Official Introducing Gigaya: Unity's upcoming sample game

Not finishing Gigaya is obviously disappointing and feels like a massively missed opportunity. I disagree that the required optimization & cleanup would not have been worth it when it comes to the game itself. There are plently of things to learn there for Unity, and it would have been great to have a stable finished game for the unity engine developers to work with as a good resource. They would have been able to test & implement new features that are being worked on with an actual real-life baseline.

As a resource for "learning materials" I'm a bit more sceptical. Unity samples generally are a good starting point for specific features (shoutout to boss room!) but that is because they are quite focused on showing off specific features of the engine, rather than attempt to make a real game, of which I'm not sure what to learn from that.

Atm I can only imagine there might be a few "hidden gems" of the engine, rather than best practices/explainers on how a project should be structured. A finished game generally also has a lot of specialized features & tools that aren't portable to other games unless specifically developed as such. In that case it could just be a sample project instead? That said, we haven't seen the project, and just for those "hidden gems" its probably still worth just releasing the project in whatever state it is in. (or going back to the stable version, you have that for the milestones you had to deliver during production... right? )

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With all the money Unity is investing, an additional year with a team of 10-15 really shouldn't have been a problem. Which brings me to another point, possibly something many devs will disagree with:

In order for indie games to continue to be a thing for Unity on PC & Console, the way unity earns its money has to change to be based on revenue share instead of (only?) a monthly fee.

The current model of a monthly fee means that Unity isn't earning a lot of money on these types of games. Succesful games make a whole lot more than those monthly fees cost. As a result, Unity has no financial incentive to spend more money on improving the engine on that side. At the same time, Mobile is doing great, and creating "services" like Unity Ads, Collaborate / PlasticSCM etc. are a potential additional revenue source. Then there is the whole BIM / RT3D / VR area filled with companies ready to throw money your way on the short term, lets get those in too!

It feels like Unity is afraid to take this step in fear of losing developers that make the PC/Console games as a result of adding the revenue share, but those developers are already more and more likely to leave anyway with DOTS, SRP, engine stability etc. taking such a long time paired with Unitys apparent focus on Mobile, RT3D, Ads and nuking the Gigaya project.

Which is a wasted opportunity for Unity imo, as well as a shame for me. I don't (want to?) make mobile games, especially not one containing Ads. I want to make cool games, and I've been waiting for proper HDR support for over 5 years now...

ps writing this post took longer than I care to admit

 

xD

 

Nah, have felt that way for a while myself. Incentives mean everything, so being ad-reliant to this point shouldn't make any of this surprising (though it is still disappointing). If the incentive is 'share in your success if you monetize with ads!' rather than 'share in your success, regardless of how you monetize (maybe that means ads)!', your are more prone to the trap there is now.

 

Depends on what you do with it

currently its greatest drawback in my opinion is the lack of a proper animation system in DOTS even the bare bones
maybe it's entirely something else for you but for me it's because my project that I'm currently working on is hindered due to the need of an animation system that supports 100+ on screen characters "GPU Instancing Limits Animations To Pre Baked Clips". Plus the current version has Many Other Limitations But It Has Come A Long Way and i don't think and certainly do not want them to drop it after all they did and all the way they've come

 

For as long as it has existed, game devs have praised Unity as a great prototyping engine. The biggest weaknesses are hardening and shipping a game - particularly on multiple platforms. The Unreal comparisons, where they’ve developed and shipped multiple games, seemed to give them an edge in some areas. Gigaya was a chance to show Unity developers a real world game development process from start to finish, sharing the entire story along the way. Instead, we got a front row view of poor management and poor development decisions along with confirmation that actually finishing a project in Unity is very hard.

Sugar coating this cancellation with “we learned a lot” doesn’t cover up the “it’s a lot of work to clean our code, optimize the game and make everything stable enough to maintain through engine upgrades.” Unity has talked to and even hired many developers that have shipped games with Unity and surely have provided valuable feedback about the process. Surely some of that feedback has led to valuable fixes, but there’s still so much that needs work. The confession that they see more work than it is deemed worth doing to finish this game is very telling. The fact that they use this as some kind of validation to not go through those final processes baffling to me.

