buy outs and Unity...

Sooo - recently another game engine (COUGH Unreal) 'bought/joined forces' with Quixel, this was HUGE news to me. At first I felt a little shock (although I've seen so many acquisitions over the years it never really surprises me anymore), then sadness (as I felt their megascans/etc slipping away) and finally acceptance (such is life - and death). Now, I get that Quixel still work with Unity - but to have all their assets available for free in another engine... grrr.

So what can/should Unity do? There isn't a direct equivalent anymore (after Substance went to Adobe). I don't believe Unity can quickly make their own version - But... I can suggest a few things.

1. Setup 'Unity Scans' - a dedicated integrated repository for any/all to contribute to. Similar to the asset store but rather than packaged assets - an in-editor feature which allows you to browse and import scanned materials and meshes. And Moderate/oversee this to give a basic Quality Assurance. Plus develop in house tools for using/editing these scans - INVEST into this and it will encourage the community to scan/sell direct into Unity - a win win imo.

2. Unity could Acquire other tools soon (before they also get snapped up elsewhere). If possible I'd suggest Reallusion… Unity HDRP is now released, but 'our' tools for character creation are very limited [again Unreal (COUGH) have their digital humans project and Microsoft now have Ninja Theory ('loved Hellblade btw)] . Reallusion have developed some great tools over the years and a similar Unity integrated approach (to my first idea) would be a huge benefit - Not only would we have great character tools, but by integrating it with Unity's engine - clothing/mods, could be brought directly/easily into the engine as well.

These two idea should encourage developers to create scans/clothing and make it easier to use these items in Unity - this would give an incentive for developers to create 'assets' and for Unity to take a commission.

Well,. that's a quick ramble - 'thought I'd put it out there and... I'm curious if you have any other ideas.

What else can we encourage Unity to 'acquire/develop'?
While there's still time.

 

The sky isn't falling and Epic buying out Quixel lead to prices being halved across the board. Unity doesn't need to buy things out because Unity is built around being an extremely generalist engine.

 

I would love if Unity bought or made something like Mesh Baker - I use it a lot lately and it can have a massive effect on performance in your game.

"While there is still time?"

Well it really depends what kind of projects you make. UE purchase of Quixel didn't impact my workflow at all, but it's true that I'm more of a programmer than anything else...

 

This. Some people are looking at this as Epic having a major advantage over Unity, but to me this looks like Epic pulling a publicity stunt and having to give away free resources to stay competitive. When is that ever a good sign for a company?

 

Yupp, games like Jedi fallen order uses Unreal, its a number one game on Steam. Unreal is dying

 

Fortunately for 'you' the 'indie game developer' you will never make an open world game with highly realist assets

Conclusion -> It doesn't matter.

 

However when I get ma windows box I will be testing out Quixel in unreal for L33T purposes only.

 

No need for complicated things, just keep expanding this library.
https://blogs.unity3d.com/2019/02/08/we-have-you-covered-with-the-measured-materials-library/

 

It makes more sense for Unreal to buy Quixel, because it looks like most people who use Unreal engine are making "that" sort of game . As people already mentioned, Unity is a more general-purpose sort of engine. If they had bought-out Quixel, I might have thought "Hm, that's oddly specific."

 

It is free to make an unreal account. Just saying.

 

The Quixel buyout only makes life nicer for existing UE4 devs. The reasons to switch engine go far beyond just assets, nice though they may be.

 

You realise they're only $20/mo to access anyway, right? If it's worth being shocked over then surely it's worth paying $20/mo and getting on with your project.

I'm not dismissing the fact that it's nice to have a bunch of neat assets made available to you for free, but it's small fries in the context of building a whole video game.

 

It makes sense for unreal to buy Quixel as they're targeting AAA studios with big budgets and open world games. Unity not so much.

There are of course many other options. Even with blender if you was to set aside around $500, which isn't that bad considering ppl spend £2,000+ for a decent unreal game dev machine.

Spoiler: secret-sauce

https://blendermarket.com/
https://www.thegrove3d.com/
https://freepbr.com/
https://cc0textures.com/
https://3dsky.org/
https://armorpaint.org/
https://sketchfab.com/

 

I think its now $20 per month on the lowest tier versus being $270? a year. So ever so slightly cheaper than it was, but for more assets, since they also raised the number of credits you get per month while lowering the cost in credits of the actual assets.
But then Im sure this was all already said in the other Quixel thread. And maybe the Substance one too, I think it drifted onto the Quixel acquisition as well.

 

Unity should acquire twelve billion usd of networth. Not sure how, though.

If my memory serves me right, Epic Games is valued at 15 billion usd, unity technology is valued at 3 billion usd, and, for comparison steam games is valued at 3 or 4 billion.

Higher value gives epic games more leverage, and they've been spreading money around. And that has been working.
Meanwhile I still recall the interesting experiment with Unity Connect, which was never hidden under the rug.

