Official Introducing Gigaya: Unity's upcoming sample game

Not being on the stock market does seem to make companies less prone to certain kinds of shenanigans. I get the feeling an alternate timeline publicly-traded Valve would never have released something like the Steam Deck.

 

Yeah but Epic is still massively funded by Tencent, which owns 40% of it.
Tim Sweeney is still the controlling shareholder but he only has 28% of shares.
So a future where Tencent ends taking control of Epic Games is not impossible.
I don't think they will as long as Fortnite is generating an infinite amount of cash, but who knows.

 

What I remember is when Valve released Half Life 2 and made Steam a requirement to play.
I remember the mega backlash it got from the community at a global scale and I remember how HATED Steam was when more and more games where being released on it, requiring an online connection to play single player games.
Of course devs released on Steam and payed a third of their income because of Steam's online anti-piracy measures, but nowadays they charge the same and don't even bother in fixing or improving their seriously compromised anti-piracy system.
I remembered that when there was all the backlash against the Epic Store, and people were defending Steam as if it was their puppy...

 

Not evil, but definitely not beyond working an angle. Even as a dev I still won't forgive the poaching they're still doing but just quietly now.

Oh nothings changed on that front, just look at Hitman 3's launch.

Hey at they very least you can say they learn lessons quick

Valve if anything understands PR.

 

No problem, i get your point.

 

Based on Wikipedia, Tim owns more than 50%:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Games
And this:
https://mobile.twitter.com/timsweeneyepic/status/1113963999287291905

 

I love wikipedia and I use it all the time, but I guess we can trust Forbes more on this subject. LOL

 

Well, yes, that's the current state of things.
But it's not impossible for Tencent to gain more power, given they already own 40% of Epic.
That's what usually happens when there is Tencent around.
I mean, it's the biggest gaming conglomerate in the world.
It would make sense for them to want to take control of Epic Games.

 

totally true, in fact i had forgotten some of those things

Ogre3D was until "recently" very powerful but also complex, T3d i think was unity's competitor, in fact it was free before unity and also very powerful, maybe better than unity on those days. I never tried Blitz3d. Godot is just a baby, a slow baby xD it has good things but not right now, even Godot looks like it is going to be like a mature version of a kid, The thing is Godot is "modern" and also totally 100% free and people like that even if development is painfully slow

T3D was and is

 

It may be now, but I paid 295 USD for it in 2008 (I just checked ) and then never ever got to use it, because it was the most confusing thing in the world and didn't have docs.
The developers made an actual physical book and then sold that book on amazon... for 60 USD!!
Of course, I also bought that because I'm a loser LOL
But once I read it and finally understood Torque, I ditched it for Unity instead.
I DON'T recommend Torque3D to anyone. EVER. CACA. NEIN.

 

Why this topic become about unreal and Tim Sweeney integrity?
Sorry @atomicjoe but you make a lot of claims without evidence.

Yes, we should trust the "estimates" of some journos, not Tim Sweeney himself.... And as far as I know, the lawsuit was about copying design decisions, not code. Copying code would have been easy to prove, but that lawsuit was dropped. But I agree about the important role of Unity in making game engines available to ordinary users for free. That's why I started using it (coming from 3d flash engines xD). Let's focus on bringing Unity to its former glory.

 

Things that i tried before Unity:
- Bunch of in house engines at Gameloft and Ubisoft
- Allegro 2d c++ library
- DarkSdk c++ engine
- DirectStudio3D
- Torque3D
- Bunch others that I don’t remember well
When I tried Unity, I instantly got hooked. Easy to get up and running, fast to pickup. Docs back in v1 and 2 was already great.
Saddly, Unity is no more easy to pick up right now. Fragmentation and engine is getting bigger and complex. Very hard for newcomers to jump in as before. And things will get a lot more worse once DOTS kicks in. Im specially hyped for DOTS but for the younger and fresh schooler, it won’t be easy.
In this regard Godot will overtake the number one spot for lightweight game engines that are fast and easy to pickup, slowly but steady over time.
Look at v4 features, looks way tasty.
A friend of mine that teaches game design in a school, already told me they ditched Unity in all their courses in favor of Godot. Why? Faster to pickup, open source, free and provides features to produce small games (the scope of school projects).
It will be a matter of time before Godot overtake Unity.

