Official Introducing Gigaya: Unity's upcoming sample game

I put bacon on the table with Unity as well. The majority of contracts do not involve gaming at all. I am curious why you think they have the right to be "angry" and why any business would let someone's feelings dictate their bottom line? Doncha just know that if they release Gigagya unfinished it will show up on Steam in two weeks from multiple studios/devs. To me it look no different nor had more depth than their 2014 or so demo of bots on the planet of mushrooms, whatever that was called. Not exactly sure what they were supposed to learn from such an effort, as dog fooding them seems to be the only things i have heard. again..bugz is more than enough dog food if yer talking about gettIng critical bugs and workflow stoppers fixed. i would be happy with parity across platforms of the microphone class myself.

 

what are you actually on about? Unreal released their Matrix demo, where are all the steam clones? your prediction already came out wrong in the past

 

I accounted for you in my stats. Why the beef? I was on about the folks who don't pay a dime trying to dictate the economics and focus of a large corporation whose survival depends on profit/loss statements.. The Gigaya team was going to be paid well over a million dollars in toto to do this. It was not much different from angry bots on the planet of mushrooms. They could have took one of those guys and made him code a Microphone class for WebGL to give proper parity across platforms for their API. They could have put one of them on making the docs all have examples instead of just reading back the method and params. When I want to get something done I do not dissect a made game. I go to the API and then the forums and stackexchange.

 

I could give a flying hoot about Unreal. This is not the Unreal forums. What have you got to say about Unity?

 

https://supersonic.com/games/
I believe this is exactly what unity wants to do with their ironsource/ supersonic acquisition, try out the games yourself and see that their ads are about their own games and ads include a small playable demos of their games

I think unity wants to do the same by advertising only unity games

 

and I'll gladly pay if by paying I get to maintain my business (although I have just started)

 

It's not the first time a big studio has made one, idk about public traded ones. What matters is the reasons behind it. I don't know what kind of press it would get.

 

You got this video introduced this very year. March 23 2022.

Just 3 months later, you decide to cancel?

If you wanted this to be an internal resource, releasing a video for everyone to think they would get that as a game resource is not the best acting example.

I'm sincerely disappointed. As many of your users.

A whole team laid off, a very promising concept canceled, lots of company acquisitions, a plethora of paid services, and the list goes on and on.

 

From one of Unity's Supersonic studio made games. All of them have similar reviews. But it doesn't matter. The game is not the point, only the ads. So Quality is not a measure of success with this design.

 

If you are going to post rumours, you will have to post your source. Otherwise it is you that looks a bit like a troublemaker. If you have a source though, it changes.

 

I just checked the main investors of both and they are not the same:

https://www.crunchbase.com/search/p...rganizations/num_investors/unity-technologies

https://www.crunchbase.com/search/principal.investors/field/organizations/num_investors/ironsource

I guess the rumor was just speculation.
Sorry

 

See here's the thing, there is basically NOTHING Unity could do to resolve this problem as it is now. If they said "Hey guys we hear you and we're starting a new project with a new team" no one would trust them. There's almost no chance the Gigaya team will come back. Releasing Gigaya as is, is a gesture, but not one that solves the problem we're all really talking about. And most other things they probably suggest would likely be met with skepticism, cause the reality is a lot of things unity has tried over the last few years has fallen flat in terms of the needs developers have that have been talked about here to death.

They want stability, they want "completed" features, they want bug fixes, they want performance, and they want to feel like games matter to Unity.

But:

1. There is nothing they're going to be able to come up with that won't take anything less than a few months to even start, and even then it's a shot in the dark if people will even remotely take it seriously.
2. There's no known new features on the horizon in less than a year, No big version number, Unity doesn't do that. There's no UE5 for unity.
3. Even if they announce some new feature it won't change the real problems people have and want resolved.

The only things that would likely recover from this is a new CEO (And probably not just any CEO), or some drastic change in the Unity business model that shifts the responsibility of those needs we want from Unity for games on to something else. Be it community, another company, or something else. Cause it's clear Unity can't deliver, or more realistically doesn't want to deliver cause delivering costs money they feel they won't get back.

Thats why the funding thing to me sounds like the only realistic concept with potential.

