After a decade of working with Unity, jobs seem to have dried up?

I've been working with unity since v2.5, been on Upwork for the last half a decade with five stars and 100% satisfaction.

And in the last few months, very bit of work has dried up. Clients don't respond back, Job markets seem to have closed down, and even when I get called in for second interviews for jobs, they just seem to wander off and never respond back.

I'd normally think this has something to do with me, but I can't find anything that would be chasing off clients like this. And the dry up seemed to happen hard over the last six months, with my last longterm contracts closing out with no issues...

I should point out, I'm talking about real work: Not companies asking for expert help at $10 an hour. Not to disparage a job, but I can make more working at walmart locally than that. Highend computer equipment, software, and mobile devices for testing cost more than that can support.

Did something happen I missed? I know a lot of game publishers went under in that time, but how bad is it?

I'm not complaining, really. I'll just move on to a new line of work if this one has crashed, but it's sad to spend a decade doing this just to move on. I'd kinda like to figure out why my job seems to have went away.

 

The mobile market was where most of the jobs were and that kinda died a while ago. I imagine this is part of why Unity's been doing a big tech push over the last couple years, since it opens them up for more options in other markets, like a greater focus on things like archviz and pc/console releases. This is also why they've been putting a lot of effort into other rendering options for non-realtime. There are still jobs, mind, but nothing like what it was five years back.

 

There's been a lot of upheaval, some bubbles have burst, and "employment" in the games industry is becoming increasingly more contentious. (and less stable)

Game developers and publishers have had it so good for so long in terms of hiring, and their abuse of employment is finally starting to bite them. Another big issue is the voracious acquisitions of smaller studios. It's becoming common for most of the "hiring" to be around small indie studios, who eventually get gobbled up by major publishers. The publishers then just re-arrange the employees they've acquired, as opposed to worrying about hiring fresh talent. So most of the entry-level positions are going to be with small, local indie studios, often for little to no pay.

Basically, attempting to get hired by someone else in games right now is a terrible idea, and you're better off getting full-time employment in almost any other industry. This problem isn't particular to Unity, but a lot of Unity developers have been affected by it. There's a lot of talk around game development unions, I wouldn't be surprised to see some serious momentum in that direction over the next couple of years. On the bright side, game development skills usually offer lots of opportunities in other industries.

 

Mobile games market is saturated and not as lucrative as it previous was - the mobile gold rush is over. Unity dominates the mobile games segment. Obviously there are still mobile games being made, but probably not as many job openings for mobile games as a few years back.

I'm not aware of problems on other game platforms, but Unity hasn't had the same level of dominance over other platforms.

 

It’s a pity, then. A decade of skills, and I’m moving on then.

Have a company needing flag drivers, and it seems that pays reasonably well... guess it’s time for a new career.

 

Examples???

Art-side examples?

 

Based on dev games only,

You you wont find job as web designer,
You wont find job as engineer,
You wont find job as a driver,
You wont find Jo as a teacher,
You wont find job as care taker,
To name few ...

Finding relevant game industry jobs are more sensible,
But many low pay general jobs are always open,
Or freelancing,
Or self employing,
Or rebranding, by taking education

 

Uh... about that?

If the market is flooded, all those jobs are going to get the overflow... So, aren’t they going to have similar problems? Fact is, 3d modeling, unity, animation, c# has ALL dried up for me.

I’m not dismissing your statement, just saying have a wide set of skills in development has not helped me in recent months.

 

If I were you, i would probably look for college, or even Uni, to top up skills of your interest and open new way for career.

 

Yeah, I was referring more to the technical side of things. Every industry other than game development is constantly starved for programmers, and are almost constantly looking to hire. And even entry-level programming jobs usually pay pretty well, and are relatively stable.

Art is a lot more dicey. People just don't seem to appreciate the value of art as much, and are always looking for cheap short-cuts instead of hiring solid in-house artists and designers. If you're a programmer, then you're a technical wizard who makes the coding magic happen, and you don't get fired except in the most extreme of circumstances. If you're an artist, apparently you're an expendable asset that can be axed at the first sign of poor annual financials and replaced with a collection of clip-art.

My college degree is in graphic design, I feel your pain. My first paying gig out of school was actually as a Flash Animator. (for an on-line college producing interactive course-work) My hobby of making little flash animations got me work while my 4-year degree in art essentials didn't. Very frustrating. This situation is not improved by the sheer number and quality of game-ready artists on the market.

 

Probably companies are realising that having their own app for their breakfast cerial/fizzy drink/candy bar is not actually a good way to sell to kids. I think most the advertising revenue is probably going to "influencers" on YouTube. Or maybe their advertising in Fortnite.

Currently I'm doing OK making indie games for Steam. But if that dries up when Steam becomes saturated or my next game fails to "make it big", I think I'll jump ship and do something completly different.

Industries are more fun in the beginning and then the corporate giants get in on it and it's no longer fun.

The whole internet thing was exciting when it started but I'm kinda bored with it all now. I might learn a new skill like farming.

 

Soulless corporates always need re-branding.