 

You haven't read the links it seems. Tim Sweeney has never told how much shares he has in the company. He doesn't have to either. So we can only estimate it. And I would expect Forbes to be in a better position to know this than you or me.
Also, that 60% of shares suposition was based on the assumption that he owns the rest of the company and it's never stated anywere.

What claims??
That it's possible that Tencent could absorb Epic in the future given they already own 40% of the company and they are the biggest gaming conglomerate in the world??
Seems to me that you simply don't like that idea and prefer to shoot the messenger.

The lawsuit was about whatever they could find to sue them, since they couldn't sue them for stealing their code because modifying the engine gives Epic automatic ownership on the new code.
The rest of what I have said about the case I found it reading the news at the time as I was VERY interested in the case.
It's public information, you can research it for yourself, but don't expect me to do this for you, especially when you didn't even read the links I put up there.

I still like your game and I can't wait to play it though

 

Also PUBG was very litigious not just toward EPIC they really wanted the monopoly on BR while not bein that innovative, even when EPIC could be accused of stealing the idea (which in fact is from dayz but with a time limits and from minecraft custom server inspired by the movie hunger game, and itself the concept date back from the japanese movie "battle royal"), they like innovate a lot, they innovated even when they didn't have to, and they are the sole reason people in corporation started thinking seriously about metaverse due to the collective interactive events fortnite was doing (like having week by week map change that imply a narrative, then having interactive objects changing in real time (the cube), then having massively playable real time events).

So is it stealing or is evolving the concept? Since PUBG itself was already iterative and derivative of many things before? Fornite play VERY differently from PUBG.

 

See they did it again Just look at the tool if is good for you at the moment when you need that tool. Pay the due fines if they are any, be correct, but don't trust the corporation, any corporation. I'm sure unreal will do same thing unity does if put in same position. There is no friendship, trust or fairness in how a corporation is run. They live in a world of sharks and they need to be sharks to succeed.

 

As for Epic, no-one should be in the business of trying to control other people's behaviour so I'll trot out the usual disclaimer: best try every engine and see what is suitable for your needs and experience. As for battle royale, well it's even named after the Japanese original films and books that predate it by a decade or more... so I couldn't care less about fortnite / pubg / etc. Sour grapes from billion dollar studios and really, best left for legal etc (who probably autonomously initiated it anyway).

I am extremely against trying to patent, copyright or trademark game mechanics. I've probably done a few first, before most of these big companies. Anyone developing games from 8 bit era would have stumbled upon many of these mechanics.

It is good for community to get a bit off topic at times though, lets off a bit of steam. Should probably get back to Gigaya / letting Unity know stuff I guess.

 

First, I'm not sure if some guy writing blog posts on Forbes, which is an open platform now, is a good source to draw conclusions from. Author doesn't look like some reputable insider that knows more than you or I do, if you check their bio. Equity shares also are not equal to voting power. It's a private company and you can't really do a napkin math and know who's in control. If the official info is that Tim Sweeney is in control and that Tencent cannot force him out, it's most likely true, unless they want to sell (because of money problems or whatever other reason). But this also applies to most other companies. If you are afraid of Tencent buying some company, it's not a huge difference if they own 40% of it now or 0%. They can go from 0 to 100% instantly if the company decides to sell.

Second, I wouldn't expect Epic employees supporting the transfer to Tencent and they're one of the most valuable assets of the company. Yeah, the engine is and userbase is important but I don't see people happily continuing to do their best work after such 180 turn. But who knows, things may change.

Finally, none of this matters. It's privately controlled company, if Tim decides to ride into the sunset, it's his right, but based on previous decades, I'd say company is in a good hands for now. You may dislike Epic for various reasons, but they did a lot of good for gamedev industry anyway. The anti-Google/Apple lawsuit resulted in both companies lowering their cut to 15% for the small indie devs which is absolutely massive change to profit margins for small game developers. Every mobile gamedev won here, regardless of the engine. And the exclusive releases, while terrible for gamers, got money flowing to gamedev studios who accepted timed exclusivity for a decent amount of cash.