I’ve released 15+ Unity games on nearly that many platforms. I’ve made a successful business out of taking completed Unity games and optimizing and finishing and publishing them on multiple platforms. I can definitely vouch for the fact that it’s not glamorous work, but it is important work. It needs to be iterated on and improved upon.

This project was announced just over 100 days ago and with big fanfare it was stated "By having the project go through the full journey from concept to release, we’re finding new perspective on the development process and identifying strengths and weaknesses." The people that made the decision to cancel this now have done a great disservice to Unity and Unity developers. We are the Unity evangelists - and we are not happy with this decision.

I feel terrible for the people you made write this statement up and this guy who had to post it. I'm not saying this to troll - but this public statement is 100% pure garbage. It goes against the stated purposes that Unity announced just a few months back. I am sad to see this messaging shared by a company that so many developers depend on for insight and knowledge.

 

to put it bluntly this decision wasn't going to be made if unity had a proper revenue generating system like unreal revenue share system instead they opted for the subscription system which to be fair had its bright side as it didn't force anyone to share their hard earned money up until a certain point

and to count the games released that saw success (Ori, Escape From Tarkov, Kerbal Space, FireWatch) And Probably Many more that i haven't even heard of

Unity should have put more effort into it's image in the games market by having these games represent the name unity to some extend instead of the thousand trashy asset flip games on steam that show the unity logo when they launch, that would have helped bring more users and eventually more games and more revenue through Ad & non Ad means


but anyway what happened can't be reversed but at least they should look at it from this perspective in the future but then again i'm but a mere guy behind a keyboard ranting ...

 

If I got that right, this is exactly what they currently are working on and is apparently even the bottleneck that slows down some other internal tasks as well.
So it will come. Likely in v 1.0 which was promised to the end of the year.

 

i really got to thank you for these news

if this is the case then i guess it wont be long probably the next 4 to 5 months

 

I have learned to completely ignore anything that is not ALREADY in Unity as if it would never come.
Hell, even what is already there has constant issues, bugs and regressions!

 

DOTS animation will not be in 1.0. Developers stated it's planned sometime after 1.0 release.

 

"sometime" is the key world here LOL

 

we can come up with something even if bare minimum functionality

it's just that the API isn't stable yet

 

It's simple, what they learned is that the Unity engine isn't good for completing polished games so they are pivoting away from that.

I don't think they could be more clear.

 

@LeonhardP Thank you for keeping us informed and sorry that you are getting the brunt of negative feedback about this disappointing decision. Something I'm not sure the higher-ups have considered enough is where are future Unity developers going to come from?

I have been a long time advocate of teaching Unity at a university, but lately the engine has become hard for new users to pick up. I used to be able to give a research assistant a simple task, and they could quickly Google a resource to explain how to do X. The past few years I've not been able to do that because the assets, tutorials and dev environment has become so fragmented nothing seems to work for them. Gigaya was going to be at least one example that I could send them to where 'everything works' and it was released and fully documented.

TBH, I don't make games. I make research apps, museum exhibitions and AR for health and science. But, I could use games as a 'lure' to get students interested in investing time to learn Unity because at some point they could make a game if they wanted to. Frankly, because of the problems mentioned above, that argument no longer works. That ship has sailed and our new game program will not be using Unity.

Students have big dreams, they join our animation program because they want to make 'Wall•e'. They'll tolerate the horror of learning UV mapping if it means they might be able to. Students do not dream of designing a 'compulsion loop' to be 'tuned to an hour, rather than two minutes', which is something that's apparently important for monetization (frankly, I would have lived a happy life never having known that is a thing).