What's more as a single user you probably can't really encourage anything, unless you can throw a check with with 9 zeroes on it at the company. So a decent idea would be enjoy things you have now without thinking too hard about what's to come. As the situation is largely beyond your control, and for now the sky isn't falling.

From unity side, the smart thing they could do is buying out promising assets and assimilating/incorporating them as parts of their engine. That would attract more people, but won't quickly close gap in networth. They were mostly doing that. Another good idea would be to finally create a C++ api, but judging by past experience, this won't be happening.

In the end, engines, tools and technologies come and go and no matter what you use now, it is highly possible that 5 or 10 years from now you'll be using something completely different. So, enjoy the moment, take care of your saving's account, and know that "this too shall pass".

Might be a bit cynical, but that's how I see it.

 

Hold on

Epic Games, steam games (or you meant valve games?), unity technology?
A bit skewed sample data, don't think so?

 

No, I don't think it is skewed. The important thing is assets and leverage they offer, and not what industry segment is used to obtain those assets. Also it is "Valve Software".

Look, it is business, not sport. One could talk about "fairness" and the "same weight category", but the thing is if a lone indie with a net worth of, say, $50k will try to take on Microsoft (net worth one trillion usd), then Microsoft is not going to say "Oh, sure, for the sake of healthy competition we will only spend 50k per year on competing product", as it would be absurd. Instead they either crush the indie or buy him/her out. Because they have means to do that, and they are going to use those means.

Heck, if we're talking about industries, Nintendo started as a card trading company, had taxi and love hotel chain at some point. And see where they are now.

Basically you can't say "it is unfair, as they're not pure engine development company", because "they" will still have more assets.

 

There's no way steam is only worth 4b.

 

Unity just recently doubled their value to $6 billion.

https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/25/unity-now-valued-at-6b-raising-up-to-525m/

 

This information is probably correct, as Valve largely takes cut off the sales instead selling their own tech, plus they had invested into several projects like Steam Boxes, Valve Index, Steam Controller, and so on. They also were said to have flat company structure in the past, which is going to be inefficient. However, they're privately owned company, so exact state of affairs is unknown.

 

That's a lot. Unity should hire additional team to prep LTS releases faster.

 

Value isn't the same as actual monetary resources available. Apple, for example, has about $265 billion in revenue and about $365 billion in total assets. Someone unaware of how value works might look at that and say they have a value of around $630 billion but their actual value is at least $1 trillion.

Likewise Unity might have a value of $6 billion but that doesn't mean they have that much money to work with, and if you read the article I linked above you'll notice that it says they doubled value thanks to a $150 million investment. Basically value is best thought of as the potential the company has.

https://money.cnn.com/2018/08/02/investing/apple-one-trillion-market-value/index.html

 

Not to mention VC/funding based valuation is more a measure of sentiment than anything else. For an extreme example see 'Color Labs' which raised 41 million on a 200+ million valuation, only to be sold to Apple for 7 million a few years later.

(I'm not suggesting Unity is in that boat by any means, just that you can't put a lot of stock in these figures.)

 

We're heading into tulips craze territory here - perceived value vs actual value.
However, another good/interesting example is tesla, which has been losing money non-stop.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TSLA/tesla/net-income

But in the end I was talking about assets available to the company.

 

I think perceived value is the actual value. That's the point (or what I thought it was anyway).

 

By 2012, Valve employed around 250 people and was reportedly worth over US$3 billion, making it the most profitable company per employee in the United States.[5][6]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Corporation

_________

I've heard conflicting things about the pro/con of the employee structure at valve, it's definitely not a silver bullet, but given that its been the most profitable company per employee in the country - I can't imagine a world where 'inefficiency' is one of the cons.

I am really surprised that valve is only valued at around $4B, but I guess their most recent games haven't been billion dollar hits and Steam doesn't do the kind of volume I'd have thought.

 

They should focus on the engine and its features and have clearly the better engine.

They already have more marketshare than the competition and if someone's happy with Unity, he won't switch because "free megascans".

 

Probably getting off topic, but you need to take in to account some kind of 'confidence factor' too. Most VCs are looking for bets that pay 10-100x, they are quite happy to lose on nine in ten of their deals as long as one of them pays off big.

Holding 1% of a public company that's worth 100 million and has physical assets, thousands of staff, significant revenue, actual profits,etc, is a very different position to holding 1% of a private company that's worth $100 million based purely on the paper valuation from the last funding round. For a start if you are pre-IPO, the position is pretty much illiquid.

Unless you are an angel, highly diversified investor, or running a VC fund, then you probably prefer a million dollars which you can convert in to cash right now, over a one in ten shot of earning 12 million dollars (even though the EV is better in the second case).

 

There's "value somebody is willing to pay", and then there's "value someone thinks somebody else is willing to pay". They're not the same and both are perceived.