> Epic just straight took the new code, slapped it into Fortnite and proceeded to shamelessly rip off the whole PUBG gameplay.

There are so many games in BR genre that you can't even count, some of them being much more similar to PUBG. Fortnite and PUBG are vastly different games with different focus areas. Yeah, both drop 100 players in the arena that need to loot some weapons but calling it a ripoff would probably mean that every single shooter today is Quake ripoff because there are players on the arena and they shoot other players with weapons. The entire lawsuit looked very frivolous and there is no real information if anything other than idea was "stolen". I think that it's better to leave it to lawyers and judges to decide what happened instead of trying to cancel a company because it fits the narrative.

Anyway, we're really off topic here. Epic had its good and bad moments but I don't think it's fair to bring only bad parts and unconfirmed allegations to the discussion.

 

AFAIK PUBG's issues with Epic became even before Fortnite: it seems they didn't sign a custom license before launch and when the game exploded in popularity they wanted to walk back on paying the 5% royalties.

 

Hey everyone, we earned a billion and don't want to lose a single crumb. Ridiculous isn't it. I even see it often from Unity's own customers: they worry about the price of pro when in that bracket, it becomes easily affordable.

 

Just as it often takes more than a dozen things going wrong before a plane comes down, it often takes getting a dozen or so things right, in an ideal combination, to make a game successful.

How many things did it look like Gigaya was getting right such that it might have ever been somewhat successful as a gaming experience?

I don't think this most important aspect of actually making a game was even a focus of the Gigaya project, despite being far and away the most crucial aspect of game design and development. Innovating, creating, experimenting with and ultimately refining the balances of rights that make for a compelling game experience extend far beyond the initial prototyping, launch, patch releases, DLC additions, updates and feature additions, too.

Unity's staff probably weren't going to experience this aspect of game design and development as they seemingly weren't even aware of its significance, let alone doing it.

Fortnight does and gets dozens of things right that ensure its success, and continues adding and balancing with every subsequent release.

On Battle Royal - this is arguably one of those USP features, but it's also true that Epic had experience with this kind of game type in Unreal 2003/4, wherein there was a mode known as Last Man Standing that could be easily modded (without additional downloads) to play almost exactly as we now think of Battle Royale.

Far earlier, there were mods that Epic were aware of for the original Unreal that offered all sorts of takes on these ideas of networked play.

But it might also be true that Fortnight got so many other things right that quite a few different types of game play may have seen them have as much or perhaps even more success.

 

The next time you're experimenting with a new aspect of your game's design, revisit these thoughts, please.

 

Yes, you did. Misunderstand.

 

Have ya played a Unity example project? Most of them don't work out of the box, require some dependency you don't really want, and have plentiful bugs that make whatever they were showcasing kinda pointless. The only halfway decent one that functioned was the crowd-developed one Chop Chop.

It's much more useful to just go through the source code in the repository and find golden nuggets of wisdom that you can use in your own project.

 

i liked the Third Person Playground project but i did have to convert the project to use Built-in instead of URP. at the time i didn't realize that A. there's no Standard shader in URP at all and B. URP and Built-in are completely incompatible with each other. switch over to URP and all Built-in looks magenta, switch to Built-in and all the URP shaders are borked.

however the character actions are mostly pretty smooth - i'm using it for my YouTube tutorials on audio scripting in Unity.

 

Exactly. Right now, it feels like Unity is aligning toward hypercasual mobile games while UE5 is aligning more toward large open world PC/console games. Neither company is trying to actively screw anybody, though.

 

Unity has a material converter that converts default Buld-In materials to default URP materials.
Also the Unitys Starter Assets Third Person Controller was absolutely solid. I for example pimped the controller a bit to use it in this WebGL demo.
The sad part about all this is, that in addition to the Gigaya team, the lead developer of the Starter Assets, @bronsonzgeb has left Unity as well according to Say hello to the new Starter Asset packages.

 

Oh I was confused for a minute. You said "left Unity as well" when meaning "got fired without warning while on a break".

