Unity makes a lot of moronic decisions imo.<p>* You have to pay to remove the unity logo from your games. This causes low quality games to proudly show the unity logo and well funded games to hide it.<p>* Very few devs are likely to release on console while on the free tier of unity pro but this has a daunting effect on the aspirational newbie, I guarantee. Lots of people have this silly habit of thinking about the monetary opportunity of their amazing solo indie game that will definitely never happen, but it still GETS THEM ON THE TOOL which is important<p>* Needless to say, breaking their own networked multiplayer setup and not even having a working replacement.<p>The engine really is fine, but the business is poorly run, and I feel that drives the trajectory of the engine downwards.
I‘m not a game dev but we used it for an AR feature where I worked. We only needed 2 seats, so not a big customer. There have been some stupid interactions with Unity:<p>- Pestering us for weeks about urgently needing to arrange a call with us and repeatedly refusing to tell us what it is about over Email, turns out one of devs didn‘t activate his seat and another user created an account with his work email an they thought we were abusing the license.<p>- Back then they offered build server licenses but there was nearly nothing in the docs about it, only „call us“. So we did and we had to arrange a call with one of their partners advising us on our use use (dynamically generating assets over an API). All of this boiled down to: 5 Instance license for the price of a normal seat.<p>Why all of this required hours of my and my co-workers time in calls is beyond me. All if this could have been done with like 4 mails max.<p>It‘s not only Unity‘s issue. I can‘t even create an AWS account anymore without someone calling me to talk about my „use-cases“.
This insistence on personal calls and account managers is such a drag.
Just feature your contact points prominently on your page and explain your offer publicly. I‘d rather have someone competent answer my mails than talk to someone who is just going to schedule another 3 calls because they are only sales people.
1800/person/seat is a pretty minimal cost, at least in the US. Even if you're paying your people 40k per year, it's a 5%-ish increase in costs, at most. Probably much less once you factor everything else in.<p>I'd be interested to know how many non-hobbyist devs are seriously affected by this.
I was about to use Unity for a project (for a larger organization) and had considered biting the bullet and buying Unity Pro… but I didn’t want to have my work turn to ash as soon as my side project ran out of funding and the license expired. Permanent licenses that you have to buy are one thing, but… Being forced into buying a subscription service (& legally being prevented from using the “community” version) just makes me way too hesitant to want to use the Unity environment. Especially for side projects (and if you can’t use it for side projects, you will be less likely to use it for main projects). If the project has a delay (pandemics happen, could have a medical problem, etc), then I risk running out of money for subscription.<p>If it was just paying for maintenance, or for memory limitations, CPU count, or compilation speed, that’s one thing. But if all your work turns to ash if you don’t pay the fee… that’s just not an ecosystem I want to invest time and money in.
This is the least of Unity's problems.<p>Unity doesn't dogfood their own engine. Unity does not develop any games themselves. This is completely unlike Unreal, who has always released games using their own engine. Unity doesn't do it, and it shows.<p>Unity has a handful of features that either barely work or only work in some contrived prototype case. They still have 3 different rendering pipelines without clear direction on which you should use.<p>They have this whole new game architecture (DOTS) but it seems like you should not use it. It's just there to confuse you.<p>They have a new GUI coming soon? Maybe?<p>Mobile builds are a complete clusterfuck with all the native code plugins you have to integrate. As soon as you get a few native code plugins (which every serious mobile game does), it takes several days of messing with your build pipeline to make things build properly on iOS and Android. And then you have to do it all over again every year to keep up with platform changes.<p>They've also released a ton of plugins and features for AAA games and cinematics that are completely useless to indie devs and mobile devs. I would love to know what their revenue split looks like between mobile, AAA, indie, and everything else. From my perspective, they haven't done much the past 3 years to make mobile dev & indie dev better.<p>Still no good webGL export if you care at all about load times. I'm not sure if they have just given up on this or what.<p>The Unity Editor also just has weird problems sometimes. It gets exponentially worse if you have large projects too. This is why Unity never sees these problems because they only work with small prototypes. They have no "real" projects which can easily get into the 50+ gigabytes range. At that size of a project, you start to have more weird issues.<p>Unity is still (usually) the best choice for mobile and indie, but man I wish they would just spend the time to make their own mobile game, see the many pain points, and fix them.<p>I will say, they did create and release the Addressables system, which is a big improvement for resource loading on mobile. Also their acquisition of TextMeshPro and support of that plugin for rendering text, super good. Their shader graph editor is still WIP and tied into their rendering pipeline mess. Nested prefabs are also a huge improvement.<p>If I was Unity, I would setup 2 internal game teams. One team building PC & console games, another team building mobile games. Build real games, release them on the app stores, and keep them updated for 2 years. Who cares if they don't make any money, that isn't the point.
This is a realistic usage of the engine and it would expose problems that Unity doesn't seem to know about.
Sony, Nintendo, Google and Microsoft, give tier 1 preference to Unity anyway, so this will hardly matter for those that actually get to be allowed to rent a devkit.<p>Not everyone that wants to develop for consoles gets the privilege to do so anyway, only when the game manages to win the hearts of publishers, and the company has a sound financial history to ensure being able to deliver the game.
This is a pretty moot point.<p>Realistically no one can develop for a console without having a significant amount of funding.<p>Microsoft had an indie storefront a while ago , but it's essentially gone. I wasted hours , and 25$ trying to get my Unity game to build for Xbox S. The tools Microsoft has for hobby devs are just completely broken.<p>Looking on the bright side with Steamdeck we might see even more great handheld PC games.<p>I wish Godot was anywhere near Unity, but it's not. UDK melts my computer and I've never been able to do anything with it.
More reasons to not learn unity. Free tier is to learn the product and test on various hardware. Do you know how many students rely on free tier to learn? Who exactly is selling games for consoles without a unity pro license? That's breaking the free license.
This feels attempted shakedown of the console manufacturers to get them to pay for Unity for their licensees. Looks like Sony and Nintendo have coughed up while Microsoft have not. Not sure I can blame Microsoft for not wanting to pay.
Does this applies to UWP games (the ones you can run on Xbox with the Creators Program)? I was considering learning and doing some hobbyist games with Unity and Xbox.