Official Important updates to the Unity Runtime Fee policy

When exactly was a country bombed for banning a phone manufacturer? This is literally what the EU just did.

 

In fact, those who choose to stay don't need to spend more money to purchase PRO, and the purpose is only to eliminate that bad startup screen. This is a waste of money.
That's not very important, because whether your game was created using Unity is easy to see. Simply select the local folder in the inventory directory of Steam to find the UnityPlayer.dll file.

 

Interesting video. Thank you for getting this to my attention. Yes, the first story here is very characteristic. However, I can not get the connection with your lines: "Reading comments like this makes me feel like Unity owes us something and they should pay us a fee for our games regardless of whether they are successful or not..." I get the sarcasm, but sarcasm for what? Nothing?

How I can relate the video (the first story) to what we are experiencing with Unity is the management not taking responsibility to develop funding plans without taxing people. Yes, they do not taking responsibility in that manner, and do the easiest thing: tax people. I think, they did not deserve their bonuses.

And it is very interesting that people younger than a certain age think that they can just pull a few words out of some context and give them a completely different meaning. That indicates the lack of literature experience. I think one should read a significant amount of works in literature before a certain age, in order to manage the terms and ideas appropriately, not even talking about the master level.

I have spoken.

 

Well, all is Unity's problem, now. We really have a good game, and we also have the power to translate what we are doing into Unreal. And we have started this. It's all Unity's problem, now.

 

You may not want to pick on others for using language correctly.

 

What do you mean?

 

The asset store is frustrating to no end, just in terms of sheer wasted potential. I could ramble on and on about all the ways they could have improved it, but to put it simply, they did nothing to foster the best talent, promote them, and develop a sense of consistent quality. Could have had an in-house art team pumping out quality content paired with another team that set these assets up and made it easily ported into the engine. A few prolific artists for effects, characters and environments and they would have been conjuring millions out of thin air every day, billions if they had properly integrated the store into the engine: Particles that can easily scale to any level. Characters with perfect animation setups and rigging, and on and on.

Imagine a growing partnership of third party, hard working talented developers who could work on tertiary features. Encourage them to network and talk amongst each other in various communities, share tools, share practices, and if they hit it out of the park, bring 'em on the team, integrate the tools into the engine, have a team that makes this process easier so the engine is living and growing in exciting new ways. Hire a few people who's job it is to specifically engage with these communities, to foster a positive work environment and make the community welcoming and technically engaging. Create a dialogue around maximizing engine development, promote hard work, promote quality content, give new creators a push who are doing a great job, take pride in the awesome assets and community that is being fostered.

Engine development isn't some random savant in a cave working alone (well sometimes it is, and nothing wrong with that) but an engine like Unity, at its best, is a legion of passionate devs, all working together, pushing forward with ambition to do great things dreaming of the awesome things they will be able to do tomorrow, knowing that it's going to be more fantastical because of the contributions of others.

We need to realize that the quality of this engine isn't stifled on a linear growth scale, but an exponential one. There are SO MANY damned talented hard working, fantastic developers out there that there is NO REASON this engine should be stagnating so damned hard. There is a severe disfunction in finding and fostering talent in our modern tech.

Unity couldn't be bothered to make their profitable marketplace friggin' FUNCTIONAL. The sheer friggin' incompetency to just get the site not lag so people can actually buy products in mind boggling, they have fallen so short of even bare bones competency, that it's rage inducing as so many depend on this product to feed their families.

It's draining to thinking of how hard these incompetent, selfish, phonies have shat the bed year after year in this company. They have NO IDEA how to foster a company that gives a darn about their work, or how to find the rare individuals who are going to bring maximum prosperity both to your company and your users. The more money either of these groups make, the more the other group makes, we're in this together, yet we're treated like enemies.

Year after year Unity and most other tech companies have banked on idiotic, short term schemes while squandering everything hard earned and of quality, of which they were blessed with a great deal. All the hard earned investments shuttered in a few years. Damned shame.

 

You're "supposed" to pick your poison and stick with it, honestly.

