How do Unity developers decide which features to work on?

On the Unity Blog, there were a few posts about how the Unity team handles bug reports. Importantly, one mentioned a particularly crucial piece of information that the developers essentially ignore all bug reports that weren't filed from the latest beta or alpha releases.

Is there a similar blog post explaining which factors go into the team's decision to implement a new feature? If there isn't, it would be awesome to have one

I suspect there are 3 primary sources of feature suggestions:
1. Core unity team (things like new tech/platform support is most likely decided by them)
2. Premium-level customers and companies with which Unity collaborates closely
3. feedback.unity3d.com
But how much and in which ways they affect the roadmap is still quite a mystery.

In particular, I'd also like to see a bit more clarification regarding how the feedback.unity3d.com fits in the process. The Knowledge Base only mentions that "the more users vote for your idea, the more likely we are to look into implementing it", which is rather vague. Here are some questions which it would be nice to know the answer to:

• How often does someone from the Unity team look there?
  • Some features which were done long ago are still not marked as completed, which implies that the answer is "not often".
• Are all user suggestions eventually reviewed (or at least seen) by the people who make the decisions, or only the ones with the biggest number of votes? Does the nature of the issue affect its likelihood of being considered, or only its popularity?
  • This is similar to the "only bug reports for the alpha/beta versions matter": if Unity devs always look only at top N feature requests, that essentially makes it pointless to submit suggestions for small improvements (and sending them as bug reports probably isn't a good idea either), even when they should be very quick/easy to implement.
• Even among the most-voted, some suggestions can sit ignored for years, without even a reply from any Unity official. Does it mean that Unity is too understaffed to dedicate someone to handling feedback, the developers are simply not interested in discussing/responding to some topics, or something else?

These questions are not intended as a criticism of the way things work right now (there are probably objective reasons for that, which will hopefully get resolved at some point). I just want a better understanding / transparency of what's going on behind the scenes and how much impact regular users actually have

 

I suspect it works like at most software companies where new feature development primarily comes down from Product Management. Product Management would get their ideas from a variety of sources, from suggestions, to large customers, to watching what is coming out in other game engines, to their own new tech idea people.

 

Yesterday I got an email from Unity QA which contained the following:

"Don't be afraid that your request will drown among the most popular requests, we are very keen on picking the low hanging fruits that are easy to implement and still makes sense to have."

I guess that answers my second question. Though not completely reassuring (given the examples above), it's good to know that Unity team acknowledges the impression that feedback.unity3d.com gives and tries to improve it