Cause lets say they do it, obviously people will be skeptical but businesses have needs and they will pay. If the system works in ernest, over time the perception of it will recover. And more people will give it a shot. It could genuinely create some hope if they actually put it to work. And if they F*** it up and kill it, then it's not a massive loss.

I just don't see another Gigaya on the horizon, and even if there is that's a year or two years down the line. Two years after technology like nanite and raytracing are reasonably established. Two years after Unreal 5 has been released. Two years and only then we will begin to see the improvement we've been asking for and I just don't know if I can wait for that.

I've waited long enough just for URP feature parity, and there's still no TAA or HDR.

What else could they possibly do?

 

Understand that the world is changing, and that the people that consume their engine also make their engine.

 

Peak capitalism. Just sad to look at. And absolutely soul crushing when you have to ruin a good game with schemes like this for profit. I've done my time in that industry because nothing else really exists around these parts but I won't ever return to that.

 

Even if they learn this they could never convince us that they did.

 

Having small playable demos in ads is interesting, i do download the games from those ads demo if i found them interesting, really looks like a great type of monetization for Mobo game devs, but as all ads those are irritating a lot when they pop-up more frequently!! I really hope that this is optional and should be upto the developer to decide how many ads they want to include in the game and when to display them just like their current monetization, and must be mobile/web only because who the f*** has ads in PC/console games ( their blog post did sound like as if they are going to do that for all platforms)!!

Regarding gigaya i think unity must atleast release the tools and features like third-person controller, streaming tools in form of small assets!!
For future demos maybe give that job to supersonic??

 

"Come on Unity!"

 

Surely this is not a good example to pitch the case for a corporation running a kickstarter.

 

Seeing this news, the Enemies(DigitalHuman2.0) announced at the same time is also worried.
The Heretic was shared only the character models.
On the other hand, UE5 distributes demos that you can fully experience just by pressing the play button.
I feel like Unity keeps showing hype.
Still, I like Unity.
At least for now, it has the power to make great games like Ori and fall guys and others.

 

The problem Unity *will* face is the fact the bar to entry for mobile is rising daily. I would say it is already past the frankly poor games offered by ironSource.

Unity lacks the strategy and staff to enable a high end visual on mobile. They even decided that Gigaya's usefulness ended before it was anywhere near stressing everything else a company needs to be a success in mobile game development.

The fact is years ago, mobile games looked pretty bad. Now, they look like fortnite or Gigaya. If I was an investor in Unity, I would not invest today unless Unity could promise that quality like fortnite or Gigaya is possible on mobile without spending a lot of money to reinvent the wheel.

By dumping Gigaya, they cannot prove Unity is able to handle the generation of mobile games to come. Therefore there is more evidence a company using Unreal Engine 5 will result in higher mobile success.

This is proven, already, 100% if the context is fornite.

It wasn't true 5 years ago, but you know, a lot happens in 5 years. Arm and Apple now supply raytracing hardware for mobile. Where will we be in 5 years time?

That's stuff investors think about.

 

We want Unity to publish Gigaya project files for public use. #releasegigaya - Sign the Petition! https://chng.it/c4dPvpQpwX

 

Releasing a half-baked project won't resolve anything. What it represented was far more important than the game/project itself.

 

I don't think it would be a good idea to publicly release a project that is not finished and with zero plans to finish/improve it. That would hardly add to Unity's reputation for not maintaining released projects (because resources get shifted elsewhere). Also would defeat the entire point of the project and initiative.

Although, I am adding this petition to my CV.

 

i think guys keep posting and commenting here is nearly useless , unity doesn't listen , it never listen and it will never .... that's a hard fact , this is not just this year , it's been years since 2014 ... i ask everybody to boycott unity compeletely until john and his minions resign

 

i still very much think it should be released. and if Unity won't do it, get the community to work on it. yeah i get that the assets were made by a different team, but permissions can be handled. i don't make games but i create game projects and i have to ask permission from asset devs if i use anything from the Asset Store. not a big deal.

as it is, this game project won't do anything at Unity but gather dust ('future internal usage' my ass - by what internal dev team?). i don't think Unity's reputation is going to be hurt any more than it already has. i have not seen this vitriolic a response on the forums in quite a while.

release it - yep it will have totally changed the nature of the project and initiative of dogfooding. so what? it's obvious Unity won't learn from this mistake so the rest of the developer community can figure out best practices for themselves without Unity being involved past the release state. i agree to just do it quietly without fanfare, but seriously, release it - make it useful for somebody, rather than, well, nobody.

