Open letter to Unity...

This isn't intended to be offensive:

With the upcoming Unity 5 and Unreal Engine 4 we, as a company of several developers, have had a few hard decisions to make and would like to share our thoughts (the result of several longwinded meetings) with you Unity as we may have to jump ship. It's worth noting that we have evaluated Unreal Engine 4 (in it's current state) and have been long time supporters of Unity (since the 1.x days). We hold several licenses to unity pro including Android pro, iOS pro, and asset server. We have several products that have been completed over the years, and have several more in the works for this year alone.

With all that being said, we find what you offer to not fully align with the price point you demand. Although Unreal Engine 4 has a steep learning curve, overall it is more powerful and offers an easier to attain polish then we have ever been able to accomplish with Unity. The architecture is built around networking which seems to be an afterthought in your tools. We are required to have Unity pro because, lets face it, few of the decent extensions/libraries purchasable from 3rd parties will work without it. We need to have mobile pro because, lets face it, performance is horrid without it. We made the HUGE mistake of buying the team license because, lets face it, asset server is garbage! You know it, we know it, it's more headache than it's worth (timeouts, corruption, bad states, loss of work, loss of time and money) and should honestly be taken out back and shot...

Now you introduce a subscription model which is 300+% greater than your competition and makes no sense to the one time cost model, we are curious, why offer the one time cost at all? Thank you for letting us pay $600 less for the subscription than the one time cost however we all know you'll be releasing Unity 6.x shortly after so why the hell would we purchase the one time cost? It's not like you'll let us have multiple installs (for our whole team) with one time cost, right? Does the one time cost allow for our bug reports to be seen before the usual 6mo time period (statistically unlikely)? Thank you for the subscription, but it's still really high for what your offering...

What ever happened to Unity's new GUI? We've been waiting for it since 3.x and all we have is a back side full of smoke. When will interfaces (c#) be better supported? When will you support more of the native iOS and Android features so we can stop buying solutions from Prime31 and the like? Dynamic NavMesh support? What about multiple listeners in a scene? More robust EditorGUI controls, callbacks, events, etc? Access to source? Why do I still have to cache a reference to the darn Transform, you'd think we'd be passed this by now...

Your feature list for Unity 5 is very lack luster. On a basic overview, the list would seem impressive but once one gets more granular into what is really pitched (past the hype of it), it really is what should have been in Unity 4, what we paid for on the upgrade. If this is just another minor revision turned major, many will feel jaded...

It's just a lot to swallow for the price you want to charge me for my team to stay. I'm sorry if this post comes off as offensive however it's been building over the years. I can pay double, DOUBLE, for your competitions product and still be paying half than what I would be paying for yours and they already offer more of what I need. I strongly ask that you reconsider your pricing model. I understand you still need to pay your people and cover your expenses however you need to remember that we're indies (and in some cases, hobbyists), we can't afford this for much longer...

Afterthought: I know what will be said after this. yes, they [unreal] want to charge us 5% royalty. I'm ok with that! If we do well, they do well for supporting us. If we make 100k, we pay them 5k, not a problem there...

 

First of all, this belongs in Unity Gossip, not here. I'm not going to address your qualititative complaints (e.g. "UE4 is more powerful"), only the ones that are factually wrong.

Unity's subscription model has been around longer than UE4's. Unity didn't offer an expensive alternative to UE4 - UE4 undercut Unity's existing price. Unity has not made any business model changes nor major announcements since UE4's subscription service. This is a hugely important distinction. If Unity makes any changes to the product roadmap without addressing the subscription price, then you'll know they've made a decision to stay expensive. Until then, they have made zero response to UE4's lower price.

I suspect Unity will indeed be forced to lower their prices soon to compete, and I further suspect that will happen near the time 5.0 is released.

Unity 4 was released November 2012. If Unity 5 is released when it is expected to, that will be about 2 years between major versions. 2 years of Unity Pro subscription is $75*24=$1800 versus $1500 for buying it outright. If you buy 5.0 on launch date, you'll likely save $300 versus getting a subscription. More importantly, your license will never expire, which makes it a more attractive option for pro studios. If Unity 6's feature set doesn't appeal to you, you can continue to use Unity 5 for free as long as you like. And, you can preorder 5.0 now and get an extra 6 months on top of that, meaning you'd further save $75*6=$450 on top of that, compared to the subscription cost.

