Official Introducing Gigaya: Unity's upcoming sample game

Oh, you mean that thing people have to do when they release a game?

Goodness!

That was the point! How did you not see that coming? How did you not see that coming ONE MONTH ago with all the announcements made?

Why would anyone trust any endeavor when unity just gave up when it got to the hard part. The part everyone has to do when they make a full release, the part people wanted Unity to experience. Not just glance at and go "nah".

If you're so damn concerned about return on investment maybe make a game you sell next time jesus...

EDIT: I agree with hippo fulfill one promise and just release the source. At least trust your community to pick up the slack.

 

Are you guys going out of business? Every press release I've seen recently makes me think you are and that's very concerning. I don't want to switch to another engine this far along in development, but I'm feeling like you're going to fail as a business right when I need you most.

 

Please reconsider. Thats all I can say at this moment,
Keep making a game and make it run on latest unity version over the years, to know the pain points.

 

I'm fairly sure there is nothing clearer in this message. We have mis-identified what Unity is now.

This is not necessarily bad but it has become quite clear?

 

It's an ad delivery "mobile games" generator.

 

It's much worse. Look at the behaviour of apps lifecycle and who makes them.

It effectively turns all developers using Unity with ads into Uber style staff that appear to be working for themselves but are really just a resource that generates more content for Unity's real customers: the people who view ads in your apps.

 

You have no clue what is right for your own product anymore.

Its disappointing as that we as creators have had to watch years of tearing down what you had.

Year after year the frustration with this company has spread far into the Unity community.

I think to turn around and say Gigaya is not to be released shows a lack of care or understanding. The game you were making meant so much more to us than Unity understands.

What I would recommend is releasing the project in it's current state or even if we cannot get that, make a blog post on what went right, what went wrong, tell us the good and bad UNITY THEMSELVES experienced while working on this.

This is the final straw for the trust a lot of people had. Its utterly disappointing.

 

Final straw of trust is a good way to describe it.

My long term plans (like 5 years out) never even considered switching engines, even though my publisher is pushing for it. Like that's the worst thing I could possibly do as a developer is have to reinvent the wheel again.

But now I feel forced to consider it. And I'm normally a big Unity defender.

 

Well, Unity is still an excellent engine. But to make the most of it financially you should probably lean hard into small mobile apps which don't take much effort but feel high quality. It should be separate from video, or emotional game development.

So as such what Unity is doing, is not bad if you are in that space. It's just apparently not enough elsewhere like high end graphics and performance, or tooling. People want more for their passion projects it seems.

 

I feel like it was only yesterday that we were just saying how large of a gesture of good faith we needed from Unity.

Now I’m no artist, but if I was going to draw the complete opposite of whatever that would have looked like… I think this would be it.

Yikes.

 

The top 1 unity complaint is "Unity is not making games with their own engine and not seeing the issues"

Cancelling the only Project in years with the notion of "Not worth the effort" is about the worst signal to send to these criticisms.

 

This is ridicolous. You just made the biggest mistake ever. Engine is broken and getting worse from time to time, and yo uclose the unique team that could make things better.Good job guys. Hard to come back from this disaster.

 

What is going on with Unity? Awful business decisions lately. This looked so promising and cancelled few months later lol

 

Gigaya now serves as a warning to all: don't try to ship a large projects with Unity.

Even Unity can't do it.


Unity Technologies, you gotta start dogfooding your tech for real again.

 

I mean, it has been the case for years now, but I think this is the moment we should all realise "Unity's tech" is ads.

 

A thousand times this.

Even midsize Projects drown in asset database problems, long and unnecessary compiles, and the god awful domain reloads from 2008.

I shipped over 30 games professionally, around 10+ with unity, plus 40 game jam entries... It is getting worse and worse and slower and slower to just WORK within Unity.

I feel 90% of recent performance improvements were theoretical or for very lopsided workloads, not actual game dev workflows. Many changes made stuff way worse, I am facing full Interface freezing 10+ second domain reloads in a sub 10k sLoC codebase when I look at a script asset funny. If only Unity could assemble a team to make a small to midsize game... Oh wait.

 

For me why I use unity is platform versatility (my monetization and marketing is based on this, and its very successful), but at the same time technology needs to improve and tools need to improve along side more ambitious projects over time.

The AAA games of today are the indie games of tomorrow.