 

As one of the only 2 people in this entire thread who has worked directly on Gigaya; I assure you being released unfinished and without supporting materials or information (which we were in the process of making) would actually defeat the entire point of the initiative and would be a negative.

I know everyone loves free stuff; but lets be realistic.

 

Yee, there are a fair share of half finished projects over on Github already...

Funny how further up someone explicitly asks for the rights of republish and resell it.
Wonder how many copies would end up on itch.io by next month if they just published it, lol.

 

no supporting materials or info? great, that means it just joins the ranks of practically EVERY OTHER DEMO that Unity has ever made previously - you get to figure out what makes it tick and how to make it better - to me 1/4 of a loaf is far better than none. i've kitbashed and adapted Unity game demos numerous times.

i get that it's absolutely not even remotely an ideal situation and i respect your involvement in it, but it really seems even worse to never release anything at all that could be looked at and worked with, even in a semi-broken state.

 

It's funny actually how the entire mess was a bunch of deliberate decisions. No accidents, nothing was unplanned. Simply actual decisions led us all to this moment.

Bravo. Good Job Unity.

 

We were working on the supporting materials and info. Also not finished (and definetly won't be now as no-one employed to work on them)

 

https://www.fool.com/investing/2022/07/17/5-red-flags-for-unity-softwares-future/

Wasn't any point in dumping your team, at all.

 

yup the Ironsource purchase actually does make sense if a big chunk of ad revenue suddenly slid off the cliff due to Apple's privacy shifts - that's been analysed elsewhere as well.

i get that cost cutting is to be expected, but for a company with revenue of 300 million, it would not have been much of a burden financially to keep Gigaya afloat, or even investigate how to slowly wind down the project and then release something at least a little polished up and more robust than the usual offering. but instead it's super obvious management simply doesn't care - it's not even on their radar how much this hurts their reputation, probably irrevocably. as hippocoder showed it hasn't helped their stock price - most likely analysts who don't care about gamedev see a company who has never made profit trying to stay afloat and are punishing the company for not seeing it far enough in advance.

meanwhile the actual users of the engine, gamedevs, having been kicked a bunch of times, seem to have had enough. i shudder to think what UNITE will be looking like this year. i hope they get an earful of how badly they've screwed the long term prospects of Unity's viability.

 

Cost cutting from game dev when you mess up your ad service tells us all we need to know.

 

Fair enough, but this still points to the same conclusion.

 

Removing Gigaya project and team is the same as a food company removing taste testing and quality control. It's all kinds of only bad for the future vibes.

 

It's an excellent post and you do much, I think for Unity with it. The problem is there is actual damage done to the community and so there will have to be many changes to how things are run. Particularly as you say there has been a large influx of developers.

More than ever, you need to be managed very well. Not as things have been so far.

 

IMO, this is exactly why Unity needs to die.

 

They would be bigger and have more resources if the indie scene wasn’t fully consumed by Unity, which is the space Unity actually occupies.

I don’t think Unreal would be affected too much if Unity disappeared. Their business model means they mostly make money from AAA, and Unity is not competitive at all in that space.

 

I've been so happy with all the changes happening quietly in the Unity engine as of late and I'm excited to see the improvements DOTs brings in the future.

Had to daisy chain through posts, but this is the most recent thread relating to DOTs release: https://forum.unity.com/threads/dots-development-status-and-next-milestones-june-2022.1291766/

Lots of people jumping to conclusions in this thread, and I can't for the life of me understand the majority of the outrage. You get youtubers like that Yong Yeah guy who has no idea WTF he's talking about, who always takes this position of the moral arbiter talking about complex corporate and gamedev things for the clicks. The modern game media is literally run on rage bait, this entire situation is severely overblown for clicks and the usual hysteria we're addicted to.

We've grown soft as of late. When has gamedev ever been fair, or easy, or ethical? Gamedev is hard and it's grueling and its built on a foundation of failure after failure and the most greedy corporations survive. I'm GLAD Unity is trying to make a profit, it means i'll have a damned engine to use in a few years from now.

I'm trying to be at least a little tactful but this thread is getting ridiculous. Sign of the times we're living in.