There are no perfect engines. Might as well pick the one with fixable problems.

 

I like the Unreal Engine but not the Shop.
Epic was to aggressive and i and "the boys" have only Accounts for free Games.
Epics free games devalue the platform in my opinion and follows the trend like retail market where you only Shop with red prices. Many Epic user are conditioned to free games, often as a 2 Account next to Steam.

With Steam a maybe -75% game cost 3$, but when you use your account data, the hurdle to charge you Steam Account is low. In Epic, you have now a giant free libary for 0$ and Epic has never seen my bank details.

 

The only court that matters, as far as corporations are concerned, is the Supreme Court of the USA. This is why it's important to follow the various endeavours of Epic against Apple AND Google. For some reasons probably pertaining to emotions, the focus is mostly on Epic vs Apple whilst the case against Google is equally (or perhaps even more) important globally. And incredibly important to game makers, regardless of engine used.

Epic's self interest and mutual interests align with game makers, engine makers and content creators, regardless of your opinions of Epic. There's not any doubt about this. The only questions surround the nature of anti-competitive and monopoly laws' applicability and intentions versus the realities of Apple and Google's behaviour. Epic's approach to getting this to be a point of contention won't matter to the Supreme Court if they consider the case to have standing.

Governments don't care about taxation of the bigger corporations, instead providing incentives (loop holes) to keep more of their endeavours within their people's markets. Even the USA's government is far too small and ineffective to battle a giant corporation like Google when it comes to matters of taxation.

Any somewhat global corporation can avoid most any taxes they care to shuffle their revenues away from. And they do. It's made easiest for them because it's suited the interests of the financial elites to have a system exactly the way it is.

 

A solid selection of plugins doesn't hurt either. I saw this linked in Discord. I'm not a fan of subscriptions for tools but I'm still very tempted because I do tend to be easily distracted when I should be working.

https://www.polygonflow.io/

 

amazingly pertinent exaple:

Philips changes terms AFTER the sale: requires data-sharing account to use a light bulb...

 

I mean to be honest, I'm not really seeing anything I'd call "intermediate" there. A lot of the stuff on display is the kinda stuff you'd really expect from the very standard progression of any engine that does 3D. Remember that army dude demo that Unity used to have a billion years ago? I'm talking like borderline contemporary with Lerpz. Everything I'm seeing there just looks like what you'd expect at that level nowadays and that demo wasn't exactly amazing.

 

Almost every plugin out there supports the current major Blender LTS.

 

The connection is very simple. The sarcasm of my comment (not just the part you quote) is about your previous comment "Unity does not put any added value in this!". It might have been better to start with $200,000 to make it clearer what value we are getting from Unity in exchange for the Pro plan. And the funny question from the video (not the whole video, that's why I specifically mentioned where the question starts), was just the spark that generated my comment. It wasn't about the management of the company, although I wish Unity was like Blender in the game development world as well, not a money hungry company. You're right about using words out of context, and your comment is a good example of that. That isn't related to the age.

 

Yes, I'm aware of that post. I've been following Godot development for a while now. However, I was answering to that part "Godot is not ready, the code source is a mess of bottlenecks, the rendering is a mess, any fork would be a rewrite from scratch. It's a forever hobbyist engine, it's great at what it is though."

Godot 4.0 is a major rewrite in every way, not to dismiss 4.1 and 4.2 which are really huge.... Yes, no one is saying Godot is ready for an AA/AAA company without customizing the engine (which is what every AAA company does even with unreal btw). Basically because they don't even have a good VCS solution, but in terms of engine capabilities it's coming along very fast. I'd give it a shot, the editor weighs less than 150mb.

I also don't know why no one is talking about GDExtension and how it allows you to script in C++, javascript, python, swift, eventually c#, and every language the community is willing to support. (Fun fact: The person who wrote the blog post about Godot API performance ("Godot is not the new Unity") is on that GDExtension roadmap thread contributing)

 

What has been done ≠ What could be done

 

And what do you see as impressive on the Unity side? Rust team has been modifying Unity for years to push it on the rendering side (They abandoned HDRP in favor of their renderer). The VRising team modified an early version of DOTS to their needs, Albion Online (Almost the only proof of unity's MMORPG scale capability) uses Unity only as an input and rendering front, game logic is a NET app.

