[reactordev]

If anyone can save the stinking ship that is Unity, it’s Whitehurst.

This is said by someone who wants nothing more than to see Unity die.

Whitehurst was pretty instrumental in getting Red Hat sticky in places where it was just RHEL. Open Shift, Open Stack, etc all drove value-add for the business and for their customers. Cloud is fickle though so selling tools to studios and trying to compete with Unreal in the VFX space is how Unity moves forward. Take your lashings from the game devs. Shore up your presence in VFX, Movies, Film. Evolve.

The tsunami has squarely landed on Godot’s doorstep. It will be up to them on how they manage the swell.

[airstrike]

RedHat customers and Unity customers make for two very different types of beasts...

It will be interesting to see how his Whitehurst's pedigree translates to this smaller-scale, higher-touch sales motion.

Forgoing the core Unity audience of game developers and gunning for studios / VFX when Unity is clearly not the graphically superior engine sounds risky at best, reckless at worst.

[reactordev]

>”RedHat customers and Unity customers make for two very different types of beasts...”

You misunderstand. They have different verticals but Jim’s mission is the same. Sell them tools at enterprise subscription prices. Per seat, per project, per shot if they can. Forget the indie game devs and their small studios. That bridge is burned beyond recognition or reconciliation.

[anonylizard]

The problem is that in gaming, its often the indie studios that are the most profitable. They may have only 10 staff, but easily make 50 mil a year. Traditional industries rarely have such lopsided staff/revenue ratios.

And small indies may transform into large enterprises surprisingly fast. Mihoyo was a small indie only 10 years ago.

Its much much easier to repair bridges with indies, who don't really want to move off unity as much as you think, and can be placated by backpedaling and the CEO replacement.

[qwytw]

> They may have only 10 staff, but easily make 50 mil a year

Considering Unity's previous pricing model (per seat) it really didn't matter that much whether their client made 5, 10 or 50 mil unless they massively increased their hiring because of that, unless they can charge per install/% of revenue.

> Traditional industries rarely have such lopsided staff/revenue ratios.

A negligibly small proportion of indie developers are even close to that.

[rspoerri]

Do you have examples for indie game studios (with 10 employees) that make 50mio a year?

[hibikir]

It's an industry of booms and busts, we've all heard about the head of Xbox discussing the risky model of large publishers, making expensive sequels until the well dries, and everything collapses. Selling to the largest companies is more difficult too: Slower decision making, more negotiation. It's the road to having a working business, but not one for growth.

It's just so much easier to get your product ingrained into a company that is growing, as long as you are getting your revenue tied to theirs. Their growth becomes your growth. But it has to be done in a way that makes them not run away. Offer different funding models depending on the project on the other end, and let the customer pick their pricing plan. When the plan for the small company starts looking too expensive for the big one, you get to renegotiate when your tools are already everywhere, and moving away is a hassle.

It works for AWS, Stripe and the like. It should work here.

[airstrike]

I'd rather fix that bridge than bank on an non-existing bridge to enterprise customers with an inferior offering and no cash flow to meaningfully fund R&D to outpace competitors.

[georgeecollins]

I wouldn't call Unity a sinking ship. It's the overwhelming choice of game engines in the mobile market. Raising prices is unpopular and may decrease their share of the market. But there is no way Unity is going away anytime soon.

And I love Godot -- love it-- but it doesn't do all the things Unity does. Even if it did, it would take years to get all the teams to switch. Think how long it took people to move away from Flash!

[gmerc]

You underestimate the game industry I think. It constantly invalidates its own technology every 2-3 years and is extremely sensitive to business model risks.

[qwytw]

> It constantly invalidates its own technology every 2-3 years

I'm not sure about that. Unity itself is not at all a particularly modern engine (just like most engines being iterations of something designed in the 00s or early 10s)

[gmerc]

Rule of thumb in AAA: After 3 years devtime you are starting to pay serious debts by tech updates - that’s the descent into development hell.

[reactordev]

This. It’s easy to criticize or idolize from the outside. When you’re in it, any time spent beyond innovating is wasted R&D. It might be justified. It probably isn’t. This is one of the main reasons Unreal went open source. Let the community drive R&D on their own dime.

[doctorpangloss]

While I don’t think you deserve to be downvoted for this, your comment is full of opinions that, as a game developer, sound 200% wrong to me. For the sake of curiosity… what are you talking about?

[reactordev]

I’m talking about Jim Whitehurst taking Unity in a different path and leaving us game devs the f#^k alone. We’re done. Go sell to movie studios, VFX shops, Video Wall Warehouses, digital twin and construction. Sell enterprise software subscriptions.