And this move makes me question if that improvement will really come.

Unity being slow and having bureaucracy issues, that's fixable, I can deal with it. But if the goals of Unity aren't with games and they don't understand the need for and don't seem to invest in marketable features and technology for a game release. At the very least don't invest enough that these features come out in a timely manner (TAA still isn't in URP for 2022? That feature will take a WHOLE nother year? No DLSS, no FSR 2.0, no HDR.)

I can't expect these issues to improve. Gigaya wouldn't have brought these features, I know that, but it was a sign Unity considered improving its game development offering important enough to do such a big undertaking.

But now they've given up half way cause it was too costly. It's not worth seeing through even if the benefits were clear.

 

This is literally the part where Unity projects ALWAYS have problems when it comes to actually putting out finished games. As the saying goes, the first 90% is easy, then the second 90% is hard...

It feels like what you are saying is "We looked at how hard it is to actually finish a game with Unity and thank goodness we don't actually need to publish it because whew, that was scary." What kind of message is that sending to people you are theoretically attempting to encourage to finish projects?

 

There is no legitimate reason for not quietly releasing this on github with a massive disclaimer about how it's unfinished etc. Can only assume staff have been ordered not to do this because they are pivoting from being a game engine company to a game ads and services company.

If any Unity Legends out there want to accidently release the project to a torrent site they would indeed become even more legendary.

And why isn't anyone talking about getting rid of John Riccitiello? EA did after the stock tanked. The same thing is happening at Unity...

 

My custom GPT3 model summarize it into this:

"The Gigaya project has been cancelled, and the team has decided to focus on other areas. The project was helpful in terms of product feedback and learning resources, but it was not feasible to continue developing it."

 

Also I want to point out this is simply not true.

What is the value of testing how easy it is to move to new LTS Unity versions? Adapt to new rendering features or performance improvements to an already finished game? When URP finally gets DLSS how will Gigaya fare post release? What about people who discover their game performs worse on a new version like some people say about 2019 vs 2021. How can you test that otherwise?

What is the value of releasing Gigaya on steam and testing updating the game and adding fixes or features? Avoiding corrupted save data and other issues that are common.

I do not believe unity could legitimately value the post release information. Let alone the value of what they would learn polishing the game up to release.

And besides the gigaya project, think of the articles/videos on what the developers learned through the whole thing? You just fired those people, now they can't tell their stories and give their advice under the unity umbrella.

None of that would be worth it?

 

I've stuck with Unity for 10 years and cancelling Gigaya is, to me, the stupidest, most short-sighted decision I've ever seen come out of you guys. You had the chance to restore your community's confidence in your company. We were all excited to see Unity actually do something really right for once- not just promises, but there seemed to be actual evidence of you doing something awesome, productive, and beneficial to everyone. Now you broke that tentative trust and left your community even less trustful of you than before.

All this for what, to save a few bucks on a project that was almost finished?

Your shareholders will not be happy when all your users leave.

 

It's true for them because they don't really care about that. The main ad consumers are small hyper-casual games with a lifetime of 2-4 weeks. DLSS is not even a factor in that market.

 

I think what Leonhard is really saying is not his opinion, just fact... that is unfortunately the rationale of those that make decisions. It's a hard nut to crack because it's purely maths and the numbers don't lie.

So it has to be demonstrated to Unity that having creative people happy is essential to keep good footfall, good amount of developers that can contribute to ad products and so on.

So Unity's management and money departments need to understand the real value of having the creatives, mavericks and so forth. Apple did.

 

A sad day for Unity. Though i applaud them for coming out here and at least letting us know whats going on (thank you), the news wasnt good at all, and has hurt the community you rely on. You cant blame us for feeling dissed, upset, left out, and not cared about. It seems to me that you are dumping everything and going fully into the mobile/advertising market. Honestly i cant say if that would be a fail or not, but your killing the rest of us.

Alot of us now have to question what to do next. I love Unity, and loved the concept of Gigaya like i did BOTD, and what it meant to us all, but thats now crushed. Us users dont have any control with the buisness end of things, and we have been crying for more communication, only to fall on deaf ears. Sorry to say this but what i hear and see is "we are concentrating on mobile/advertising, the rest of you are on your own". Not what we expected...

 

Just as a reminder, you may want to remove the Gigaya clips from your homepage since the project was S***canned and vaulted, never-to-be-seen by the userbase.