And don't get me wrong, all those teams and games are AWESOME, and Unity is as awesome as a tool.

Looking at Godot previous developments is great, it will help you find if Godot suits your project needs.
However looking at games published by godot as the only truth of its capabilities is as wrong as looking at Albion as proof of Unity's mmorpg capabilities.

 

I was just defending my right to speak without needless chains in a chaotic situation, no engine choice dilemma was directly intended in that comment.
---
Regarding your suggestion, you know, an endorsment on your part would be more significant than a suggestion... are you trying to tempt me with those fixable problems?
Well, I would like to switch to Godot, and indeed there could be that little problem of community fanboism, but as you said one has to pick his poison, this could not be a problem at first or a very funny one if you got some sort of mithridatism for that kind of situations. The real issue atm would be for me the lack of the f***ed indirect draw calls, you could do wonderful things with those even in an (to some extent) unoptimized engine. Much logic calculation, in my case, computed on the GPU, thousands of meshes rendered in 1 draw call, easy to port code as you have HLSL to GLSL compute shaders conversion. Possibly fast as it can get. They should be supported in Vulkan with vkCmdDrawIndirect and other API calls and Godot 4 features Vulkan, while OpenGL ES 3 seems old to me. But no indirect draw calls atm. Why Juan? Why?

Your turn now, what poison would you pick?

 

After using both Unity and Unreal I can say your statement is not correct.

Unreal is very good for 3D, has features unity doesn't have, like hair with physics and collisions, a solid framework for creating characters that can have multiple layered parts, like clothing on top of existing geometry, it also has nanite that frees you from the hell of ultra optimizing 3D models. It also has lumen which doesn't require baking the lighting like in unity.

but unreal is not so good at 2D, Unity is far superior on this target.

 

I recommend Godot for devs that make 2D games or 3D lightweight games and UE for 3D games with highend graphics but i am surprised with all new free alternatives to Unity like Defold, Flax, Unigine, O3DE, Stride, Godot, etc. with this situation of look for one Unity alternative i back in the time and remember years ago when use Unity Free and this version of Unity have not shadows feature and i look for other engine, you needed add circular gradients called blob shadows to "simulate" shadows, is crazy but now with the Runtime Fee you will pay by your game installations and in the past if you need shadows you needed pay for a Unity Pro license.

 

the unreal hub is actually two hubs. they behave similar.

one is in the Epic Games Launcher, which originally was the hub, then got extended to become a steam like app that sells games. There you find the unreal marketplace for game engine resources, like unity used to have in the past, now the asset store is only on web in unity.

It is not good, very sluggish, it does the job but it is slow and annoying. It gives you an overview of the project you work on, there are thumbnails, overall have better features. but is slow and a pain to use.

the second hub is in the engine itself, if you start the engine directly not from the Epic Games Launcher. has projects thumbnails like the launcher one.

 

Ok, I got genuine question regarding Godot.

Since it is open source and full of part time work made code, as far I understand(correct me please otherwise?) is the quality of engine code suffering? How is it's performance wise, at runtime and in editor. I am not referencing to performance like Unity DOTS.

If Godot is like Unity 5 or earlier, in terms of performance, what prevents godot to become sludgish, when more features will be added. Just like in case of Unity.

Is partimers code integration not a potential risk, to build performance bottlenecks? Specially in long run?

How blender did handle such challange?

Just disable it in menu options.
It doesn't trigger it then.

 

Main contributors are mainly people with many years of experience in gamedev and/or writing game engine technology. Sometimes even decades. They also have a full-time project manager and several capable people code reviewing PRs. Low-quality code is not accepted into core. FOSS tech is very common outside video games, it's time for this industry to catch up as well.

Opens faster than Unity, enters Play mode immediately, exports builds in seconds. Instant domain reloads thanks to CoreCLR/.NET7 and there are no C# packages to slow it down.