In short: Unity's subscription price is balanced properly with its buy-outright cost. (Perhaps not balanced with the cost of UE4, but I've already addressed that)

Coming in Unity 4.6 this summer. Already in beta testing. It's been discussed to death on the forums, please do pay attention.

The native iOS/Android features are a constantly moving target, and most Unity updates bring the API close to or up to feature parity with the native features. Prime31 reacts quicker than UT, but the majority of Prime31's historical offerings are currently obsoleted by a more recent Unity version.

Dynamic NavMesh support is partly addressed by carving in 4.3.

Unity 5's "lack luster" feature set includes a complete overhaul of the audio system.

I've never seen this suggestion on either forums or the Feedback page. What exactly do you with it to do differently? Can you link to somewhere it's been discussed? (And if not, do you expect UT to read your mind?)

Available for the right price, and always has been.

If you're talking about what I think you're talking about (that gameObject.transform is a slow function call), we have indeed been past this for a long while.

 

Can you post links to the work you've done in Unity and other engines? Thanks.

 

People have invested a lot in Unity, and it's a good system (sometimes great, but sometimes horrible too). But the industry is coming to a crossroads where Unity developers have to decide whether increasing investment in Unity upgrades is worthwhile.

Of course all of these complaints have been stated before, and I don't know if we need another thread going through them. However it's important to say the reason that these threads keep popping up is because of Unity's lack of response... which get's increasingly depressing with every new announcement from the competition.

 

Unity did respond, if I recall correctly. I mean, it's possible it was just some sort of community representative who's position on the matter was not official, but it was clearly stated that they feel the price of Unity is still justified and doesn't need to change.

 

Where?

 

Where is the link to the comment?

 

I don't remember, it was one of those giant threads that sprung up talking about the new pricing model of UE4. I think it was somewhere in this thread specifically; http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/235219-Why-Unity-5-0-is-STILL-a-good-deal
But the thing is 24 pages long, and I don't wanna search through it. Especially since it may not even be the right thread.
I know for a fact it was in one of those, because that post was what made me decide not to develop games with Unity, and instead just use it for selling assets.
I posted as much in the very same thread, but my post history doesn't go back that far.

 

He can't hear you because he's gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooone! Perhaps you got caught up in the details and missed the main thrust of the post?

Is that a definite fixed in stone date? http://isthenewguioutyet.com/ still says it 'should be' in 4.6. Can you direct us to the post where it is guaranteed that it will be in 4.6? I mean, what with all the broken promises and lack of communication pre-broken promises saying promises would be broken, would it really be that surprising if it slipped again? It's nice that you still believe what Unity say though. It shows the loyalty of a dog that just hasn't quite been kicked in the face enough times. Didn't the NGUI developer get hired by Unity only to leave Unity shortly thereafter because of... well, we're not sure are we?

Anyway, I don't think criticising his reasons for switching will make him change his mind. It might work on someone else though.

 

Pricing was discussed in this thread by a developer:

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/235248-Are-you-OK-with-Purchasing-WebGL-Add-On

Is that the one you were thinking of Grimwolf?

 

Just vote with your wallets. Don't like it? move on.

Get sick of other engines? move back.

Posting yet more threads about it helps how?

 

You may have taken that as complaining, it was intended as comparison. Regardless of your opinion of my opinions I am still a customer who spends thousands of dollars with Unity a year. Take my opinion of comparison as you wish I suppose (constructively or destructively). When talking about 2 video game tools, a qualitative comparison is very appropriate. Why I would put in in "gossip" (something that is unconfirmed) was counter to the objective of writing. I wanted to know if Unity would become more cost effective and scale with the competition.

Palm's webOS was around a longer than ChromOS, that doesn't make it better or viable... It's my understanding that Unity's subscription model hasn't been around all that long. It's also my knowledge that UE4 has been in the works for a lot longer than their marketing would indicate. I understand that UE4 undercut them, and I wasn't directly asking for UE4 pricing, I'm saying that side-by-side comparison would indicate that UE4 is a bigger bang for the buck. I'm not asking Unity to be $20 a month, I'm asking if they can lower their price a bit to support the smaller teams more. The fact that they haven't responded would suggest to me that they *want* to loose the smaller teams to the competition...

not including all the mobile pro stuff (which I've addressed)... Not nickel-and-diming at all </sarcasm>

Pay attention to what? trolling the forums? I get work done, thank you very much. I read the news letters and visit the marketing pages every so often to see what I'm missing. I've watched the videos where they demoed the new GUI. I've waited patiently. Now you say 4.6 where I say I was originally told 4.0. It may have been discussed to death on some forum, but I see no official word about it...

