CEO John Riccitiello does not expect Unity's main customers to be game developers in the future

http://uk.businessinsider.com/unity-ceo-john-riccitiello-opportunity-beyond-gaming-2018-9

Well, obviously Unity is expanding into other fields. Surprised that the expectation is that game development will become a minority consideration though, given it's the most popular game engine.

I guess the concept Unity has is that they'll be doing all these news reports, all these sports overlays and so on, and that's expected to become more business than games, along with other realtime graphics applications.

Thoughts?

 

Setting the stage for an IPO is my guess. They probably don't make enough off just game dev subscriptions to justify the high market cap that all those Unity investors want to achieve when they go IPO.

 

I've made a lot more money using Unity to make 'not-game' stuff than 'game-stuff'.

It's titled a Game Engine, but lots of industries are looking at it as a Visualization Engine. At the core, that's what it's good at. Those industries want solutions and rolling your own takes too long. Unity's reached a level of recognition where it's a valid choice to fill those gaps at an absurdly lower price.

 

I don't know near as much about this as most of the people here, but from my small perspective I've seen Unreal moving towards a more beginner friendly approach, and from my small experience, as a pure game engine, Unreal is just better equipped for that than Unity.

So maybe, sizing up the competition, Unity see's a better future in avoiding a head-on fight, and instead branching into new territory (not necessariily new territory, but expanding in areas where they already have a foothold.)

 

Unreal is way harder to use than Unity with or without blueprint.

 

Yeah, I can't argue about that at all, I'm not a programmer. I just see more stuff coming from Unreal that is obviously geared towards helping out beginners, so I got an impression they are wanting to steal some of that market from Unity.

 

UE4 hits your productivity when you want to make iterative changes, or tools or anything like that, things we take totally for granted over here...

 

I understand. And the smart beginner is going to find out about this stuff one way or another before they make their decision about what engine to use.

But for the raw beginner who's going to throw down some money on asset store stuff to make their 500+ player MMO RPG, they won't know the difference and may be more likely to go for the "AAA" engine if it has lots of beginner friendly content like "no-coding" visual scripting and such.

But, yeah I'm just purely speculating here and don't want to derail the thread into engine vs engine debate, so I'll stop procrastinating and get back to work. (How many times a day do I say that?)

 

Unity could also gain momentum in AAA / AA game production once HDRP and ETC are established.
I'm surprised it took that long to make this happen.

 

I don’t see it. Wishful thinking? (Although I’m not sure why he would be wishing that)

There are much more specialized and better tools for those industries, I don’t see it happening.

Maybe for small independent CG movies, where they can’t really afford to pay renderfarms (but the classic offline renderers are also getting faster, so...).

 

There is this movie Next Gen which is done in Blender https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7133686/
and in Unreal

Maybe Unity aims to have similar production goals.
https://blogs.unity3d.com/2018/08/13/unity-for-film-real-time-cinematic-technology-at-siggraph-2018/

And I think that more indie developers will use Godot in future.

 

Maybe he is not expecting that there will be great expansion to other industries, but that they will drive all game developers away.

AND THEN, they can finally replace the forums with Lithium and gamify them all they want.

This plan has been set in motion for years, but who could have imagined?!

 

unity is getting used right now for a lot more stuff than games
a lot of companies are jumping on the interactive advertising bandwagon, and there are a lot of other fields like architecture, design, simulation or simple interactive presentations
so i guess its not really that far fetched that other markets will exceed the gaming "niche", at least when viewed from a profit point of view

 

It makes sense for Unity. It's not that they're reducing focus on the games market, they're expanding their focus to include other markets.

I haven't worked on games for a few years now, and made more money doing non-game stuff too.

If film forces Unity to bump up their rendering/graphics game, then games benefit from that too. Games require the engine remains performant without the GC hiccuping all over the place, which is beneficial for films too. It's win-win all around.

 

Yeah first rule of effective advertising is: don't target the customers you already have...

 

This is the time to start getting farmiliar with other tools. Not necessarily time to switch or anything, but preparing for the future can put you a step ahead of the crowd.