 

Farming is awesome, i used to have a veggie garden but now i live on the forth floor so i only got an aquaponics(hydroppnics with an aquarium as the tank) setup with some herbs (not what you think - those babies are organic )

 

Well.

Time for a 20 hour bus ride to get to the site.

I'm off to train as a escort driver for wide load trucks.

Good luck in your work, guys. Hope this makes a touch more room for the rest of you.

 

Hope to see ya back here one day, take care

 

If I may, one option for leveraging your Unity experience is in Augmented Reality, which is currently built on mobile and is what I believe to be a motivator for Unity moving into Tiny and DOTS, and in my albeit humble opinion could very well be the largest opportunity space over the next ten years, while VR technology becomes more transparent.

I just felt to share that. I wish you success and happiness, in whatever you do.

 

I am also working in AR, I think next year it is going to go mainstream once AR headsets come out that arent S*** and are cheap enough for the average consumer. I am ready to rock that space, already have a framework and a few projects in the pipelne

 

I got out of the Unity freelancing market because the most I could make was $35 US an hour. (Even though many here claim $50 or even $100 an hour, yet I never ever encountered that).

Software contracting pays more, $60 USD an hour is about the going rate here in New Zealand, and I get to go into a real office and work with people each day.

As to your question around work drying up, I've always wondered when the gold rush was going to be over, everyone jumped onto desktop and mobile game dev over the last 7 years or so, because a lot of companies were making a lot of money, but you have to consider that those years are over now and 99% of developers or wannabe developers have learnt the hard lessons , tried to build their MMO's and Flappy Bird clones, and now moved onto something else.

So I'm wondering if this is a sign of the market stagnating. Not to mention, there are so many experienced Unity developers out there now, its hardly seen as a skill in demand like it may have been several years ago.

 

I’m on a bus headed cross country, so I got time to chatter...

I think it’s a combination of things...
1. Game marketplaces are being flooded with games. It’s a golden age for gamers, really. But that means the signal to noise ratio is massively unfair to new publishers.
2. People are continuing to flood into the industry, looking for work. Combining new game design graduates with veterans from the massive layoffs we’ve had in the last year or so.

Generally, I feel that it’s going to be a matter of getting noticed. Even with a decade, I’m not. My own fault. I spent so much time helping startups and doing small projects under NDA, my portfolio stagnated.

By the time I realized the landscape change, the damage was done.

Your mileage may vary.

 

The next big thing, I reckon, is machine learning. So if I wanted to advise young people what to learn I would say learn python, and neural network libraries like Tensorflow.

 

This is why we work mostly on projects that could be done without unity. So we approach contracts that are asking for general graphical stuff / end result without specifying the tech, and then we suggest the tech (which turns it into a unity project).

Certainly since the job board forum here was killed, I have noticed a slow but steady decline in unity specific freelance work both here and elsewhere.

I think this is a problem unity need to actually tackle, right now there are more than 5 million unity users many of which hunger for freelance work, and there are tons of people who need unity work, but the actuall connecting them is not working (connect really doesnt cut it, they need to literally partner with upwork or something similar to revitalise the market at the same rate that they are revitalising the engine ).

 

How does this compare to Unreal jobs? For example. I can imagine there's even less of a call for that.

Luckily, C# skills in Unity can be transfered to other jobs.

I've worked in companies that did Flash games. (It no longer exists!)

I would say in the future art skills might be more valued than programming skills. As eventually all the software that needs to be built will have been built more-or-less. And the rest is just reskinning.

But yeah, I'm looking for an exit from this industry too. Any ideas? Something that would suit a lazy person with a short attention span.

 

It's all the same. We're past the "indies with money" boom of the early 2010s, past the mobile wind down of the mid 2010s, and we're entering an global economic nightmare situation like it's 2008 again. If you want a decent paying job, shift to enterprise. If you want a stable job, shift to data entry or middle management. If you want to live forever on the seat of kings, make a game worth a damn, but don't expect that to be a guarantee in the slightest.

 

Shortest path becoming millionaire or homeless is by making games.

It just how it goes.

Real advice is to just to do what you like.
If you like earning money - just change the field. Do web design or QA whatever nowadays most popular.

Truth is - there's always a job out there for a Unity Dev / Artist.
Maybe its just not as appealing for your paycheck as other vacancies.

 

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/...gine-and-real-time-3d-skills-at-all-time-high

Unity posted something similar last year. Both companies are saying the opposite of what is being said in this thread. Who do I believe?

 

Both? A lot of the jobs have moved to ArchViz, but only so many skills actually transfer over to that, most of them largely artistic.

 

(Don't take this data as advice, or take it seriously, just poked around some sites)

Linkedin Jobs in the US mentioning:
"Unreal": 1,508
"Unity": 8,237, it appears that 90%+ mention Unity Engine rather than "unity" as in united people, so more like 7,413

"UE4": 177
"UE3": 20


"Unreal Engine": 698

"Unity Engine" 406
"Unity 3D": 574
"Unity3D" 240
"Unity game engine": 203


Totals:
Let's assume, UE4 + UE3 + Unreal is not overalpping: 1705 jobs mentioning Unreal engine
Unity3D and Unity overlapped 58 times, so: 7595 jobs mentioning Unity engine

Conclusion:
Unity Engine is mentioned inn 345% more Linkedin job postings than the Unreal Engine.

