Is Unity heading in a more commercial direction?

They are telling us they don't compete with customer ... except making a game would be more cooperation through inspiration. Generally games don't compete too much with each other, and they don't have to make an amazing game because the market is technical.

 

Are they telling that? Do you have a link?

I guess releasing paid assets on the asset store doesn’t count somehow?

 

I'm a bit confused by the initial question. Unity has always been commercial. It is middleware. They aren't making it or maintaining it for free. Let me just blow some minds here. Unity didn't originally have a Personal license edition. Once upon a time, there was no "free" edition that could be used. And it was actually like this for a while. Let me just blow some more minds here. Unity was originally a Mac-only game engine. You couldn't get the core editor on any platform other than a Mac. Yeah, that happened, that's how all this started out. Not only did it start off as a purely pay-for-license engine, but it was also exclusively available on an unusually expensive PC platform. It started off being used by mid-tier developers to make games for the Sony PSP and Nintendo Wii. Commercial support has been a de-facto position from day one, and has never gone away.

You can't make an engine like this one without a commercial focus. The resources simply aren't there. It can't be a hobby project or an open-source effort. You wouldn't be able to scrounge the manpower necessary, or maintain the same level of enthusiasm or long-term effort. If you wanted to shift it away from a commercial focus, you would also have to drastically scale back the scope and feature set. No way around that. The price of getting the fancy toys and features provided is that there is money changing hands. This level of effort requires that someone is getting paid.

And there's nothing wrong with that. Especially in this day and age. Once upon a time, monolithic commercial projects were the only game in town. But now that is no longer the case. While hobby and open-source projects require leaner scopes, they have also grown to the point of providing viable alternatives. If someone wants to distance themselves from commercial efforts, there are actually options now. You can use Godot 3D instead. You can grab one of the numerous programming frameworks and roll your own solution. Hobbyist communities are no longer reliant on major commercial software projects, and that's a good thing. But they also shouldn't feel entitled to all of the support and development that those commercial projects benefit from, either.

 

I guess some people really believed their current "let's make a version of the engine free so we can monetize little kids with the Asset Store" business plan, to really be about "democratisation" or some other marketing buzzword.

In any case. It doesn't really matter, they will soon lose marketshare in gamedev circles if they continue like this, but maybe the sound assets they sell on the Asset Store will be able to sustain them.

 

I don't think anyone is arguing with that. I pay for lots of software, and only reason I don't pay for Unity is because I don't have to. It's the software I would pay the most for.

Do you really think that selling add-ons for a tiny example project on the asset store is going to make lots of money? It won't. The correct focus is to fix the engine and release good demo content for free (since for them the asset store is pennies on the dollar anyway). It just looks poor imo.

And if they think releasing a game is competing with customers, that's like saying that since COD is around might as well forget about making money with fps'ers.

Imagine if Half Life Alyx was made in Unity? If anything, that makes me want to get my hands on Valve engine. Same with Fortnite.

 

I'm a user from those times, I even paid for the separate iOS licence. I thought it was a good move to add a free tier, but a bad move to make everything free because the money would have to be made elsewhere.

Some of the attempts at making money elsewhere were big mistakes. Unity Learn having paid elements was one of them because it tried to monetise users too early in their use, but thankfully Learn has returned to free.

There are number of the new features that seem more suited to advanced users, not the general user base, such as ECS and DOTS. I would rather those features became paid than some of the other attempts at making money. As long as there is a fully maintained game engine suited to the average user for free, I don't mind some features becoming paid.

It seems to me the best way to make more money is be flexible with the paid tiers. I've turned down contract work because I couldn't get satisfactory answer over how tiers would work for me (it seems I would need a new licence for each team I worked with in case one switched tiers, meaning my licence would mess up other projects I'd worked with on the same licence, and a lot of work offered has been short term, so multiple teams a year), and the same for collaborations. At least allow Plus and Pro to mix as long as each organisation involved does not mix licences. I will probably be paying for Unity soon, but would have been doing so for years if the licences had been different. Instead I did other work. How many other people does that apply to?

 

The problem with the subscription approach is that you need a high volume of subscribers to make money, and I imagine that the great majority of Unity customers awill never need to upgrade to Pro.

