Is Unity still worth it?

The recent decisions that Unity Technologies have been making (laying off staff, buying companies like IronSource, and cancelling Gigaya) make it seem like the future doesn't look too good for Unity. A few people even think they are starting to focus solely on ads. I have already made some 3D models that work perfectly well with Unity. Is it still worth making a game using Unity or should I switch to a different engine?

 

Your life, your decisions, your consequences to deal with.

One of the advantages of unity - clean api that is easy to use is still there and available to use.

Basically, even if the company were to start working hard to drive unity engine into ground, current version would remain available and usable for quite some time.

 

Purely from a current job-market perspective; having Unity experience under your belt is only going to help you as there are still tons of roles and freelance work that is using Unity as the main engine. Where this market will be between now and 5 years time as game projects ship and are shifted to maintenance or discontinued? Time will tell what happens! But it is clear that UE is shifting a lot of AAA projects over from their own proprietary engines and ive recently personally seen a more balanced amount of roles in both Unity and UE.

It sounds like you are a 3d artist (correct me if im wrong); my advice is to become familiar with the art asset pipelines for a variety of off-the-shelf game engines just to cover your bases as much as possible. Having been in the industry of making interactive digital things for about 15 years; I recommend to 'always be evolving and learning'. I remember a time when so many people used Flash for so many things that it seemed impossible for it to disappear.

 

Seems business is beyond many. You downsize to save money. You buy companies to add to your revenue stream or remove or consolidate competitors. This goes back into core research and paying the remaining staff. If they get a lions share of mobile gaming ad revenue and do not plow it back into research then there will be an exodus to other apps providing services and tech that they did not and that investment will not have the value it had in potential at buying time..

 

Of course Unity is worth it. It is flexible, has an awesome Asset Store with a ton of content, it has multi-platform support, the community is huge, the services and core packages are improving frequently and you can develop your games/products using C#.

 

None of these decisions has actually changed anything about the engine itself, or the editor. If these tools worth while before, they are still the same now.

 

Is it worth it? Worth what?

What are you trying to do?

 

You're looking at it from the perspective of an end user but you need to look at it from the perspective of running a business. While they suck the reality is layoffs are expected during a recession. Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc are all doing it too and absolutely no one can say they're in a bad position.

Acquiring and merging with companies makes sense too for multiple reasons. Eliminating a competitor, obtaining expertise, rapidly scaling up the capacity of your services, and so on.

Gigaya is just a casuality of the layoffs.

 

why not learn multiple?
it's worth as much as you make it

 

I'm still going with the "large asset ecosystem" answer. There's no way I would be where I am without having a bunch of the tools and code libraries I use from the Asset Store. I would still be developing those systems, and not working on my actual game. I've been tempted to jump ship to either Unreal or Godot several times, only to realize how much I'd be buried in work to get to the toolset I already have with Unity. All the other stuff is business noise that just gets in the way of actual game development if you let it. Unity is too entrenched in the industry at this point to not allow people to pivot to something else if ever the day came that Unity fell off the consideration list.

EDIT:
I've been burned by using other engines in the past (Torque, C4 (and still "available shortly"), XNA) and Unity just seems to stick around, after getting past that hokey workflow, it just keeps going.

 

Alot of great answers here, but mine is: why worry about what Unity does as a company?. Is it directly stopping or effecting your work?. What Unity does as a company is no different from any other company, in these times...

 

I would say the proper end-user perspective is to look at the end-user product. Look at the engine and the editor. What does it give you and what does it cost you? These are the things that affects the end-user most. Not the silly headlines that have pooped-up lately.

 

I think Unity is currently the best 3D and 2D game engine for mobile device game development. I believe Unreal is too heavy and complicated for mobile device, whereas the other game engines aren't as mature and resourceful as Unity.

Maybe Godot or other low-end game engine users can give us some opinions about mobile device game development?

 

One of my current game prototypes is in Godot.
In terms of deployment iteration speed i'm clean building the entire APK and launching on Android device in under 10 seconds from clicking a button. On-desktop debug launching is less than a second and I can replicate mobile touch APIs with mouse and zero code changes (Its literally a toggle in the editor) and works 1 to 1 multi-touch with my second-screen touch-screen monitor.

 

Thanks for the info, that sounds good. I really wanted to migrate to Godot, but one of its ex-developers revealed its weaknesses as compared to Unity

 

Everything has weaknesses - just try it rather than taking someone elses opinion as your own. If you havent tried the engine for yourself, you have no idea how relevant what you were told really is (or if it is even true at all).

 

What were the weaknesses? As MadeFromPolygons said; all engines have weaknesses. If there was an engine that had none then we would all be using it and this thread wouldn't exist.

 

Agreed. Unfortunately, I'm currently busy migrating from 3ds Max to Blender, so I'd dig deeper into Godot once I get the hang of Blender

 

Yup, I agree. The ex-developer said Godot's API isn't as complete as Unity's and he showed some proofs here. I'm not familiar with Godot, so I can't verify his statements

 

It's true that there has been some rather disappointing news regarding Unity Technologies (the company) lately, but at the end of the day, Unity is a tool. If Unity can do what you need it to do, then it's a good tool.

That's all that should matter.

If a tool more suited to your goals comes along you can always switch.

 

Right now Unity is worth it. In 2-4 years, though? Hard to tell. Depends on the use case and how Unity will continue to make decisions. There have been a lot of bad ones in the past 4-5 years, too many to count. Maybe they will learn from those mistakes and correct their ways, time will tell.

My biggest concern right now is timelines, everything is taking half a decade or longer now and never really reaches feature parity with legacy systems. By their own words UI Toolkit has been in development for 7 years already and Unity still don't recommend using it for runtime UI.

They started on the Visual Scripting road 4-5 years ago, cancelled their Monobehaviour based implementation in favor of DOTS VS that was then also cancelled in favor of integrating the acquired Bolt 2 which again was cancelled so they integrated the outdated Bolt 1. Two years have gone by and UVS is still Bolt 1 from late 2018 with a different skin. Now it's practically abandoned in favor of developing the next major version of visual scripting that'll be Graph Tools Foundation based. But there's no ETA for that either, likely another two years.

This kind of decision making is common at Unity. If they could stop flip flopping all over the damn place and get something done in a timely manner so I can use the damn thing before I grow old and retire, that would be great.

Godot 3.5 is nearly there as far as our needs go. We're looking forward to Godot 4 maturing.

 

- stop giving me depression...

(in really, that Ui Toolkit gime hope about the future... no joke. Its like 'Small steps for big projects - big in the sense of meeting market and community demands').

 

With all the Unity issues I did install Unreal but not given it a go yet would be a big shift. Also tried Godot 4 which looks good but maybe not my thing. I like Unity always been loyal just hope they get ahead before ahead is out of date again. Everything moves fast these days. By the time net7 is unity it will be net10!

 

Yes of course

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