 

Actually, there is a good reason, though you won't like it. Their working copy of Gigaya uses third party assets that aren't licensed for redistribution, and they'd need to have someone remove those before release.

 

Then this five minute task can be done by any well-meaning Unity staff member... assuming permission is granted.

 

Really, though, releasing 'what they have' would remove any plausible deniability as to just how viable the project was. Their ideal scenario is presumably for everyone(that they care about) to quietly forget that it ever existed.

 

they will not do that. same as how they will keep online the images and videos for the other project they promised they will released. the one with the realistic woman

 

Personally, I hope not. As I (and everyone else who was on the team) rely on showing work done (even not finished) in the 'recent project' category of our portfolios

 

Holy S***, I'm not used to defending Unity but I guess i'll just play devil's advocate really quick.

Making a good game is HARD, triple A studios stumble focusing all their resources on established IP with established rulesets and existing fanbases.

BEST CASE SCENARIO: Gigaya is released and is a pretty decent platformer that people think is pretty cool. It doesn't radically change the engine, it doesn't blow up unity and show it is capable of making great games, there are already hundreds of great games that do that.

WORST CASE SCENARIO: It takes longer to make than expected as most all games do, enters development hell, and it becomes a joke that even Unity can't make a good Unity game. Not anyone's fault, that's just fookin' gamedev.

Frankly, that's a S***ty bet to take.

Layoffs are always a touchy subject. Were hard working, talented people let go? Yeah, that happens in this crazy world. But sometimes people are let go who aren't really adding value to the company, some of 'em are even down right lazy, burned out, or creating an environment that doesn't translate to positive progress for the company. I haven't seen any resources that details who was let go and why, but you're always going to get people acting as if everyone let go was the greatest most important person ever and that's rarely the case, no offense to anyone posting or reading this thread, everyone I've engaged with here on the forum has been a knowledgeable professional.

No one likes to see people lose their livelihood, but sometimes difficult decisions need to be made. Here's hoping Unity is getting its act together and this isn't a sign of further degradation and lunacy.

 

It won't be released, they announced it won't get released. Did you miss what has happened? They fired most (all?) of the team working on it, including people posting here right now in this thread which I guess you just indirectly called lazy, which is a really S***ty thing to do.

 

No it didn't. If you didn't actually ship it, ideally on multiple platforms, it really really didn't. You come across as naïve for even thinking otherwise. Like a college student who took a few classes and thinks you know the real world.

 

This is the longest streak of bad news, bad decisions, and ignoring customer necessities that I have ever witnessed here, and I'm ready to believe we're just halfway, I fear of what will happen in the next weeks. I'm finally tired of defending this company, and after twelve years working with this engine, for the very first time, I'm considering if I should move elsewhere after my current project. It kinda hurts, I love this engine and I know it like my pockets- but right now this doesn't seem like a solid ground anymore. It's sinking under our feet.

 

Just a headsup to please not take it out directly at Leonhard as he was ultimately not the person that made this decision.

 

Turn this project into a community effort, I'll dedicate my free time working on it.

As for the licensing of certain assets that might be used in the project, those CAN be stripped off completely, and many young talented artists that would like to contribute can work replacing those assets.

 

I appologize to the team if any of you felt slighted, as I stated in my post I have a great deal of respect for the presence I saw here in the forum and in various promotional material for the project. I can see how my post is a bit cold at a time like this, my apologies. Acid Arrow, don't put words in my mouth.

 

Unity lost my faith in their "sample" projects few years ago. They are used mostly for marketing, then sometimes released and forgotten. Another example of how whoever is in charge of Unity have no idea what they're doing.

When watching any sample trailer remember that it's only a nice video probably completely irrelevant with your work and Unity's future.

 

https://twitter.com/garrynewman/status/1547698491681411073?cxt=HHwWgsCggYDlw_oqAAAA

 

the ultimate proof that unity in current state is a mess and not ready for game production as any developer hoped ,

 

Well still the only relevant engine I can afford, It's time I stop learning and start the portfolio, I'm depressed enough it's not worth making a "dream project" no matter how planned and rational it is.