There shouldn't be any editor perf issues related to UI like with Unity's IMGUI since their UI only updates upon request like UI Toolkit.

Not a lot of recent benchmarks are available. This person is doing some flawed testing:

Unity chose to bring most of the development from core to C# packages, which is the main reason editor is slowing down. Godot won't ever do that. It'll be either core C++ updates or C++ GDExtension plugins. Long story short, because Godot is not closed source and has a capable and accessible C++ plugins API.

All code is reviewed and tested before accepting it. There are also many guidelines and processes in place for code to even qualify for being accepted such as the need for a bug report or a feature proposal to exist. Random code is not accepted.

 

Also, you're supposed to pick your poison yourself.

 

You still have the runtime fee in place for the newer version of Unity, which as I understand it is the only version currently where you can remove the splash screen.
So you would have to pay the runtime fee to get the splash screen removed.
It's too bad that John Riccitiello is still employed at Unity.
I would have thought with this debacle that he would have been fired.
That's one reason I don't trust Unity anymore, along with your trying to please the investors over the developers.
It's too bad that Unity has now become like Sears which was lampooned by Eddie Lampert.

 

Thx @PanthenEye for the great input.

I watched few times this vid, and few his other related to ECS.
Unfortunately it is indeed very flowed.
I don't know if guy is biased toward Godot, or lack of experience in Unity ECS/DOTS.
But it show it badly.
If he shows that 10k Unity ECS instances run far below 10k, that is something wrong with a test.

Either way, it is interesting to see, Godot handles nicely 10k simple instances. I don't know if this is out of the box.
Unity can do that too never the less without DOTS. But perhaps not out of the box, just with a bit custom rendering side coding (draw mesh instancing).

Either way, I don't see code samples of tests on his channel, so rest is just a speculation. Or maybe shows bias.

 

No problem buddy.

 

Everyone talking good things about godot is biased towards godot and trying to make the engine look good to other people. There are more successful games made with rpg maker, using the default copy paste rtp than games made with godot,
Now a godot cultist will jump will jump in the comments and say that this is because the engine new and not many people know about it...

People leaving unity to move to godot are just people that will come back in 2 or 3 months, if your game can't be done in flash it can't be made in godot.

 

I see people calling Godot the perfect engine, but I still have objections. I think although its 2D tends to be mature, the 3D part still needs to be tested by the work. You can try using it to create complex scenes, render high-definition character models, and compare it with UE5.
I used it before, but it didn't have ray tracing at that time.

 

Sure thing buddy.

 

If anyone still reads this thread and wants to leave Unity but doesn't know where to go: Don't take anyone's word, positive or negative.

Spend some time with the engines, it will be a lot more informative than some random post on the Unity forums that claims intimate knowledge of competing engines.

 

I know I habitually roast Unity for its iteration times as well as the problems of interop but to be completely fair they do release frequent updates addressing these issues. It's just that there's so many problems that they really need to just let the devs heal the damned engine and stop shaking up the whole organization with all these massive acquisitions and misguided and poorly-researched policy changes.

Also, on the one hand I wish they'd talk to us more often without the mask of PR to get their finger on the pulse but on the other I think that sometimes we dampen their enthusiasm by referring to the owners as brandy-swilling cigar sniffers who drive to work on their yachts along a red river of spilled blood of job cuts and broken dreams.

- moat "won't somebody think of the execs" dd 2023

 

Remember, the current TOS that we had to fight for still allow Unity to screw us over whenever they want.

 

It is the sad reality of any corporation that they reserve the right to change the prices of their product at any time. If it turns out that a business model for a corporation results in a losing proposition, holding them to that would ultimately result in the company going out of business. But at the same time, it's something that can also be easily abused, which is why the factor of *trust* is so vital to any corporation.

We live in a society where we frequently put ourselves in the hands of others who could screw us over while maintaining the faith that they won't screw us over. This debacle woke up a lot of people to that fact, and many of them switched to FOSS alternatives so that they would be in a situation where they can't be screwed over.