If Unity does not court/attract game developers and is simply an engine built to serve an ad platform, where are your new users going to come from? What can I point them to that says "it's worth learning Unity because you can make THIS?' Do mobile monetization companies even need a game engine or can they just pick from a variety of pre-made templates and put a new skin on them?

It seems really short-sighted to cut this team and what must have been a very minor budget item in the scheme of things. Not sure how you all will recover from this, but hopefully you'll make some kind of effort to show that game development is something that Unity is interested in.

 

I mean they could just build a great engine agnostic ad platform and cut the editor completely.

 

Just finish up your games, continue to support them, don't go forgetting your unity knowledge, but the landscape is changing. You have extremely promising open source engines who wont do an IPO and sell there souls, maybe it's time to start getting familiar with them while they are growing, and grow with them. See: Godot and stride

 

Incredibly disappointing to say the least. You have good people there and had a clear chance to finally establish credibility with the community that actually cares about finishing & shipping games.

 

Honestly, that's the only take away of this whole situation.

I, too, have been in denial for a long time, thinking that somehow, someday, Unity would backtrack and go back to the Unity I loved. But let's be honest with ourselves here: all these decisions were not "mistakes", they were intentional and they will keep coming.
The direction is set and it will not change.

Key engine developers have left the company and it very much looks like there is no pilot in the cockpit.
New arriving developers will never have the knowledge nor the authority to deeply affect the engine structure (without breaking everything), so they will just build add-ons around it, and this add-ons will never be 100% finished or polished because the devs will either be reassigned to another new feature that marketing can showcase or leave for a better job somewhere else.

Unity is now a shell of what it once was (or at least what it wanted to be).
I'm positive it will survive in a zombie-like state lots of years in the future and we will be able to use it to finish our projects or even start new ones, but it will never go back to the Unity engine so many of us fell in love with, because the people that made it in the first place aren't even there and no one cares anymore.
The end will not be sudden but a slow and constant decrease of interest and new users over time.
We'll have plenty of time to jump to another engine, but we'll HAVE TO eventually.

 

I’ve seen various apps in the app store using Unity ads, which was not made with Unity.

 

@LeonhardP or I guess @Andy-Touch who, thank you for being the one to answer things.
How far did the project get to completion? specifically, did it provide the first had experience using unitys platform SDKs/plugins? if so, which platforms/consoles was it ran on, and were they (bugs/crashes aside) cert passable?

also, if the team is gone, how do we know any action will be taken from this experience, and not just have the writeups sitting on a server somewhere like a digital arc of the covenant?

 

Winter is coming

 

They needed to rewrite systems to get them more optimised and they were "on track to ship V1 by end of 2022". Draw your conclusions. To me it sounds like they were in "early beta" or something like that.

They are not going to take any action, that much is crystal clear.

 

I wish!
I'm melting here!

 

I saw Aras posting in the DX12 out of preview thread with a Legend banner (instead of Unity), he's not working at Unity anymore and it set me into nostalgic mode.
I'm one of the oldest Unity users. I started using Unity even before creating my forum account in 2007. David Helgardson itself which i still have his emails conversations we both had convinced me to buy a mac and get Unity.
I've seen this tiny micro underdog engine company become a monstrous behemoth that clearly don't want to make the world a better place anymore.
Is there any freaking giant company in this planet that really want to leave a positive mark on earth? Or im just being "A F***ing Idiot"?

 

Yep... for me that says it all.
Last time I checked he was participating on Blender import/export features so maybe we'll see him in Godot next, who knows

 

Sorry, but I think, you know the answer. This is also what happens when a household cleaner ceo tries his hand in the games industry

 

Yes, but the team later said that they have started working on both animation and navigation in parallel with the development of DOTS 1.0, so its not that far away after the release of DOTS 1.0

 

I mean, it seems to me we are ~1 year away from DOTS 1.0 being released and animation like a couple more years after that. I would say three years from now is a lot. And that's assuming the team and features don't go the way of ...Gigaya.