Unreal do royalties, so they only need to have a few very big clients to make a substantial amount, and they don't need to worry about trying to squeeze the average indie. Also they have a huge game out that not only shows off the engine but makes a boatload of money. And the Epic store.

If it's true that Unity's main source of income will/does come from non-game stuff, perhaps they could create a branch of the engine dedicated to that and sell it at a premium. After all, it's hard to imagine a game engine that can seamlessly switch between an endless runner and engineering processes simulations. That's probably why the ECS and ML focus was originally conceived.

 

VR games tend to be very simulation like becasue of the nature of VR. Even the simplest of VR games have some simulation aspect

 

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/artic...-and-sweat-wed-like-to-make-the-tears-go-away

The problem is that AR didn't got big enough, VR didn't got big enough, every other domain face fierce competition, they probably expected to reproduce a mobile style Heist and when they got to AAA the ground shift beneath them while they lost the nimbless that gave a lead. Right now they are less about innovating than implementing someone else state of art while moving the state of art needle a few inch, but much too late for no real people to take advantage.

 

I'm talking more like hydraulic simulation or materials stress or something like that, where you have to operate on very large numbers of data points fast. I imagine something like ECS would be very useful for that.

 

In so far as "democratisation" means "making something accessible to everyone" there's nothing contradictory about claiming that as a goal and also charging for some products or services.

The fact that they charge for some things makes the core engine and toolset no less available to anyone, and that's already more than you need to get started in game development. Unity's consistent push towards making things broadly and easily available was also a significant part of an industry-wide trend. Before Unity was a thing the standard pricing for a certain competing engine was US$250K... for an old version.

Back then $1,500 per person per platform was indeed far more accessible than most of the competition. In that context they could have patted themselves on the back for already succeeding. They'd managed to make a game engine available for about the same price as the other content creation tools people would need. But they went further and eventually got a $0 license out, too.

And now people whinge that the UI is the wrong colour and that optional extras cost extra. :-(

What would come next? Unity sucks because they don't provide a computer for me to use?

 

It doesn't mean that. But let's not argue semantics.

My real problem with the term when Unity uses it, is that people attach some higher calling or moral motivation to the word "democratising" used in the Unity context, instead of the strictly business move that it was.

 

Why are you so convinced it can't be both? Every business must generate income, but there are different ways that can be done. Unity chose an approach which is both commercially successful and highly democratic.

They have always been highly commercial. Without success there, they would likely have had less impact with their "democratisation".

On that note...

Yes, it does. That is one of its meanings. First result on Google:

 

Why are you equating democratic with moral?

 

Where am I doing that? Heck, if you read enough of my post history you'll see that I don't necessarily think that "democratic" is necessarily "moral" in the first place.

 

I feel like we're talking a bit past each other.

I clarified that my real beef with Unity using "democratising" is that people attach moral motives to it, to which you replied with "why can't it be both?".

The "both" I'm arguing it can't be is being motivated by both morals and business. So either you replied to something different than what I posted or you equated business -> commercial and democratising -> morals.

Or at least that's how it seemed to me.

Anyway, I yield, I've had a couple of crappy days and I feel like I'm having more trouble than usual to get my points across. I think I've had the phrase "yeah, but they've democratised game development" thrown back at me when I'm trying to criticise Unity for other (unrelated) things, that at this point I have an allergic reaction to the term.

 

Right, that was definitely a slip up on my behalf. The reason I think it can be both is that their choice of approach to business may well have been influenced in whole or part by wanting to have some positive impact as well as wanting to be commercially successful. There are a whole bunch of ways they could have approached commercialising their tools, and the one they picked was "lets make it more easily available than other established engines".

Whether that was really because they wanted to do good or just because it was an effective way to differentiate themselves? Well, only they'll ever know.

I agree there's plenty to criticise them for, including some of the ways in which they've chosen to pursue the "democratisation" thing. For instance, I'm pretty sure I've complained in the past that by pursuing "easy to use" seemingly for the sake of "democratisation" they've sacrificed things elsewhere, and that "accessible" and "easy" do not have to be treated as the same thing.

Anyhow, I hope things pick up for you!