 

Spend some time with the communities too. A solid community can help make up for a lack of documentation as this game engine has proven and the poor state of this engine's documentation is not unique.

 

Therefore, companies with conditions choose to develop their own engines because there is no situation of betrayal.
(No need to choose a license as they do not require unity, ue, or even godot).
Even if they spend a certain amount of research and development costs and maintenance costs, it is worth it for them. There are still many mobile game companies producing 2D games now, which do not require high costs and they do not necessarily rely on Unity as a commercial engine.
UE has another issue, there are relatively few programmers and their salaries are relatively expensive (in my country).

 

Companies like that don't sign the same licenses we do.

 

I think you are confused about the content of the video and its relation to the Unity matter (or my comment on this). However, it is meaningless to continue our discussion on this. On the other hand, $200,000 is not an added value - I think many are also confused about this. That is your success as developer if you make it there and what Unity defines with that is part of a subscription system. Now, Unity is canceling plus subscription plan, and forcing us (the ones not on free plans already) to upgrade to pro, right? This, in fact, what Unity adds as a value. Or, should I say, takes away? And, moreover, they do this by not adding any substantial new features to their engine. Engine is full of bugs, they are not fixed. Their tools are not tested and improved by them on real world like Unreal does with Fortnite, and because of this, they lack calculating wide range of industry practices when developing their tools.

One recent example I am currently struggling with is addressables system. I have an output of more than 20 GB archive from that system. I don't want to put it on web, I need to ship it inside the build folder. Now, if you are familiar with Steam's practices, they will divide the whole folder data into 1MB chunks when uploading my game. If you read their documentation, it is essential to have as stationary chunks as possible in order for further updates not cause data corruption. From the documentation, one can easily understand that if the addressable archive increases 10 MB in size in a further update, as it is not built for Steam's system, your game build will cause a data corruption in an update. At least, in theory. We'll see how that goes. But, what does Unity imply with this? No respect someone shipping addressable content on disk on Steam? Or, we should not ship a 20-25 GB archive? Why not? If so, put a warning about this on your documentation. No? Then this is just a miscalculation. So, where is the added value here? In fact, Unity's miscalculations takes more of my time and my energy to search for solutions, implement and test them.

Man! If we are not supposed to make PC games with their engine, let them state it formally and clearly. But they always say the other way. Then you work on your content for 2-3 years, and when you are about to release it to the store, 1 regulation that they did not count when developing their systems, and BAM! And I'll be taxed for this? Because there is some added value in all of these, including their attitude on these changes? Come on!

 

Yes, it is a conspiracy! /sarcasm

You're free to grab Ogre3D, or just jury-rig stuff with naked LibSDL. The idea is to have a brain and evaluate your situation. Godot is one possibility out of many, that has a track record. Flash? 3d games in flash were incredibly uncommon when it got axed.

Godot's advantages are llicense and cost. Doom and Gloom prophecies that "You'll all come back!" aren't helpful and create negative impression instead.

 

Considering the number of Unity asset store plugins made by lone coders that do a far better job than Unity's own internal systems, having features done by part timers shouldn't be too much of a concern. I mean, Unity finally decided to make actual URP samples and immediately ran into the problems everyone has been complaining about for years.

 

Don't forget full access to the entire source code.

(I am quite biased towards engines where you can read and make changes the source code without having to book a call with an account manager.)

 

I'm sorry for the off-topic, but can you link to this so that I can read about it?

Also, I agree with those statements. Looking around in the Godot issues and pull requests I saw bad code, bad requests, but also the contrary. It's not rare to see someone catching some bad performance when profiling and making a pull requests that fixes it.
Godot supports CoreCLR, which Unity is working on supporting too, but who knows when we will have it, without a doubt it won't be on Unity 2023, probably not 2024 either, but it makes Godot's C# around twice as fast as Unity's C# (as Unity uses Mono) and that level of speed up is usually similar to what we get by using Burst. It's an incredible performance boost.