 

I was surprised too. That said, according to Forbes Gabe Newell's net worth was $5.5b in 2017, and is now down to $3.5b*, so it could be that it was much higher and increasing competition over the past few years has just been chipping away at it.

Also keep in mind that Steam is just one distribution channel on one platform for mostly one type of product, where game engines are branching out and creating value across multiple industries these days. Most of my work in Unity hasn't been in entertainment-oriented stuff.

* Edit: Though it does specify that this is based on estimated ownership of one quarter of Valve. Not sure what that implies about the value of Valve, though.

 

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You set the materials up wrong. User error.

 

[mod edit: rants and nonsense removed]

 

Verify it yourself, lazy bum. Low effort answer for low effort complainer.

 

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@Merchant1307 please tone down your attitude and keep it civil.
If you don't know, @BIGTIMEMASTER works with graphics for quite a while now, so has solid background, to judge on your material setup.

 

[mod edit: rants and nonsense removed]

 

His credentials aren't fake. In fact, he's even part of the team that made a game you can play right now that's on Steam, where he did the art:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1113300/To_Battle_Hells_Crusade/

 

[mod edit: rants and nonsense removed]

 

You just tried to claim that anyone who registered after 2014 could essentially be an operative out to get you. Do you understand how unreasonable that is? Can you provide any evidence of any of your claims?

 

[mod edit: rants and nonsense removed]

 

We could very easily say the same about you based on your responses here. General Discussion is not a support section and rather than create one in the appropriate section you decided to hijack a thread. If you need assistance with using the high definition render pipeline then create a thread in that section.

https://forum.unity.com/forums/high-definition-render-pipeline.386/

 

Who is "they?"

This is a claim that requires evidence to support it.

Who? Why?

Why would they assume you were going to start posting on the Unity forums two years before you even made an account and then put operatives on the forums?

I've been here since before 2015 by two years. How does that add up?

 

The Unity Asset Store has quite a lot available, while the same cannot be said for Unreal's. This is Unreal actually trying to defend against an advantage of Unity. Unity doesn't specifically need to respond.

 

Again, open discourse is encouraged in order to foster a healthy community. Healthy skepticism is encouraged and feedback helps up improve Unity. To that end, we will not tolerate inappropriate and disrespectful behaviour.
This is my final warning.

 

Banned.

Behavior toward other members alone is completely unacceptable let alone breaking virtually all the rules we have.

NOTE:, when a troll or whatever goes off the rails like that, please just report and don’t engage (it’s just more to clean up). They are obviously nonsensical and are just here to yell and not actually discuss anything. I know it’s difficult, but try to ignore them until the janitors get here.

 

My aim, in creating this thread, was..
1. To be realistic about how tools can be acquired and change.
2. Seeking positive ideas on how Unity can grow.
Simples.

 

That's what Unity is doing, quite constantly. It's the most common game engine in use, and the addition of DOTS, the job system, and the new pipelines are great first steps towards the engine being used in larger, more demanding titles. There are other things, like UIElements, adressables, all sorts of things that are fixing to solve a lot of other pain points that exist in the engine/

The simple reality is that Unity is growing. It is growing and constantly improving, it's just that the way it is doing so isn't flashy PR friendly stuff.

 

I would just like to also point out that anyone thinking that the speed of workflow in unreal is anything close to unity is having a laugh. Unreal has an amazing amount of tech, but if you want to make something quickly you make it in unity. Yes in a perfect world where you have no job but working on your game, that doesnt matter so much. But if you are trying to do this on the side of your real life, like most do, time is of the essence.

There is nothing stopping you from knocking together your vertical slice using unity, using that to pitch and fund, and then building the full version in unreal. The API and engine will change but the underlying gameplay will not, and neither will your IP.

Ive already gone down this "unreal looks way better, maybe ill even enjoy development in it more" rabbithole and honestly, its not that the grass is greener on the other side. Its just different grass.

If you are however a complete beginner then you should try both as you have less to lose. If your experienced in unity however, I fail to see what you will really gain using unreal. Most of what you can do there you can do in unity if you set your mind to it and have the technical knowledge. And no, I am not talking about massive realtime destruction or realistic assets or any of the unreal features that are not useful to any indie intending to actually release something that will turn a profit.

All of that noise is just noise, if you dont that the AAA sized team then you just are not going to make anything close in quality to all the unreal PR tech demos, so probably time to start accepting that.

 

In fairness, Unity is doing like a gazillion flashy PR friendly stuff events per year, so I don't really buy that whole "unity's about substance" thing.

I mean, that's also a bad and a good thing. Yeah you can do things quickly, but when you want to do things well, things fall apart really quickly. I have no idea how Unreal is these days so I am not saying it's better on Unreal, I'm just saying that the speed you can build a prototype does not really transfer beyond a prototype in Unity.