Constantly moving? Did iOS drop support for advertising all of a sudden? has their native dialog UI gone away? Has Android's native dialog UI gone away all of a sudden? Yes, they have brought it closer, I'll give you that, but it's a HUGE market and if they are going to charge x3 the price for Android and iOS, perhaps reacting a bit quicker to a fast moving market (which you get to boast on your marketing pages to attract customers who you charge) is a requirement.

YEAY partly addressed! So now I can save a NavMesh as a prefab and load/unload it as any other prefab? (if so, please post a link, cause we've been trying to figure this one out for 5 months now).

And much like the promise of the new GUI with 4.x, the same promise of a "game audio system of your dreams, then add some" (taken right from their promise on why I should buy) comes with a truck load of salt.

Got it! I guess we can agree that competition +1

If your genuinely interested, sure. But if your going to validate my opinions based on work our team has produced then no; as I think, in this matter, the money we spend a year should speak just as loudly as our productive quantity/quality. We have several licenses (pro everything) of Unity and we want to know if it will be more cost effective for us as a small team than UE4. We don't need Unity to beat UE4 in price, because there are many benefits to using Unity over UE4, but with such a big cost difference it's hard to outweigh the benefits of moving to UE4 on price vs quality alone.

Very well said, and very to the point!

Exactly! I'm not going to waste the day away searching through the forums and guessing on who is actually from Unity for an "official" response. If Unity chooses to ignore this thread (my attempt to get an answer) then so be it, the official response is that they have no response and my decision for our team becomes that much clearer (and our wallet can remain much heavier next year).

That is the very definition of conjecture...

 

Correct me if i'm wrong but that is 5% of gross profits, not net. With taxes and other fees it will likely work out to be a lot more than a 5% on net profits.

 

you are correct. I'm not going to defend it, sucks to loose profits, but at least the entry cost is super low.

 

Are you suggesting that a forum (definition: a place, meeting, or medium where ideas and views on a particular issue can be exchanged. ) is not a place for such things?

Vote with my wallet? Are you kidding? -vote with your wallet-, what nonsense.. We've [our team)]spent thousands (10k+) on Unity over the many years and you suggest we should just move on without asking any questions? Like I'm wasting your time or something right? "poor stupid customer, wanting things and asking us questions. Doesn't he realize he should be happy we don't beat him with the money he gives us hahahaha, dumb customers..."

All I want is a simple answer. Is the price point set in stone, or will Unity put in a little wiggle room in a couple months to stay competitive. So far the only official Unity response [Super Moderator hippocoder] is that I should take my business elsewhere... GG!

 

It's not conjecture, a member of Unity made that post, I'm 100% certain. I just don't know if it was made as an official stance and/or represented the feelings of the Unity team as a whole. There was no guess-work involved.
I'd link it if I could find it if that were really necessary, but there were at least three similar threads that reached 20+ pages.

I never claimed that was their official stance. I'm just saying there has been a response on the issue, and it was not good.

 

Then if you are a big enough dev shop it is likely that the costs could increase substantially, IE more than the cost of Unity's licence where you are not paying gross royalties per game. Also IMHO its a bigger risk, as you could make a largish gross profit but still come out with a net profit margin of less than 5%, in which case you would be making a loss. At least you know your definite risks and costs with prepayment. Don't get me wrong though I do agree with some of your qualitative arguments, just the business end seems risky.

 

You make it sound like there was a fallout or scandal. Unless I hear otherwise, I assume Michael has done his part and then it was up to Unity. He has talked relatively openly about his work (1, 2, 3).

Unity Tech has made a lot of mistakes since I am on board (2012), but I see the integration of NGUI as a positive example - it only took too long. In my opinion, more community contributions should be picked up and integrated.

 

The Integration of NGUI didn't took too long, the problem was in the decision making. They started their own GUI, weren't fully satisfied, started over.. and started over again. That doesn't make it better, but at least it isn't an example of lacking willingness to bring unity forward.