I think we both agree that small indie studios will not be returning no matter what promises are made, who is CEO, or what new shiny monetization idea they come up with next.

I wish him the best of luck.

[doctorpangloss]

> I think we both agree that small indie studios will not be returning no matter what promises are made

One thing I agree on: more often than not, behind an interesting piece of art lies an interesting personality.

To advance the conversation based on some substantive facts, based on my conversations with creators of large free to play Unity games, all were already using IronSource and were not impacted by the changes anyway. As a game developer who publishes himself, I do not plan to migrate away from Unity, and I wasn't really impacted either. I can't speak for the 30 or so studios who posted pleas to revert the changes, but based on what happened, I believe they got what they wanted. So if their decision-making is rational / based on facts, I don't think they're migrating either.

This is all to say that when you have no budget, so you value your time at zero and you have no visual art you didn't author yourself, it's easy to put 100% of the personality into the product, and make that The Thing. There are people I know who turned 20,000 followers on a TikTok about games into a $1m check for a game studio! This is a viable strategy, it is uniquely suited to people to have opinions about game engines. But my facts-informed opinion is that this isn't representative of most game developers, and that they are actually really happy with Unity and relieved that the pricing changes found a middle ground that is less emotionally charged.

[mrdatawolf]

What did I just read??? "Substantive facts"? That was all opinion. You didn't even directly respond to the poster until your last sentence and there you declared your opinion to be "fact-informed" and assigned both the feelings and actions of the average Unity dev using your, at best, subjective experience.

[thsbrown]

Just want to second this.

I've been using unity for almost a decade now and enjoying it despite the many caveats and idiosyncrasies I come across.

The bottom line is, I definitely don't want to throw away the decade of experience I have using Unity if I can help it. Ultimately I want them to learn from their mistakes and move forward. While Unity has had a fair share of missteps ultimately it's the devil I know.

[59nadir]

I'd like to ask (only out of genuine curiosity): Do you also build your own engines or are you fully entrenched and dependent on Unity? I would feel very disappointed if I spent a decade on something only to depend exactly on that one thing and not be able to create it myself, especially when it's such a tractable problem in a sub-year time frame even with learning happening. The fit you could have with your own engine with a bigger up front investment of time and energy seems like it would easily pay off vs. just using Unity for years and years.

[reactordev]

Not only sunken costs, but building an engine is no easy task. It’s easier to write a game than to write an engine (most of the time).

I do think this is the right approach. This is the approach I took. I was dependent on an engine for a long time until I realized it was just a facade and that I already possessed the knowledge to do it myself. So when XNA died, and MonoGame wasn’t mature yet, I had no choice but to write my own. Some of that effort went into MonoGame’s early days, most of it didn’t (I respect keeping the API the same but we, devs, could have done better to improve it).

Unity made it easy to build games without having to know the underlying proponents that do what they do. Instead, it’s presented through a massively opaque interface called a MonoBehavior. Because of this opaque abstraction, it’s almost impossible for a Unity game developer to know exactly what’s going on under the hood.

My first game engine took me 3 years to get to a point where I could ship something. My second was 1 year. My latest was 3 months.

Eventually, it becomes just adding another interface to your GPU abstraction to support wgpu or DX14, or Vulkan2, or Metal, any graphics api becomes just a Buffer, a Queue, and a sync lock.

[crysin]

Small studios absolutely will return to Unity. This whole debacle will be a faint memory a year from now, the marketing machine will continue and indie developers will become entrenched in Unity's C# ecosystem, build tooling, all-in-one package + asset store. Some indies won't return sure, but Unity will continue to maintain it's foothold with indie developers.

[chii]

> entrenched in Unity's C# ecosystem, build tooling, all-in-one package + asset store

instead of indies, i think this applies much more to mid-level studios. Indies tend to be much more flexible and agile, esp. very small indies. Mid-level studios, with a dozen people that have gotten used to the toolchains and have existing investment in it (any custom plugins for example), would have a harder time switching away.

However, this whole debacle just goes to show that proprietary software may be a trap, unless the T&C explicitly clarifies and makes it _not_ a trap. This is what unreal engine has done (you at least will always remain on the same T&C for the version you signed it for).

Open source is a much safer bet for the long term for an indie, esp. if they're just starting out now and do not have toolchains attached to unity. And the godot ecosystem is just budding right now, which means the opportunities are also great there.

[qwytw]

> which means the opportunities are also great there

Opportunities to spend significant amounts of time working on tooling and other engine features (with a non insignificant likelihood of still ending up with something inferior to Unity depending on your use-case) instead of actually making your game?