 

https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-2022-2-beta-feature-highlights.1296357/#post-8271297 if this is happens, than its few months away

 

I'd say 9 months isn't a few months, right? LTS was released in April of 22, fairly sure the next one will be released around April again.

And complete tooling around DOTS will take a lot more years and, going from their recent record, it's going to be a S***show.

 

But atleast we will be getting our hands on 1.0 in Q2 as promised, the animation and navigation tools must be for 2023.xx

 

How is any of this a counter argument to my "DOTS 1.0 is ~1 year away and animation a couple more"?

 

Doesn't the xxxx.2 version gets released by December?? So it isn't 9 months away right?
Wasn't there main aim to release a stable working version in 2022.2?
The LTS version would just add some bug fixes and remove the pre release tags

 

But sure, if you want a DOTS release to fool around with, I guess you have that already, no?

 

The Bugz dept gets dog fooded every day hundreds of times. This presents a ton of data on what works and doesn't. Hopefully this shake-up fills better shoes in that department...because that is where the meat really is. IMHO Gigaya was low level and a waste of money. I would wager that of all the complainers on this thread that one in ten is paying Unity a dime for subscription to it's indy or pro package. Ergo your threats to move to another engine are like buh-bye! Some engineer or architecture firm will fill your spot with a 5k a year subscription.<ducks thrown virtual objects/>

 

They are an ad company, they make most of their money from ads. The subscriptions are mostly for kicks.

 

hi did you see this?

Official - Unity 2022.2 beta - feature highlights - Unity Forum

 

The build for DOTS (assuming it comes by the end of the year) is what staff call "radioactive" if you mean this year's experimental-possible release. What staff say and what press releases say are not aligned, so it would be unfair on staff to expect too much too soon. LTS is still 2 years grace from the final release of 2022.2 - so it can theoretically take up to 2024 and keep the release date.

 

Plenty of the more critical users here actually make their living with Unity, aswell as people who have been dismayed off this forum.

I pay for like 3 users or something.

Maybe it's drop in the bucket for Unity but the investment for users goes well beyond the monthly fee. It's time learning, tools made, long term development projects and business models. They have a right to be angry regardless of how much money Unity is making off them.

 

Unity should be PLEASED whenever people talk loudly with loud opinion about Unity on the forums.

As opposed to not talking about Unity on a competitor's forum.

 

There's nothing worse for any product than for people to simply not care any more.

 

I'd be all in for it being released. But when I see the ratings that people give for free stuff even on working things on the asset store that come from Unity, it'll just end up in a huge S***storm either way.

 

Will Gigaya be released as it is ?
Even in it's unfinished form ?

 

No, it was mentioned before that there are no plans for that.

 

Thank you.

Now this makes me angry.

 

It has created a heck of a lot of bad PR for Unity, and I would say that is punishment enough. Unity needs to sit down and properly measure the value of the creatives, the crazy ones and the mavericks of game development. Not everything CAN actually fit inside a spreadsheet.

Those companies that were able to take the risk of what did not fit inside a spreadsheet (Sony for example, with PSVR, or Apple with smartphones) are now the leaders.

I hope Unity stings from this bad decision and learns why it's important to listen to their own staff and more than this, encourage a bunch of F***ing idiots to carry on growing Unity's userbase.

 

I would be VERY surprised (and happy) if that happened.
Personally, I will keep using Unity for years to come, but it will be the current LTS version and not more, since I finally got my perpetual Pro license.
If this wasn't the case, or if I was starting my game dev journey now, I would surely explore other engines before Unity, that's for sure.
Unity has done irreparable damage to its image of an indie friendly engine. It has lost the indie darling aura it once had.
That can't be bought back.

 

Words like irreparable are irresponsible really. I understand the passion behind it. But when something changes for the better it can only do so if we are still there to appreciate it.

So I challenge Unity to think creatively.

 

I wonder how the devs of the engine that still there at Unity feels, hows their motivation after recent events. They need some support from the community, because usually its not that particular programmer fault that there are certain decisions made .

Hope they can retain some form of motivation.