 

The 5% is taken from gross profits before 'store fronts' take their cut and Epic pays taxes on that 5% of the gross - $3000 per quarter. You will pay taxes on the remainder after 'store fronts' take their cut so you will pay taxes on something like the remaining 65% of the gross in most situations.

Epic is clearly angling on 5% of a rare blockbuster being more profitable that $6000 up front and 0% of the profits every two years from a tiny minority of users. What I see is they must both have some sweet contracts with governments and big businesses to even try for such markets.

 

I think Mr. Helgason makes those really big type of announcements so you probably misunderstood.

 

No, your correct, it is risky, but we're not a big enough dev shop where we can afford to dump a ton of money into software every where. we turn. We already pay for decent PM software, all cloud storage, github, computers (macs) and their OS licensing, and so on. The cost is always growing and we need to cut where we competitively can. Sure, the royalty cost can get heavy (if we got a huge popular release) however if we can A. get more business due to more polish B. put more out the door due to quicker dev path and art pipeline and C. save a bit of money initially, then we can justify the steep learning curve of new software... Besides, if we are making enough on a title where the 5% becomes a big concern, then I doubt the 5% will really be that big of a concern ;-) Also, the 5% doesn't count towards advertising revenue or IAP which can offset if the title is popular enough.

It's all about risk vs reward and Unity has been the only viable choice for us over the past 4 years. A crossroads has come indeed and now is the time where we need to seriously consider who we go with for the next 5 years (5 year commitment is what we are currently looking at). If we stick with Unity, then the cost needs to come down a bit, if we go with UE then I need to get a few guys ramped up (trained), including myself (aside from the 3 weeks of evaluation I did), to be proficient.

Unity has lots of things going for it, don't get me wrong, but in order for us to financially stay with Unity they need to be a bit more forgiving to teams of our size and income abilities.

 

I would guess most feel the way you do. Unity ought to have got their act together, they always struck me as a tad arrogant. But anyway this is all good news for us as I'm very happy to see competition and hope there is even more, which I have good reason to believe there will be.

 

Seems extremely rash to jump ship now though, no one knows what deals may come about after unity 5 is released. Perhaps Unity 4 android pro / iOS licensed for substantially lower cost. If I were you I would at least give Unity until 5 is released then you have all the information to base a decision upon.

 

Firstly, moderators are not Unity staff

Secondly, these are my opinions, as a person who runs a business using Unity products.

No, only that's the only language businesses can understand. They will not listen to someone having a moan on a forum. I can't speak for Unity, but most businesses will track real hard data, and that's data from people not spending as much.

Ths signal to noise ratio around this entire issue is *so* high, that's literally insane business sense to use forums as a guide for your business decisions.

Especially decisions as critical as this. You're a businessman, yes? if so then it baffles me you'd respond like that.

If you've spent 10k+ and not reached out to unity personally, then are you absolutely sure you know your business? 10k+ qualifies you to have airtime with any business one to one. So phone them. Email them. Reach out. You must know this, surely?

And Unity moderators don't work for Unity. We are individuals that help the community. And I'm pretty sure it's more helpful to you to reach out to Unity directly, in light of spending 10k+ as you put it.

GG is childish at best when I'm actually being helpful and you can't see it.

 

I would say I completely agree with you @masterprompt
Although Unity isn't exactly an expensive engine to publish/develop with by any means, its becoming a decidedly old one. Age isn't a bad thing if the features can keep up but all you've really done (UT) is throw some features (that probably would have killed your 3D PC business had you not) at us and called it $1,500.
Its not so much that fee I have a problem with, more the slightly insulting fact that those features are already 3-5 years old and you want to call it "next-gen" or whatever.

Don't get me wrong, I love the engine and I love how U5 looks but what should have been a small update doesn't warrant one and a half thousand dollars. (not to mention the publishing licences)

 

This 5% is a red herring - yes you'll loose 5% of your gross when you exceed $3000 per quarter but if you are to be successful then conservatively each employee should have $50,000 take home pay per year or the equivalent for the country one lives in.

So using extremely fuzzy math, something accountants or the tax man wouldn't do, to take home $50K you need to make $100K per title per year as the tax man will 'fuzzily' take $50K but before the tax man can take that $50K, Epic will take $5K and, e.g. Apple will take $30K so the tax man doesn't even have access to your $100K. From the $65K remainder, your worker will take home $32.5K to make up for this and get your worker $50K a year (acceptable in most places except in Western Europe, costal Northeastern US, and the US Pacific Coast) you need your title to make $150K.