(More conservatively Comparing "Unreal Engine" + UE4 and UE3 and "Unity Engine" + Unity 3D + unity3d + Unity game engine:
Unreal is 895
Unity is 1423

Unity is mentioned 59% more)


Goole Search Trends:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today 5-y&geo=US&q="unity jobs","unreal engine jobs","UE4 jobs","unreal jobs"


"Unity jobs" appears way more than any Unreal related job.

Another one:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today 5-y&geo=US&q="unity developer","unreal developer"




Indeed and Monster.com
Seems to follow similar results as linkedin, with unity being sometimes 10% higher to 50% higher depending on the search, and state. In New york for example, Unity Developer seemed way more in demand than Unreal developer.



Google job searches
Seemed to show twice as many results for Unity C# near california than Unreal C++ near california:
How to access it go here: https://www.google.com/search?q=Unity+C#+,+california&ibp=htl;jobs#fpstate=tldetail&htidocid=Pb77rU2a2VHBjpgJAAAAAA==&htivrt=jobs

 

Link broken. At least for me
"Oops, your browser, device and/or location is not yet supported."

 

It worked fine here

 

I see some "california" reference in the link.
Not sure if that reference to USA location. Just guessing, if that maybe an issue.

 

I get tge same message @Antypodish gets.

 

I don't know what exactly that kind of driving job is like, but isn't the entire transportation industry the first that will get crushed by self-driving cars?

 

I didn't mean to create a unity vs unreal thing. I just noticed that article unreal posted and I think in a Unity Keynote they said unity jobs are increasing a lot. So going by both companies, there should be a lot of jobs needing unity and unreal. Maybe these jobs are located in certain areas? Unity jobs might be drying up in certain areas? idk

 

Well I think the post was more about freelancing for clients rather than jobs in companies.

I think the argument is that the type of jobs where you hire a Unity freelancer to make your little game app to promote your Cheerios product or whatever is drying up. But that's not to say companies aren't hiring people to work on Unity probably for bigger projects.

 

There will always be fluctuations, ups and downs.
Every year i read similar predictions of doom "the bubble will burst" etc on this and other forums... Yet here we are.

It is sad if you really had to change work. Only few months of not much work is still in realm of fluctuation for freelancers. I'm sure things will start again for you.

While there are more and more creators, there are also more and more end users.

Here is optimistic (and realistic) observation of the world:

-My generation (born in early eighties), many of us are gamers.
-Older generations (my parents for example) not gamers at all. Extremely low percentage of even casual click-gamers on mobile among those generations. As we go to even older generations, non-gamers increase by 1000%.
-Generations younger then me: more and more gamers by each generation, and more and more female gamers. Which is something not so common in my generation for example. So it's a double growth

If average human life span on the planet is 70-80 years, and im in mid thirties, in generation of decent percentage of gamers. This means half of planets population alive today (those older then me) who are almost 100% not gamers in any way, will get replaced by new generations who will play games at least in some way shape or form, and that will include all genders.

This means massive growth in pools of new gamers in the next 30-40 years! Add to this opening of new gigantic markets like China, and soon in my estimate many African countries with humongous populations and incredible economic growth will join. Nigeria have population of 190 million. See them in 10 years, and many more... The future is bright.

 

oh look at you and your fancy optimism

 

There will be more gamers, but there will be more gamer-turned-developers like me

Serious developers would rarely play games and would only do it for research purposes

 

What makes you think this?

 

lmao what

 

I'm not aware of any serious developers that don't frequently play games, at least when they have the time to do so, and for more than just research purposes. There are bound to be some out there that don't play games but it's more likely a case of they don't enjoy playing them than anything else, and I have to wonder if they're any good at it if they don't enjoy them.

 

Unless dev is just code-monkey, without knowing games, good and bad, and taken inspiration, how they can build something good and maybe innovative?

Also playing games, devs can learn about technical aspects, methods applied and performance issues/solutions. + of course studying additional resources.

For that, need play alot before then. Best devs has long gaming history, including modding experience. And people don't mod games, if they don't like play selected game.

 

You should really bite the bullet and move on from Netscape.

 

I get this message both in firefox and chrome, it's probably the location. (like he said, it says california in the link so it might be it)

 

What makes you think I use Netscape? Strange judgement. I have 5 different browsers and more than one device, resulting the same.

 

Fairly certain it was intended to be a joke.

 

LOL no. It's cute you think you invented gaming, but dude. No.

--Eric

 

Its sad that you decided to depart from this world I started gamedev career back in late 2012. Definitely my dream hasn't dried out. I have been doing non-game promotional activation work based on Unity Engine, casual-hypercasual-midcore-multiplayer mobile game for various local company, r&d stuff for games for these companies. Its tough to linger on indie world. But I am trying. I wish great success for your future endeavors.

 

But i did ...

 

More than 15% of the planet's population lives without consistent electricity, if they have electricity at all.

 

This is just the U.S., but it's also the first article I found so it will do:

And that article's from 5 years ago...the olds must have taken over gaming by now.

--Eric