Official Blog Post Series - Games Focus: How your feedback drives product development

Maybe make sure it's up to date.
It links to 2021.3.8 and not 2021.3.12, which already is out!

Also poor timing with the latest 2022.1 version being broken with URP template.

This forum post says fifth installment and blog post days sixth

Overall nice post to keep everyone up to date with new tools however

 

How Unity gathers feedback is probably the BIGGEST issue I see in the company as a whole

Example:

Spoiler

Example of how roadmap feedback doesn't work. There's this request made 5+ years ago, it also had a lot of upvotes in old and now deleted feedback.unity3d.com, https://forum.unity.com/threads/separate-physics-and-rendering-layers.505580/

Card was created and complete but implemented incorrectly as described in https://forum.unity.com/threads/separate-physics-and-rendering-layers.505580/page-2#post-8489972.

Card: https://portal.productboard.com/8ufdwj59ehtmsvxenjumxo82/c/1153-rendering-layer-support

It really shows that Unity gathers and prioritizes feedback in a really bad and ineffective way. Forums are a complete mess, roadmap - no publicly visible discussion, comments, upvotes (probably 90% of users don't know you gather feedback there).

Fortunately at least for bugs https://issuetracker.unity3d.com wasn't deleted.

There are 3 options to improve it:
1. Revive feedback.unity3d.com with a better structure and categories
2. Move as many forums as possible to GitHub discussions that support upvotes
3. Improve forum.unity.com by adding:
- thread likes
- sorting posts in a thread by likes
- sorting threads and posts by likes in a timeframe (for ex. one week).

Here's how I imagine Unity employee gathering feedback with 3rd option:
1. Opens forum website with their category
2. Filters threads by likes in a week or month etc
3. Opens few of the top ones
4. Filters most liked posts to quickly read most important feedback

 

Another issue is how Unity releases engine versions especially LTS, gathers feedback and is unable to quickly act and release hotfixes.

There should be previews (like in Unreal) otherwise it's a gamble whether or not LTS is stable and upgrading a project will break it. There were several major issues in 2021.3 LTS because of no previews and slow testing phase that makes releasing hotfixes even slower.

Perfect example is https://forum.unity.com/threads/rec...ion-is-missing-or-better-say-removed.1335368/ broken in 2021.3.9 with a fix still not released.

 

I have to agree. Unity having a series about responding to feedback is pretty hypocritical.

 

Simple - It doesnt anymore. We had gigaya upcoming which would have been the best product feedback initiative ever seen, and then somebody went and ****ed up and fired the entire team and killed it before it even was released.

So the answer is - our feedback does not drive the product development at all, and its honestly pointless any of us contributing to any of these pandering attempts when we know based on history that we are not being listened to.

Like I am sorry to take this tone, but what kind of slap in the face is this survey meant to be - given the recent cancelling of Gigaya?

 

I remember when it was possible to comment under Unity blog posts. Somehow that option was removed I guess after some negative feedback under few posts. It really shows that Unity rather ignores the feedback instead of accepting the reality and working on improvements.

 

I'm reasonably certain the real reason it was removed was for two other reasons:

1. the blog posts were loaded, just loaded with spam
2. people leaving extremely bigoted comments in any post where there was any minority group mentioned

 

And company with 5000+ employees couldn't figure out another way to deal with it?

 

They did find a way to deal with it: turning off comments.

 

Feedback for you: read more carefully.

 

There was never any meaningful feedback on the blog in the first place because the blog was never a place for feedback.

 

There was some and Unity could at least see overall sentiment towards whatever was in a blog post. Now they can waste time writing useless blogs noone cares about and they won't even notice.

 

Yeah, no, there really wasn't. Most "feedback" on the blog posts were things talking about how the thing being promoted in the blog post would fix existing issues. There's a reason that, generally speaking, the most common places where comments existed at all were on the more technically focused posts: it was because they were discussing how to actually use the tech in question.

The blog practically never had any actual feedback and the tech discussions were best suited for the forums anyway because they're designed for proper conversation threading. Removing the comments on the blog was a good move.