So this fuss about 5% is silly because that's a bargain compared to trying to get that done and manage that type of engine, business clients, engineering talent, and artistic talent yourself. UE4 and Unity has a steady influx of businesses behind the scenes you don't see in the forums and that's how these game engines evolved to be 'wow' in the first place.

 

It's not rash when it has been discussed to death over several meetings by the team as a whole... We essentially stand at: if we need to dive into UE4 to get a jump on it for Q4 and convert our existing coop game, then we should start now. If we are sticking with Unity, then we need to invest in 2 more 3rd party tools to support what UE4 gives us out of the box.

So you can see, we're getting close to a point where we need to decide. This has been talked about over the past 2 months excessively and eventually the boss is going to ask me for my decision and ask for the cost analysis on why I decided as such. It's a small team, I can only bribe him with lunch X many times before he gives me the stink eye ;-)

 

Hmm... as crazy and biased towards Unity as I am, for some reason have absolutely no problem with this open letter. I think it's perfectly fine you explore other options.

You're making a game, the game engine you choose is key. The real question regarding expenses, is probably what game engine saves you more time. Which one is more productive for your team.
Will importing assets going to be a problem? Can you compile and test things fast? Many things that could halve or double your productivity.
You just gotta take what you pay in Unity licenses, and divide and calculate an average per month, so you can compare it to the rest of your monthly costs. Think living expenses, or salaries, that's the big money drain. You say licenses are money, I say time is money.

 

Yes I agree on his points too - but I don't see how it sends a message clearer than voting with wallets does. In the UK it's a common phrase here. Perhaps that is why he took offence.

 

Umm, we value feedback, regardless of the medium.

Noise ratio would have been higher in the gossip section. Support seemed logical. Using the forum to discuss this seemed logical. Unity's responses to emails are canned.

Not really; I'm a programmer who works for businessmen. Respond like what? that you, a moderator (approved by Unity I can only assume to moderate their forums) would tell me to go elsewhere... to show them rather than ask them? I'm a programmer, I go to a forum to ask questions, I go to a news group to ask questions, I lurk in IRC to contribute and ask questions... Logically, it's better to ask first than shoot so why you would tell me to speak with my wallet before writing an open letter (I did title it open letter to Unity right?) would baffle me sir.

You are obviously taking me out of context. We've spent 10k+ over the last 4-5 years. We have 4 licenses (pro everything) and put out 3-4 products a year none of which puts us in a techcrunch article anywhere near flappybird... What airtime do you presume we have? If we had a multimillion dollar budget sure, Unity would give us some personal attention however if we had a multimillion dollar budget I honestly don't think we would be using Unity either...

Your obviously missing the point.

A matter of perspective sir. Telling me to shut up and go elsewhere (or similar words) is not being helpful; just the opposite.

 

If there is a mass exodus of people from Unity, with people retooling and buying new assets, its already too late to enact positive change as those who have left are unlikely to come back. Basically it is better for Unity to change now/soon before its too late.

 

Will I must of said this a bunch of times so apologies for keep re-iterating the points.

Across the span of games I worked on or are working on, including MMO's, FPS games, MMORPG's and a current RPG. Unity has not been the engine we should of considered or potentially some of our clients, but as I did by my concept in it I wanted the team to continue in this direction (well for a while).

The editor constantly fell over with large scenes due to a lack of 64-Bit editor, there has been Physx bugs reported back in Unity 3.5 that still aren't fixed, the terrain system constantly crashed or stopped working, selecting multiple items crashed the editor. There was a constant need for the asset store to plug gaps and unless released with source could be hit or miss, all shaders for these type's of games needed replacing and so did all the post FX. Whilst I know it falls into the remit of our duty other engines didn't require no where near as much effort. Unity lacks APEX support, it lacks a material editor, there's issues with GC, there should be a fully integrated Blueprint equivalent, we had to use SVOGI instead of beast because exporting the terrain fell over. Occlusion culling was hit and miss in many revisions.

The VFX and cascade partices / matinee portion of UE4 is a VERY! Nice touch.

