If unity didnt exist...

What would you be doing instead...

Using another game engine... Making your own... Doing something else entirely???

I think probably because i started with mobile games i'd probably be doing something in java or Flash maybe. Or maybe some kind if website money making scheme.

Very possibly xna would still be around. Probably wouldnt be using any of the other game engines as they are a bit tricky.

 

One of those three, yes.

 

Pretty much what I'm doing now, but either not as quickly or with something else.

 

Remove Unity, and you leave a Unity shaped hole in the market. Something would fill it. That's how free markets work. They aren't perfect for a lot of things. But for efficiency in making money, its hard to beat free markets.

 

Making games. Been doing long before unity, and likely long after.

 

Before Unity, my only knowledge was based on some intro level CS courses I took. In other words, I could hardly program anything and was considering quitting. Then I found Unity, which made me interested enough to learn to program well and allowed me to find my passion for it. Now I’ve expanded my skill set to other areas of programming outside of Unity, but if not for Unity at the beginning I’d probably not be a programmer.

That’s if the question was: what if it never existed? If it stopped existing now, I’d either check out Unreal or use GLFW/GLM/GLEW/etc with C++.

 

I'd probably have messed around a bit longer with XNA.

 

Well probably still bitz3D and I wouldn't have the interesting shader overhead

 

Not many things would change for me. I only use unity for the front end and I can do that with Unreal, Lumberyard or Godot as well. Maybe with a bit more hassle but nothing I can't manage.

 

I started making games before Unity exist.
Probably might still playing with RPG Maker and Construct.
And keep continue learning on Unreal Engine.

 

I still have 3DGS A7 "Extra" license somewhere... But most likely I'll messing around with godot or xenko 3d...

 

Bacon chef?

 

And I'd be wondering why the pixelated roast dinner looks the same from every angle.

 

I would be using Unreal Engine 4.

But if game development wasn't a thing...

...I'd be his nemesis, the restaurant critic.

 

What you guys forget is that Unity changed alot of how the market work. Before unity engines were expensive things to license. Unreal had to change their model after Unity, not certain it would have done that if Unity weren't around.

 

I don't forget but there were pretty good cheap solutions for engines before Unity actually. Unity was higher priced than most engines of the time, mac only and had very hard limits. So they didn't democratise all that much, frankly.

Any true democratisation came when they launched a free version many years later, when their competition was already pretty much free and better featured. I would argue Unity finally became woke around version 5.

 

I wasnt a game dev back then, which engines you speak of? Was there really anything more than Unreal or Id Tech etc?

 

Torque was around and was an inexpensive option compared to the rest. Unreal and Id Tech had engines you could license, but they had a very high price tag. Torque Game Engine had a $100 price tag and full source code access. The Torque engines essentially laid the foundation for inexpensive, approachable game engines for the masses. Unity just managed to do it better. It was the competition between Torque and Unity that set the stage for other engines.

 

Cool never heard of that engine

 

Not surprised. Now that the engine is fully community maintained, no one is really advertising it.

 

I was at GarageGames during the height of Torque. (though was on the game team, not the engine team). It was a good and ambitious engine for the time.

But engines aren't a necessity for making games. Back in the day, few indies used them. All you need is a computer and some time and smarts. Engines make it easier for sure, but if someone really is passionate about making games, you just need a computer. Flash wasn't really a "game engine" though it was mostly used for that. During most of the early flash years, it was just an animation/rendering tool with some elements of UI (eventually). But that didn't stop people from leveraging it to build games.

 

Ha, I didn't know you were at GG. I was on the Torque team. Game industry is a small world, huh?

 

I probably would still be using the C4 Engine. And maybe going back and forth between that and XNA/Monogame, or maybe finally try out Godot.

 

Unity was an inevitability.

It's just painful to develop iOS and Android apps separately, especially during the early days when the SDKs weren't as fully fleshed out as they are now. Someone would've stepped into the void eventually.

If not Unity, then probably Xamarin.

 

Not a single mention of Adobe?
It's strange to think I've used Flash longer than Unity, so I'd probably be doing something over there.

 

I miss the days when we had to pay for good game engines.

 

I have been extremely enthusiastic about game development for the better part of two decades. I would be dappling in game development, whether Unity was here or not. I would just be using a different engine, or coming at it from another direction.

For me, the biggest difference would be tool development. One of my real passion projects in using Unity has been developing custom tools thanks to the extensibility of Unity's interface. I got pretty good at it, and now I always check engines for the plug-in possibilities before digging too deeply into them. I love cooking up my own tools, and Unity helped to empower this practice through it's flexibility.

