engines have been trying to catch Unity up in terms of developer friendliness, Unity has been going the other way by making itself more unfriendly."

They are losing the simplicity selling point.

Unity can make games that compete, they should be taking these critiques to heart strongly as teams/games like Rust and Kerbal are exactly the target they should be going for along with smaller games/mobile games etc.

Unity has so many internal developers now, that requires alot more communication needs, testing needs and maintenance. It also pulls the company in many directions if there is no clear engineering/product lead at the top and it is all management/business/finance pushing feature based development which gets them into version 2 syndrome or the "second-system effect".

> The second-system effect (also known as second-system syndrome) is the tendency of small, elegant, and successful systems to be succeeded by over-engineered, bloated systems, due to inflated expectations and overconfidence.

If the second-system effect doesn't describe Unity I don't know what does.

Get back to simplicity Unity, let the engineers/product people have power to set this back on course. Stop catering to big developers, they make their own engine for this reason, consistency and simplicity of their own process. Dogfood Unity with an actual game, the problems will be clear today. If you aren't doing that, listen to people like Garry who are.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect

> A lot of mobile game developers who use Unity aren't small at all. They are huge companies with lots of experienced engineers. The baby devs don't generate the $ for Unity.

Even if they are large companies, the teams are still small and the point of Unity is simplicity.

Unity wants to be AAA for console/desktop but mobile is their bread and butter as you say. Companies and indies chose it for simplicity and there are lots of Unity developers. They are messing up the simplicity angle and going after new markets but causing pain for their existing customers. I get they want to grow and sell more licenses, but I'd argue most of their paying customers are indies, smaller mobile studios and larger mobile studios the have many small game teams.

Unity also make lots of money from the asset store. All these constant breaking changes also break many assets.

Unity just need a more consistent surface level API/signature/facade, and move the hard stuff down below that for most cases with advanced modes accessible with more setup/work. Their changes now are making people that don't need AAA level output, more cartoony mobile games, do unnecessary work losing out on their selling point of simplicity.

A lot of effort goes into making sure allocations are avoided though. You also have DOT's High Performance C# which is a blazing fast subset of C# (Burst Compiler). I like the idea of using a language for everything, then restrict to a subset where performance is critical. You don't have that wall between scripts and (C++) engine code. And as mentioned above, less glue code is appreciated.

Making your own game engine requires experience as well. If you've already used other engines, you'll have some idea of the "shape" that a UI library or texture loading system should take.

It often feels like if Godot hired one really, really good documentation specialist, they could run away with things, especially in the mobile, indie, and lower-spec spaces.

Unity's documentation is bad, but unlike Unreal's, it exists.