"Performance by default"

Godot physics are bad though, and apparently its 3D audio isn't the best either. But all of it is fixable, with Unity we can't fix a damn thing, many assets from the asset store are like band-aids on top of Unity, and there's a limit to how much we can fix it.

 

Yes and no, if the game stays below the gross you don't have to pay the fee. If it gets above the $1,000,000/yr (the argument goes) you can probibly afford the lesser of $0.15 per sale or %2.5 of gross, but that's going to be the exception... at least until they change the terms again.

 

I'm not the OP (Neto_Kokku), but here you go:

• https://forum.unity.com/threads/introducing-the-new-urp-3d-sample-beta.1495706/

 

Agreed, the general dysfunction destroying tech companies isn't rooted solely in some mustache twirling, money grubbing CEO, it's a human centipede of burned out workers, sleazy marketing types, and of course the top brass. Over time, if a positive corporate culture is not maintained the negative attributes of each compound year on year until you're left with a company that produces nothing. Greed, laziness, short sighted goals that come at the expense of long term prosperity. The human capital of today doesn't want to till the fields, they want to strip them bare and cash out on what those who came before them worked hard to cultivate.

It's this unspoken rule of "hey don't call out my bullshit and I won't call out yours". Workers sitting at their desk surfing reddit, managers quietly cutting all the milestone lists, everyone just quietly nods at one another, "Yeah everything is f*cked but if our investors and consumers figure it out we're all screwed, we either get fired, or we actually have to work again".

So what we're left with is a company of "see no evil hear no evil" where no one sticks their neck out to fix the rot, and everyone just cashes their checks as the walls burn from the inside. It's human nature to put all the blame elsewhere, it's human nature to say, "eh, it'll be fine, good enough" why should I work hard, look at that department, they don't do sh*t and their salary is 2x that of the monkeys in the cage busting their butts to do code. And it's a really sh*t environment to work at, because there is no solving it, it's no one's fault, that a horde of lazy, uninspired people have taken over a company by sheer volume. You can't fight the machine, you eventually become part of it even if you want to work hard and do cool stuff out of necessity.

At some point after unrestricted growth, no one gives a damn about doing their job any more, about doing anything great, because networking becomes the sole bottleneck of quality of life. Not rocking the boat, playing the office politics game. You either smile and nod or you shmooze and wage politics. You get your paycheck either way, and if you DO put your neck out, if you DO try to right the ship, you get the target on your back for being "that guy" that's going to bring about painful long hours, squandered work as features are implemented as band aides opening new edge cases and further cementing a flawed foundation.

We've crossed the threshold where nothing matters. Working hard doesn't matter, making great tools doesn't matter. They don't want to make money making cool stuff, they want to legally bind you to pay them money because they have the iron grip on the industry, because they postured and schmoozed to get into the position of ownership, the corporate organism they have become cannot survive in the arena. It's soft, weak, tribalistic, and hostile towards anything that threatens the gravy train, which is why these forums are a desolate wasteland.

I'll link it one last time because it's just so darned relevant:

 

Went down a rabbit hole reading into the recent Unreal layoffs on Glassdoor.com and ended up digging into Unity, shines a light into how these pricing plans may have come to be. The following are accounts from current and former Unity Employees:

Pros

Some of the employees and engineers are amazing. Some of the incredible talent that made Unity what it is are still there.