 

Not if you wanted to ship iOS games.

 

When?

 

I didn't and still don't. But have too

 

2008 - 2016

 

I was there just before you it sounds like, we may have crossed paths (2006-2008). I was there for most initial stuff with instantaction. It is a small world. My current lead programmer, was the lead on Penny Arcade's OtRSPoD. And we figured out that we had actually met years ago when he came down for a meeting at the GG offices.

 

Neat! Yeah, I was contracting for a few months during the IA transition, then relocated to Eugene as a full timer when it was made official. We didn't meet directly, but probably hung out in the same parties. OtRSPoD was a great game and the devs were cool. Never had a chance to meet them directly, unfortunately.

 

Small world. @MelvMay was responsible for Torque2D and now works on Unity's 2D physics. Also probably a couple of other people from that era here.

 

Yup. Melv and I worked together on Torque 2D MIT. It was his last GG project before moving over to Unity. Loved working with that guy. Unity picking him up is one of the best decisions they've made =)

 

Running an obscure website that hosts custom maps to be used with new campaigns I create and share for Warcraft II BNE. It wouldn't popular and I'd refuse to update the design out of pure stubbornness, so the 90's-esque layout would likely deter a lot of people, leaving a handful of like-minded individuals who visit enough to earn me a whopping $1.50 a month in advertising, all while continuing down the path I was on before this: creating websites I'd never use in languages I don't like while working for clients who only ever saw me as a means to an end.

 

I thought it was a Swedish company

edit. ah, Machinegames vs GarageGames

 

We all assumed you would be hosting and providing =) Keep up the awesome work at the Unity. Been loving the new features.

Feel bad I haven't contributed an answer to the original question. So here goes. If Unity didn't exist, Torque probably would have lasted a bit longer as a commercial product. Wouldn't have stopped IA and GG LLC from going out of business, though. The engines would have still gone MIT. So I'd still be doing what I'm doing now. I transitioned from the professional game industry to standard app development. Game dev is only a hobby now, which makes me happy.

 

GarageGames was founded by some of the core members of the old Dynamix team. They were the guys responsible for The Incredible Machine, The 3D-Ultra series, and several other projects under the Sierra On-Line publishing umbrella. Jeff Tunnel is one of my video game development super-stars. And Dynamix was responsible for a lot of great games back in the day. GarageGames attempted to carry on that legacy, but didn't see as much success as they probably would have wanted to. Torque got used a fair amount back in the early 00's, but never caught on the same way that Unity and Unreal Engine managed to. For a while Torque was THE go-to indie engine. It was reasonably affordable, and ran on Windows while Unity was Mac-only.

 

I'd probably still be enjoying myself, playing around with
good ol' blender game engine.

 

I would be using the next best game engine I'd find.

 

Thats not really how markets work. You also need individuals to recognise oportunities and have the time and resources to implement new products. There are only a finite number of people who each have their own agendas making the whole thing enormously unpredictable.

The world would have gone ticking along just fine without Macs and iPhones.

Or in evolutionary terms a world without kangaroos would not inevitably have left a kangaroo shaped hole.

In the real world there is also price fixing and monopolies and the aversion to taking risks.

 

You clearly misunderstood him. His statement is that a different company would have filled the dominant position if the current dominant company did not exist. This isn't rocket science we're talking about here. It's very easily observable if you look at the market in general. There is almost always at least one dominant company.

Before Unity the game engine for indie developers that was constantly getting mentioned was Torque. There were a few others floating around (eg A8 Game Studio) but for the most part they were just awful. If Unity hadn't destroyed them it's possible it might still be the dominant one.

Likewise there was a dominant smartphone before the arrival of Android and iPhone. I remember paying very little attention to the smartphone market before they showed up but even I remember that BlackBerry was the dominant company.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackBerry

 

It’s also likely that if Adobe hadn’t given up on the market and actually delivered on Air Next, unity would be fighting for dominance. Things change quickly and for unseen reasons.

 

Unity's only gotten where it was because I was made moderator. This caused some sort of quantum spark thing... and here we are.

 

My constant complaining about the dark skin is why Unity has feature parity between versions EXCEPT for the dark skin.

 

PBR and all features after that makes Unity a actual competitor to Unreal came after I started working on my game, just saying. And all the bugs we have found, QA loves us!