Yes, what Unity's management tried pulling off was stupid. However The engine itself is remarkably cheap from the perspective of many developers compared to any open source options.

> unless the T&C explicitly clarifies and makes it

Funnily enough IIRC Unity had a similar issue with the T&C back in 2019 when they promised to never change it retroactively again. Somehow they managed to "forget" it in a couple of years...

I guess one important difference with Unreal is that Epic has way less bloat (several times less employees) and make huge amounts of money from Fortnite so they don't need to try and squeeze as much as possible from their engine clients (currently anyway..)

[chii]

> T&C back in 2019 when they promised to never change it retroactively again.

it's not about changing it, it's about including a clause in the T&C that the version they signed is the version in perpetuity for their version of software (obviously, an upgraded version may have the T&C changed).

Unreal has this clause iirc, but not in unity.

[TulliusCicero]

They probably will now, but if they had gone through with those changes, they would've lost a lot of studios.

[Qwertious]

Unity is common in small indie studios because, for so many use-cases, it's the only game in town. for most 3D projects, Godot isn't ready yet, so their only option is Unreal. Which is substantially what Unity replaced in the first place.

Give it 5+ years and another screw-up from Unity at the tail-end, and I 100% agree that Unity is sunk for indie devs. But as it is, Unity has a grace period where devs are locked-in and if Unity can demonstrate stability over the next few years, then people will forget it.

And yes, if. Unity's current PR position is in a fully-stocked rope warehouse, but they could navigate out relatively unscathed.

[reactordev]

>”Unity is common in small indie studios because, for so many use-cases, it's the only game in town”

I wholeheartedly disagree. There’s more choice than ever. A search on GitHub would show you.

Unity has had one thing going for it. It was easy to get started and it had a ton of learning material. It is NOT the only choice. Off the top of my head there’s:

- Ogre3D

- O3DE

- MonoGame

- GameMaker

- Godot

- Cocos2d

- GDevelop

- Pandas3D

- Reactor

- Stride3D (formerly Xenko)

- Three.js

- Babylon.js

Unity’s editor first approach and their C# “everything’s a behavior” is why so many think it’s the only game in town. It’s not. It never was.

[johnnyanmac]

I'm not so optimistic. They changed the model and JR is out. Unreal is way too bloated for many indie dev projects and Godot isn't ready yet. That may be enough goodwill for now.

maybe if this happened two years down the line and W4 Games had more time to establish itself (maybe even make it's own game to inspire confidence) it'd be a different story, but I can still see indies coming back. If they ever left to begin with. And this isn't even talking about the corporate giants in the mobile space.

[qwytw]

> I think we both agree that small indie studios will not be returning

Why are you so certain that a significant proportion of them even left in the first place?

[frozenfoxx]

As an employee at Unity, I can assure you they did.

[qwytw]

So they actually cancelled their subscriptions and/or stopped development of their current games? What proportion of all developers did that?

> As an employee at Unity

I don't think they are even remotely close to being as transparent internally as they used to be a few years ago. Also as far as I'm aware sales data wasn't accessible to every single employee even back in those days?

[raxxorraxor]

I don't think the strategic action of a CEO is too relevant right now. The need to focus on rebuilding trust and I just cannot see how they will do that. They introduced an insecurity for developers, which already operate in an extremely high risk industry.

If there weren't people at Unity that could influence or stop the former CEO, the problem probably also didn't vanish with his termination.

[reactordev]

I agree with all of what you said but having known Jim Whitehurst, he’s a guy who’s die hard about culture. Fixing the anxiety from within and giving people the space is what he’s known for. Whether he makes the right strategic decisions is up to him but if you have read anything from him you’ll know he seeks to improve excellence within to then champion externally. He did this with Red Hat before IBM. His book, The Open Organization is still relevant.

[phpisthebest]

Well if whitehurst follows his normal playbook he will just Aquirehire the godot project leads so then unity does not have to worry about it

[reactordev]

Don’t curse us. That would be the MO but please, leave some choice in the markets.

[johnnyanmac]

On the bright side, if they do that Godot will just Fork, the same way Urho3D did. This would be a big bow but it may also be a small chance to truly dig in and fix some of the issues that were talked about for years in the community.

But I'm probably just daydreaming.

[reactordev]

Wait, what happened with Urho? I thought they were going strong (aside from a few who tried to take their code and just rename it)… did I miss some news?

[johnnyanmac]

This link gives a brief explanation: https://gamefromscratch.com/urho3d-is-dead-ish/

You can also see that the Urho3d repo is readonly on Github. I don't know which fork is the most active but there are a few that sprung out of the mess.