 

jajajaja sad but Torque was very powerful, in fact it was the only game engine where you could go interior and big exteriors without loading scenes, i managed to do some little things in t3d

Exactly + for me Unity was like the black sheep (at least for me) they were growing faster and putting nice things and demos online, i remember some demos from unity 3, sadly is not the same this latest years

i agree...

maybe in +8 years, godot v4 does not look very great in my opinion

That is also true, but in the end it was going to be good for all of us

 

In the meantime Epic invests in Ex-Lumberyard-Cryengine-fork open source engine

Wonder what their game is here.

 

Even if you pretend Gigaya was no use for Unity internally or for us indie devs, it's cancellation has been a PR disaster.

Even if your focus is on other industries, you'd think that you'd still need to attract the next generation of developers?. Epic are consistently putting out high quality demo/sample projects and detailed videos on their YouTube page. Unity seem to have fired anyone who makes learning materials and have put out very few tutorials in the last year. Their latest video is about skyscraper architects and the comments are just about Gigaya.

No newbie starting is going to see all this and pick Unity over UE5.

John Riccitello's goal was to basically make as many acquisitions as possible in order to pump the stock price, which would eventually make himself richer. If Unity fails, he wont care, he'll just walk away with millions anyway.

What I don't understand is why more Unity employees aren't saying or doing anything about this.

 

Come on Guys, Unreal release real live examples routinely. I thought Gigaya was going to level Unity back up.

 

They are afraid that if they speak out they will be fired. Which is actually quite true. They will get fired. And will most likely prevent any of them finding jobs easily in the industry after that. Corporate owners don't like people that take initiative in defending their rights and their coworkers rights against the company ownership.

Also, don't for one second think the people fired recently are different from those that remain. They have no moral right to ask the ones that remain to defend them, because they didn't do it themselves when they were on the payroll. This is the harsh truth and I will not sugar coating this.

And for those that remain. The troubles that unity had with the ads not having enough conversion because of google and apple changing how you can access the user data, that trouble will not magically fix it itself just by changing the code the ads work with. The access to the core user data, that is the real issue, and since is gone, is gone. Six moths from now, or one year, there will not be the expected revenue and you guessed, the first thing they will cut is workforce.

At least unreal got itself a game marketplace. If and when the fortnite will die down they will have some revenue out of selling games. unity has nothing like that. With the adds going down, with the engine broken, having took debt for this relaunch, uh boy, this doesn't look good at all.

 

I expect the next round of layoffs will happen preemptively, before a revenue miss announcement, and be more significant. Kind of like a show of intent, to stock holders and potential lenders.

They still need to borrow more money, and can't sell shares to do it, as the merger includes a deal for share buy backs.

Anything that's non-essential could get discarded in this process, including DOTS/ECS and the SRP approach.

Or the CTO could make a play to takeover, as a founder, if there's enough loss of goodwill of Unity between now and then.

He's been oddly quiet.

 

>cancel gigaya
>merged with ironSource

Damn.
I am very disappointed that I have spent the last 6 years for Unity
Now there is a serious question about choosing another engine
And I'm doing two projects on unity, and what do I do now, start all over again?
I am very glad that I was dissuaded from buying a pro license for several years for my team..

So, it looks like at this rate, CEO of Unity Technologies will get a warm place in Epic Games, and Phil Spencer will buy Unity for a five coins.

 

While I can appreciate the overall post of yours, and your attempts to be frank with us, I have to say that this bit can easily read as 'The official solution is to be big enough to get Unity to personally come help you finish your game.'

 

Finish your projects and re-evaluate your options by them. But yeah, Unity future looks uncertain rn. Unity looks like those companies that will do anything to survive financial issues. Having strong core products is not enough when you got a bunch of greedy folks at the top of the company. This is a huge problem with public traded companies that tries to growth quick.

 

Nah. Unity is still great tool for making games. Just don't rely on promised features. If Unity provides what you need, you don't have to worry. Just continue making games. Problem emerges when you wait for something new like dx12 or new tools. If you're worried about outside perception, I hurry to calm your nerves - most people don't give a damn. They don't care about engines, developers and game development drama. Give them interesting games that work well and they'll be happy

 

I don't know if it's solvable within 10 years, or if it should be (source is on github, people can compile Unity themselves). Such an engineering effort is always going to run counter to keeping up to date with the rate of progress. Right now, hybrid renderer 2 in DOTS is not state of the art, HDRP has some fairly cheap near term additions like water and sky, but they are not integrated and will take time. Then there's general DOTS, and all the tooling that still needs. Then there's all the other stuff. Point being is that trying to get all that continually developed without bleeding customers to Timmy's Latest Shiny is going to be nigh on impossible while refactoring for available source code. It will likely not happen and people will have to eventually be OK with just a DOTS layer of solid source code.