 

This is disappointing news. The FPS project (made by the same team?) contained some absolutely essential lessons for Unity development; particularly when it came to configuring projects for multiple types of builds on the same platform. Unity, out of the box, doesn't really have the tools necessary to make cross-platform development easy (and I say this having shipped a commercial project on Xbox One, PS4, Switch, PC, macOS, tvOS, and iOS). I'm also disappointed because recent Unity releases have had issues that would have been caught by an internal team using their tools. For example: projects containing Visual Scripting could not be built from the command line, meaning games that used it couldn't have automated builds for a long time. It took them nearly a year to fix this. Also, they recently introduced rules to Visual Scripting that blocked the auto-import of nodes from assemblies that had editor dependencies... but then they left editor dependencies in all of their run-time libraries, so nothing referencing Unity's own run-time libraries will auto-import nodes. Their own recommended fix from QA is to install an alpha version of visual scripting that is almost a year old, whose development has been cancelled until possibly Unity 2023.

I was a tools developer before I was on the gameplay side, and I learned that you can't design tools purely on speculation, imagination, and a list of user requirements. They need real users to test them. People need to be able to use them for real tasks, and they need to work when it matters, otherwise they stop using them.

 

Guys, lets not resort to bashing each other, i love you guys. We are all in this together. Lets face facts. Gigaya will NEVER be released in any form (sad as that may be). Is this news really stopping your projects?, no. Its effected your feelings towards Unity, and its actions, im with you on that. It IS a concern for the future, but that is out of our hands. Lets all admit it, Unity is one of the best game engines available, with the asset stores catalog, its insanely great, and saves us all alot of time with our projects.

But you can still complete your current projects, and use any version of Unity you like (without the newly/future suggested changes to come). THEN you can decide to stay or leave. Even i have my doubts of doing so, so do we all.

We all placed faith in Gigaya, and i have to say @Andy-Touch I read your post on the controller, and im very impressed, god bless you, and your efforts. Come on guys, we have no control over what happens.. we are just left to deal with it.

I for one use multiple game engines (in-house, Unity, UE, and play with Flax/CryEngine), you are never left without options. You do you. What ever is best for you and your project. Lets not argue between ourselves over this, opinions are like assholes, everyone has one, lol. Love you all, just do whats best for you and progress...

 

Nah.

 

The real issue is how the words coming from the people making the decisions demonstrate really worrying trends. Obviously, many people would have liked Gigaya to succeed but it is the deeper problems that are revealed in the cracks that need to be examined.

 

Some of the accounts posting about this news are around 10+ years old. People who have been around this engine, promoting it, making assets, posting about bugs, helping others for 10 years.

And even those people are jaded by this news. And that's just on this site, imagine the sentiment across the internet.

That is a SERIOUS problem. And Unity should recognize that and recognize it won't just affect games, it will in the long term, affect other areas too. Much like other things, word of mouth and general sentiment is as a major contributor to long term viability.

Positive sentiment makes it resilient, negative sentiment makes even positive moves much less effective than they should be. It's like how when a bad game release (Avengers) harms a good game release later (Guardians of the Galaxy).

It's clear Unity is chasing film, architecture, ads, and all these things. But if the general sentiment is negative towards Unity will those companies choose Unity over something with a much more universally positive sentiment like Unreal?

What happens to Unity if third party support starts to wane?

 

They still have some massive inertia before they fall though, if they ever do. They are fine for now, only we aren't.

 

I chose Unity because many of the developers around me were using it and I knew that I would have experienced devs that I could ask for help (also I had a bad experience with an early version of UE3). Now more of those devs are experimenting in Unreal 4/5. I like Unity and would like it more if it was stable. I also have a small business that uses seven Pro licenses, invests time and money in training, and dev resources in custom tech, tool and pipeline development. The long-term viability of Unity is an important issue for me because those investments pay dividends in future projects. As a business owner, looking at Unity's course over the last few years, it would be irresponsible of me to ignore alternatives. If Unity's engine-agnostic online services become their priority, and they continue to make cuts to non-mobile features, then the engine may become difficult to use for PC and console development in the future. I don't think this will happen soon, but we need to start making contingency plans. (And that sucks because I'd rather just be working on games!)

 

Get some advisors, fire someone.. this streak of self-sabotaging can't be unplanned.. what's going on ?

COMMUNICATE!

The only thing keeping me here is Third Party services such as Photon with their latest sdk Fusion.. you've got a sleek workflow I don't want to leave.

Why do we still defend something that keeps giving up on itself? Whoever is running this circus should be legally obligated to leave IMO.