 

game are harder than movie, no surprise

 

I can see it becoming their main revenue source more so than their customer base. Guess it depends on what they define as customer base too, are personal users 'customers'?

 

Unity would be very wise to learn early on that the repeat customer, the consistent customer is their bread and butter. That is game developers.

These other markets aren't likely to hit asset store or services anywhere near as hard. And there is solid competition in the movie space coming as hardware improves. All those offline renderers still stand to benefit from GPU improvements while being very closely connected to the DCC packages.

 

Can we please have robust and stable 2018 Unity without downloading 8 or 9 hotfixes every single release ?

 

Have to admit this is ironic coming from someone who is constantly asking about the latest beta releases. If you want to have a robust and stable release with a minimal number of hotfixes then your answer will always be the LTS release.

 

I thought beta is stable at least. But this beta is more like broken alpha.

 

Betas aren't ever stable. Why would you assume that?

 

Traditionally a beta release is an unstable build with a code freeze.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_release_life_cycle#BETA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeze_(software_engineering)

Software is not considered stable until it's official release.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_release_life_cycle#Release

 

I think Unity actually does fix bugs in the betas first, but betas come with a ton of their own bugs so things balance out

 

The beta that became release candidate is as stable as the released version

 

As an exmaple, here is our last build that went all the way to production.



You can see it first went to our Dev enivorment, then to test, then to acc and then finally to production.

 

Strange logic.
Beta never guarantee to be stable, nor is finished. And that is true across all software.

This is why there is tons of early beta access (unfinished) games for example. Devs no need to worry, about unsolved bugs, or that product is not complete, as per target. Hence sticking beta label.

 

No, you never rebuild a release candidate then you can introduce bugs. You build a binary then let that first go to test (its a beta in this stage), if it passes test and acceptance it goes to production.

 

The released version comes from a release candidate, undergoes a full QA check unlike each beta which does not.

 

Yeah, exactly, but my point was that it starts its life as a beta.

 

Yes but by the time it is stable its not a beta anymore

 

Which only means that no one found the bugs that inevitably hit stable.

 

You can always be sure of one thing, there are always bugs in any software

 

The ultimate size of the game industry is tiny. Its somewhere between 100-200 billion annually globally. That's small fry. My first company was bigger then the entire global game industry. Plus Unity already has the lions share of the revenue available in games for game engines. Sure they can canabilise a few more percent off unreal. But there isn't much more room for Unity to expand within games.

That puts an absolute cap on the size Unity can grow to, and that's a big deal if they want to go public. Any investors will be looking at Unity as a mature company with relatively stable markets. That's not a company you pump millions of new investment into, its a company that you hold defensively. You cut costs and make it more streamlined and efficient, you don't push more money into R&D.

That is, unless Unity can convince the market that it still has other areas to grow into. For example the construction industry is worth about 10 trillion dollars. If you can measure the size of Unity's 'real' industry in trillions, rather then billions, it makes sense to keep pumping in the money.

 

Game tech is getting used a heck of a lot for non-game stuff these days, and if AR becomes mainstream that'll be even more the case.

Separately, the games industry is growing, but Unity has ended up in a nice position to capitalise on other industries starting to use game tech. It's accessible, flexible, and plenty of people know how to use it. And as @Kiwasi says, there are not only loads of other industries out there, some of them have really deep pockets if a valuable practical application can be found.

At my last job we did loads of this kind of stuff, and that was before it was even really considered a thing. In fact, we focused on this type of stuff as it paid better.

 

We used unity for visualizing store layouts when planning new stores, the customer was a Swedish world leading clothing enterprise.

It's used in alot of none game related applications.

 

"Filming your own games is easier than you think" adds are coming xD.

 

We are spending more and more of our time using Unity for non-game applications for our major client. Makes me a little sad, as I love the creativity of game development, but of course, the money is there for non-game uses so that is where one must go. The good thing is these non-game applications are often used for good...teaching, training, aids for disabled folks, etc. The fact that Unity can do both, game and non-game is a huge achievement!