 

As much as im hyped for DOTS, Im not really counting on it to be released anytime soon. We have two pitchs here and no one took into account having DOTS.
I went to see few publishers for our pitches and most of them where asking Unreal 5, no loading, X and Y feature of the PS5, things that I'm not sure is possible with Unity or extremely tedious to put out well, like constant level streaming without spikes (currently impossible on heavy levels), in Unreal many of those features where solved ages ago.
We also saw others that didn't care much about the engine of choice but their funding where short or limited to our team. The ones with tons of cash, ready to throw money at your face want the bigger engine.

 

Problem for DOTS 1.0 is... you can learn that or you can give up and learn C++. I think managed C++ is easier than Entities / DOTS, chiefly because you have an internet full of solutions, while Entities is this weird thing and a lot of typical ways to do things have to be reinvented.

For mainstream users of Unity not solving highly specific problems, Entities will be avoided until all the missing systems gameobject Unity enjoys are done for it.

 

So for those of us who can't afford these consulting services, is there is some "best practices" or tips and tricks guide for game developers that was gleaned from Subnautica, or any other past consultations? If so, are such things already incorporated into Unity's user manual? Or can we see it via elsewhere? This question isn't necessarily personally directed at you, I'm just replying because your post made me think of it.

 

In case nobody has reported this yet, let me mention that "Small/empty project take a smaller-than-eternity-but-still-absurd amount of time to open" in recent versions.

 

There's also the small matter of Unity 1.0 features of recent memory being perhaps more akin to a 0.1 version than a full release, and often being in dire need of a rethink. LWRP being a prime example.

In the case of DOTS 1.x updates/progress, this is a compounding issue because so many crucial systems and sub-systems are intended to be built upon its benefits to "sell" the story of Unity's future relevance and candidacy as an engine of tomorrow.

This might now be seen as a bridge too far, given that they're seemingly pivoting to Mobile, and part of the reason Gigaya was considered something to write off.

I fear that your somewhat unvoiced fears of an equivocation on quality as a driver of Unity's future goals is quite indicative of a real option they're considering.

Burst and Jobs are basically complete. It's the ECS of DOTS that's lagging, along with any all subsystems and systems that are intended to be added and built to gain from it and DOTS as a whole. Ricci might be looking down that time frame of works and thinking "we don't have that kind of time, anymore, and the promise and potential it holds no longer needs to be the bait to drive usage of our engine."

They could revert to finding cheap and easy gains with Jobs and Burst support and integration within/around existing systems - as this would be ideal for modern Mobile, and the fastest way to a somewhat claimable finished state of modernisation of the engine.

The crucial consideration will be how many current game projects (of significance to Unity's revenue) will be dropped if the grand vision of ECS is abandoned, and how much goodwill lost and negativity added, and how well can that be balanced by the performance gains of using Burst and Jobification of existing and near ready systems.

The other wildcard, and possibly saviour for Unity, is if they're thinking they can thrive from being a publisher after their merger with IronSource, they can open source the engine and restore some kind of hope in things getting done well, to a controllable schedule for those able to benefit from the world sourcing of fixes and updates to older versions of the engine.

At this point, with the financial situation sufficiently extreme that big things have to happen, I think the cancellation of the community's last great hope (Gigaya) is only the beginning of the scope of things Ricci is willing to do. Or he might have already checked out. He doesn't seem to have many shares left.

 

I don't think John has the power to do that

 

He's empowered by early investors. Read the IPO documentation. There's almost nothing he can't do with Unity, and he's almost un-fireable whilst those early investors (still the most signifiant controlling shareholders) think he's the man they'd like executing their plans.

 

That's almost exactly what he's probably considering doing. Or even more.