Cons

As a long long time Unity user, nearly since version 1 of Unity, I was super excited to work at Unity. Unity always stood out as a company for the indie devs, your ally, your partner, to help you get past all the barriers in the industry that small players face. But I think ever since it went public it has gradually eroded into a pure profit growth driven business. Leadership cares about nothing more than what will get stock to go up in the short term. They've hired so many people from other Big Tech Corporations trying to essentially colonize original Unity culture with Big Tech Corporate process and culture, and they are winning. Many Unity originals, Engineers that have been there since the beginning have left. They pushed out Joachim, the original CTO, the last Unity original and real engineer on C-Suite, so literally Unity leadership has been entirely usurped by non-engineer business types. The only places still managing to do anything good are those places with very high level engineers that still have substantial political weight to throw around and happen to be in a stream that can be argued to make the stock price to go up short term. But increasingly they must fight against pure business side that greatly outnumbers them with free time to play the bureaucracy game. If the narrative about their effort affecting stop price changes, they will be rug-pulled fast. Being an engineer that can do anything of value is like sitting in a middle of a circus. They are cycling through managers and product people just trying to find anyway to milk any more cash from anything in the short term. They have even in the past year started to cannibalize some of their own customers. Unity isn't even a good company to partner with anymore, the relationship will be predatory and extorting, tuned for short term stock inflation however possible. It's a sad thing but I think its just the fate of any successful tech company. The engineers build something of value. Gradually the company hires more and more business people until they overtake the company, then a company once driven by engineers and engineering innovation is now driven by excel spreadsheets trying to get the stock price to go up however it possibly can to let the current round of business people to get a decent cash out on their stock options before jumping companies again every 3-ish years or so. Even worse, in recent months in response to sweeping corporate policy changes, they've actually taken to firing people on the spot who disagree with leadership. A few of these got out in the news, but there have been dozens of them. They were not all justified. Internal slack and communication has become much more shut down compared to what used to be a very open and communicative company. Increasingly it is only "Yes Men" saying anything out in the open. The business crowd that's usurped all controls of the company are playing a hard ball game of thrones with power. A bunch of engineering illiterate suits super super paranoid that people will figure out what they are and call them out on it are now sitting at the top terrified, trying to milk whatever nonsense they can for another stock payout or bit of nonsensical media attention.

Advice to Management

There is no saving the company unless it can go private and the pure business leadership is replaced with real engineering merit. Which isn't going to happen. The Capitalist Vultures won. They are picking Unity to the bone. Dissociate fast. Might still be worth it to work here for a year or two to get it on the resume, but it's no longer a long-term route for career growth in engineering, nor something to depend you own life or business on.

=====================================================================

Pros

- Met very intelligent, kind, and supportive people during my time here and this is honestly the highlight of my tenure - $0 out of pay-check for medical, dental, and vision insurance in the US - Has so much potential in its product portfolio including a partnership with Apple Vision Pro - Office life is fantastic and homey with tons of events and perks, if working in-office is what you prefer

Cons

- Anyone senior director and above is completely disconnected from the rest of the employees and has no intention to bridge that gap - ironSource acquisition has completely changed the company culture in a way that undermines the voices of anyone who is not an ironSource legacy employee (i.e. Unity and Tapjoy employees) - Very little respect for C-suite and that's no one's fault but theirs. Town Halls and All-Hands meetings are a joke - Keeps advertising itself as 'competitive' in the market yet a simple LinkedIn search reinforces the conclusion that Unity is severely underpaying its employees - Marketing organization is messy and borderline toxic in some areas

Advice to Management

The Unity I joined in 2020 was exciting and positive in all areas, especially its products. Within less than three years, that has changed dramatically and has disappointed me time and time again with its business decisions. Advice? Rather than prioritize padding the wallets of executives, listen to disgruntled, tenured employees who truly believe in Unity; those are the people who built the company -- not the billions of dollars spent on acquisitions and mergers.

===========================================================
Pros

- Amazing salary & benefits package - At least for my team, the most friendly, competent, and functional group of people I've ever worked with - Excellent company all-around with great products that are a blast to work on - Led by very competent leaders in seemingly all areas; John Riccitiello is an amazing CEO that is very engaged with people & approachable (he likes every-day employees to come to him to talk and ask question/suggest changes)

Cons

- Kept buying or merging with companies when we don't have infinite funds (Unity has not been profitable yet, but we are close), which seems to have led to mass layoffs when the economy stumbled right after these acquisitions - just feels like a lack of foresight - Eliminated or shelved a serious number of incredibly important projects after these acquisitions, ostensibly because there was not enough money to fund these projects - Extremely woke. The company often pushes intersectional identity politics onto employees. Certain people with certain identities are allowed to be outright racist to others in chat on the basis of "victimhood", where they are essentially given a pass for toxic behavior - The company seems to be putting a lot of resources towards these ideological initiatives at a time when we are suffering in the current economic climate

Advice to Management

Keep being awesome. But there is work to be done around fostering a less toxic work environment in some areas. Still, I've found a way to tune all that out so it isn't as distressing.