I think people could stand to take a step back and try to think about how things are going with an open mind, stop getting so mad at comments made by suits talking to other suits, Unity is a corporation composed of many people of many disciplines and being a little money grubbing in certain spheres is necessary for survival.

I don't get how Unity indulging in advertising suddenly makes their engine unusable in other areas that are also getting better every day.

People like to form mobs and get angry about causes these days, they like to paint people as vile and evil and embark on their blood thirsty crusade. It's easy to tear things down.

You want a game engine that runs on unicorn farts and kumbaya songs? Great, build one. Aside from assets that are STUPID CHEAP, I haven't had to spent a dime on Unity, I feel like i'm ripping these sons of bitches off for an INCREDIBLE game engine. I'm glad you guys are keeping these guys on their toes and to some level of ethics, but damn, this is becoming incessant.

I don't know what game engine you guys are using, but the Unity I use gets more performant, more usable, and more stable with every update, I've been happy as hell with this engine as of late, and the things going on in the background are very exciting.

It sounds like some of you guys just want something to be outraged about. Absolutely sucks people are losing their jobs right now, it's a tough time to be losing a job, it really is. But buck up, this was a fantastic experience, and you'll be in a great position looking for a new job.

 

WWHHHAA I am so shocked the new pathetic parasite running this POS company doesn't want to help developers I never saw that coming. Unity now only cares about their own wallet not the hard working developers who made them rich in the first place. I am so glad I moved on from this POS engine to UE and GM2

 

This is a great reply and thanks for making it but some points.

This is why I was surprised Gigaya was on the chopping block cause to me 200 was a small part of the staff. Yet they fired what I felt was so critical.

Regardless, even with this, it seems the teams for features people need are small cause progress is so slow. I dunno where these 3000 people are placed in Unity but I don't really see it helping.

We're two years since URP, and 4 years since LWRP launched and still there's no feature parity with standard. And as hippo said even mobile is reaching desktop quality fast, compatible with raytracing even, but features like raytracing are only in HDRP which is not mobile compatible. Meanwhile people using URP are still looking toward features of the past they still don't have (And apparent performance issues).

I've always appreciated the road map but again, so many of these things seem so far off. And even if they come before my game releases it's part of a whole new Unity version. Now granted I don't usually have a lot of issues upgrading versions, but it is a barrier.

Based on Unity 2022.2 TAA and HDR is still another year off for URP until the next LTS version, let alone FSR 2.0 or DLSS. And those are standard features gamers expect NOW. Things that affect a games sales.

I've long been aware Unity works with developers but didn't know the name. And I can see it's a paid service which makes sense.

For me I think something less involved is desired, cause as things are this isn't good enough. Problems still take over a year to get resolved and features still take too long to come out. And people still feel like the engine has issues with optimized releases. Sure this service helps with that on a one on one basis, offloading the problems like I said earlier. But to me this is a band-aid for the companies that can afford it. It doesn't benefit the potential sleeper hit.

Also most needs don't exactly need to be that involved. For a bug taking a year to fix this isn't the solution for that.

Granted this could be just a structural issue with the company on why these things take so long to see a release, but still. It's not like we get ETA's or Commnication to really know.

EDIT: Cause one thing that happens is sometimes there's awareness for issues but they never really get fixed. Like this problem where screnspaceAO is stripped if you don't use Unity's SSAO and want to use HBAO.

I'm dealing with this problem now (and the solution didn't work for me yet) and come to find it's been known about for almost a year. Does this problem really need a whole year? And a whole version upgrade?

 

If the gamedev community wasn't so temperamental and prone to toxicity there would be a lot more communication between devs. Lots of interesting types in gamedev.

Wasn't too long ago I was in the same boat, used to rage on here a lot, but lately things have just been getting so much better in the engine across the board.

I like this new Unity we've been seeing lately, less talk, more action. It's not exactly the best climate lately to be communicating with everyone walking on egg shells anyhow and this thread perfectly demonstrates why.

 

No, I think it's the opposite, learn to communicate properly. Especially a company like Unity operating in a professional space. Treat users like professionals and they'll respond as such. People would gladly take a S*** response over silence.

No one here is angry that they acknowledged canceling Gigaya or told us why, but not realizing they would have to address this issue is probably why the decision was allowed in the first place.

PR is not hard, just don't treat people like they're stupid.