[bdefore]

It's confounding to me. AAA/AA has always been an unhelpful designation. Much of PC gaming's recent hallmarks have used Unity to great success, for example Hollow Knight. Developers used to proclaim their games were based on Unity almost akin to a badge of honor. That honor is diluted by Unity's pursuit of the indie mobile gaming space which is tarnished with microtransactions and ads.

Blockbuster titles may pull in more revenue. But they also can fail spectacularly. Is there a financial window for a tightly focused indie-game engine like Unity? I don't know. But it's hard not to see Unity's arc rhyming with the story of other VC-soaked growth-chasing operations.

[techdragon]

Unity was never that great of an engine and tooling. I’ve only come across one extremely specific circumstance where it was technically the superior choice. Where it gained mindshare was its licensing deals before Unreal changed theirs. It grew with the mobile gaming boom and in order to keep growing they tried to grow to compete with the AAA/AA engines (most of which are either Unreal, in house and studio exclusive, or completely custom) and barely made it… I say barely because based on my experience and the conversations I’ve had, anyone who built a technically impressive game with Unity has probably built 80% of it themselves because the stuff that shipped with unity wasn’t up to the job. Unity survived because after a boom in developer mindshare courtesy of mobile games, lots of familiar developers were available to recruit for larger Unity projects where they got to spend their time reimplementing more and more of the entire game engine themselves on top of Unity because it didn’t really give anyone enough to build more than the simplest of games.

I’m not saying it’s broken or shit, it did deliver a working engine. Just that the entire marketing hype and ecosystem built on top of it was a technical house of cards held together by the suffering of the developers using it.

It’s the MongoDB of game engines, “worse is better” … because we spent most of the money on marketing, because marketing gets sales via our content marketplace before people can really discover how bad it is, and by then they’re fighting the sunk cost fallacy of the money they spent in the content store… just good old classic MBA “apathetic evil” … nothing special.