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Pros

You will enjoy Unity if you love corporate politics and big egos. If you enjoy useless meetings, you will also like it here, because they are constantly in a state of planning, and never reach the hard part - execution of the plan. If you don't like your team/manager, just wait 6 weeks and you'll probably re-org anyways and start the cycle all over again.

Cons

Self-important and yet totally incompetent middle management. I literally couldn't tell you one thing that my manager produced or stuck with for more than 3 weeks. Technology Org steeped in toxic, clique-y culture. Very little career growth, and it's based on who your manager is (gatekeeping). Totally siloed and operationally dysfunctional. Not interested in any new ideas or hurting anyone's feelings which become major blockers to innovation and progress. Their disjointed product/website strategy reflect what Unity looks like on the inside - teams & systems that don't talk to each other, massive amounts of duplicate work, data all over the place, engineers and egos dictating business decisions, lack of transparency, and the most impressive non-answer answers from leadership I've ever seen.

Advice to Management

How on earth does a company get away with 3 ROUNDS of layoffs in less than a year and not address their executive management while us peons are cast off by the hundreds? CEO claims to take "full responsibility" for layoffs, but disappears when things get tough and sends useless corp-speak emails that mean nothing. The rest of the C-suite is no better. Why you all continue to dig into your clearly unpopular standpoints instead of actually addressing the issues is baffling. And, where's the Board holding people accountable? I can't imagine how this is considered acceptable, effective leadership.

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Pros

Good work life balance Decent chance of stocks being worth something in 10 years if management doesnt completely run it into the ground Carries some weight on resumes due to it being a household name in game development

Cons

Management/C-Suite are completely disconnected from reality, none of them seem to have any technical chops to speak of, meaning that they are a bunch of sales/marketing folks trying to run a tech company, and failing at it badly in my opinion Employees literally despise them and make this known quite loudly, and the C-Suite instead of taking this feedback and making changes, chooses to lash out at employees who speak up, and have fired employees for calling the C-suite out for their out-of-touchness Morale is low and has been for years Inter-team dependencies and production processes are abysmal, ever seen that meme of how Microsoft teams are a bunch of people pointing weapons at each other? That's kinda what Unity is like right now

Advice to Management

Listen. To. Your. Employees. On. The. Ground. Stop blindly chasing tech trends, and find a north star that both inspires the company as a whole, and starts to pull all these disparate teams together. And fire JR, because that man has zero charisma and ability to inspire.

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Pros

There are some really good people at Unity who are really passionate and strive to do the right thing. The core product, the Unity Engine, has an enviable place in the gaming world (for now). There is a lot of goodwill that goes along with it.

Cons

The company continues to be at war with itself. Is it a gaming company? Is it a mobile company? Is it a US company? Is it an enterprise company? The management has no idea. They talk a big game, but the reality is little transparency, constant reorgs and blindingly foolish decisions. So many people are out of touch with the core game developers. They make plans and give presentations to think they are making the right decisions, but it's all for show.

Advice to Management

New blood is needed. Or at least a serious and honest return to the gaming roots of the company. And please get new, real leadership in marketing.

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That 'Ignore User' function is really effective! I'm used to them showing the presence of an ignored posts, but they are completely invisible.

BTW: Rereading the FAQ, the wording is a bit obnoxious:

It wasn't unclear but a completely different measure, as subsequent conversation reiterated ongoing installs would be counted as installs. Never were we told that the wording only meant the first engagement.

Clearly this FAQ is aimed at appeasing shareholders too, and management trying to save face. Hope a journalist gets to press them on this at some point.

 

You literally joined this forum days after the drama started.
Come off your high horse of knowing anything about Unity users, please.

 

Don't worry, most devs here ignores this user's responses. So is not like wasting anyone's time anymore.