 

I think 3D visualization like this Weather Channel thing is becoming more common place. Soon engines like Unity will replace Power Point style presentations. It could potentially be a standard piece of office software that everyone uses.

 

I love this. I would like to see it used more and more, not only for weather, but other environmental and climate based education. We talk about where to place a well to avoid contamination by septic tanks or leaky gasoline tanks and we show cross section pictures, but what we could actually show a realistic rendition of the pollution plumes and how it interacts with the flow of the ground water. I worked for an environmental consulting firm and we used to use computer simulation to create cleanup proposals for our clients. Very difficult to actually show them what we were planning to do. Imagine being to do this in a more visual way. Great for educating people on why they do not want pollution regulations banished and why the water they drink may be threatened.

 

Very cool implications. But I think the only way to make anybody care about pollution is to give them a glass of Flint's best and make them drink it.

Large scale problems like this don't hit home until... they hit home.

 

Maybe, but the more we educate people on the issues, the more we can make a difference. When in graduate school, I worked with pre-service teachers. The goal was to create issue oriented research projects for elementary school students, mostly around environmental issues and science. The results were amazing among the kids, even young kids in 4th grade. Being able to use technology to do this, not only for the kids but for the teachers could have a big impact.

We can give up and say nothing will make a difference until some one dies, or we can do something now that will possibly bring about a new generation of people who will be better educated. I prefer to do something if I can.

 

I think 4 years is a bit too aggressive, but the overall trajectory of Riccitiello's comment is sound. Youtube sized animated shows are perfectly doable now. I could see Unity being used for internal corporate training videos as well. Saturday morning cartoons could easily be made with Unity, though the inertia of existing animation techniques will be a significant barrier.

Simulations is a big area for growth, both static simulations and interactive training simulations. I could see drivers education training, pilot training, or pretty much any vehicle training using a simulator based on Unity. Orbital training such as space station repair, space walks, etc, could be done with Unity.

User front ends for remotely operated semi-autonomous vehicles could be made with Unity. In vehicle displays could run off of Unity.

Unity could replace some corporate powerpoint style presentations. etc etc

 

Did he say in 4 years? I think the 4 years is the number of years he has been CEO at Unity. There is some mention of how he does not know what will happen in 5 years...but maybe in 20.

 

You're correct, I misread the quote.

 

Unity are already advertising jobs for many fields:

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=u...bp=htl;jobs#htidocid=3kiMMLZHyibzJUq1AAAAAA==

Obviously there's shared improvements but it does look like a nice bit of cash from Unity, which historically also worked with military agencies etc.

 

Heh that kind of dovetails into the AR/VR thread. Visualization is a pretty huge field with obvious (and not so obvious) applications, so if you jump on it early enough, there's good money to be made.

 

I watched an interview with the guy who invented Blender and he brought up an interesting point. As creatives, we think of Maya as Autodesk's major product, but doing the math, it's a niche product compared to the income generated by other products used in manufacturing, AutoCad and the like.

Reading about Unity's research efforts in AI, it's clear there is a research/industry demand and focus outside of games. As @Teila mentioned, using Unity for training, education and design is already a major growth area outside of games. Cars/buildings and urban areas can be prototyped before being built, allowing users a realistic experience of the finished product. Or, just testing a manufacturing process before committing to it.

It's all certainly possible to do, but Unity seems to be working to make it easier and more widespread. Once that happens, I can imagine AI humans doing initial rounds of testing and iteration. Through better AR, virtual assistants could be in the space with you, offering advice on the best way to conduct a procedure. I think the combination of a strong code/developer environment, 3D and ready-made assets is what makes this seem viable.

 

Things like Mocap, AR and photogrammetry keep getting more accessible. Soon we'll have an app where you just have to point your phone at something and walk around it and you'll instantly get an acceptable 3D model with PBR maps. It will be so easy that'll be used for every mundane thing.

You'll be able to go to restaurant, point your phone at the menu and see an AR of your food on the table in front of you before you order it. "Mmm, that does look good. I think I'll order that."