I could go on and on, but I think you get the general gist of things, I fully understand engine development is difficult and I expect bugs it's what happens. It's how they are dealt with is the key factor.. In essence Unity isn't good for A, AA, AAA games or large development..

UE4 comes along, not only is it cheaper (In some respects) but it provides you with a more dynamic and scalable toolset. They rapidly update and expand said toolsets and UE4 improves every month, on top of that it has more tools to begin with. Do I want to use UE4? Not really, as you said it has a much bigger curve than Unity. But it's not a matter or preference, it's what gets the job done.

I'll check out Unity 5 as I'm paying for it and I hope it will be everything they say and more, but I'm not sticking my money on it.

 

It helps to vent frustration!

 

Will, first off, thanks for your response! I apologize if my original post came off harshly. I'm a programmer, not a PR guy, so forgive me if I have no censor button (or if I uncomfortably stand there in a crowded place haha) :-(

I appreciate the GUI finally being brought through. I have no issues with NGUI other than it feels like such a hack solution to use (no offense to the author of NGUI at all here, he made a better GUI than any of my guys could) but I've longed for what I saw in those videos from you guys. Something native that I don't have to stitch in so sloppily (again, no offense to NGUI).

Regarding pain points; there's always things that can be improved. I feel my wishes are no more important than anyone else's here so I dare not go into them any further than what I previously listed. We can be here for years talking about things that could be put into software to appease everybody so I feel it is better left to it's organic progression through feature requests and usage testing. And know that I fully appreciate the long road that has gotten us [Unity] this far and I don't want it to seem like I'm belittling whats currently available in Unity.

I can understand all that however when you say "tools and services" all I hear is more dollar signs leaving my yearly budget :-(
I use asset server as an example. It's so frustrating to use, we used it for 3 years before finally dumping it for GIT. Granted, we can't do everything in GIT we could do with asset server BUT the headaches are less and our productivity went up 2 fold. That is a "tool" you offered that we had to pay to hate... Hope is contagious but the reality can be disappointing.

Unfortunately our experience shows hints of arrogance... There are bug reports that went unanswered for months. Some our fault, some unreproducible, some ignored permanently. The price point was always worth it, because Unity was doing things for us that other's couldn't for the same cost. But times have changed... Your not the only guys on the block now :-(

Note that my chrome (mac) says it's fully up to date with 34.xxx and this demo says I need 35.x :-(

We know all to well about the dangers of prematurely committing to information publicly ;-) Know that the decision I'm faced with is merely a side-by-side comparison of capabilities vs cost vs resource commitment. I ask nothing more than what your are allowed to provide. Having some information to use in an analysis is better than no information and I completely appreciate your response in the matter!

Your not sounding condescending at all. My saying that UE4 has a steep learning curve is a very [ambitious] statement. The engine/editor is still very immature and although I fell in love with blueprint (as a programmer), I realize that much of the work in UE4 will still be c++ based. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't tearing my hair out at a few things over the last 3 weeks. But, in the same respect, realize that we fully evaluated Unity (back in the 1.x days) before jumping from torque, and that we reevaluate our tools every year but still continue to stick with Unity. So although your statement is taken to heart, know that we don't just haste-fully make a change; even though this thread is only hours old this topic has been talked about for a over a month now internally.

ps. I can only assure you that I like Unity (well, most parts of unity). I was very apprehensive when I was told to fully evaluate UE4 for consideration to reduce cost. (I'd be willing to sign and NDA and pay $100 out of my own wallet to know if the price point has any wiggle room down the road )

Forgive any offenses in this post, I must leave the office and cannot proofread it :-(

 

Ok, so is that a yes or a no? I'm genuinely interested.

I'd like to see some of your work. Please post a link. Thanks.

 

Of course what I state is my opinion and partly conjecture but you can't do that by giving away Unity Pro. They are addressing most of UE4's challenge with Unity 5.

Unity is adding a advertising network that can target advertising better than Google and others can offer. Google is about inappropriate saturation. Cable and satellite television is about advertising saturation. In cable and satellite all manner of inappropriate advertising is taken on to try and make a profit. On satellite, I've seen sexual enhancement product advertisements placed in shows meant for small children they are so desperate to make money (TNT / TBS). Unity needs to be something else. Something more respectful. Being respectful doesn't make you a prude, being disrespectful does get you tuned out though eventually and usually almost immediately when it's face to face. On the internet you have to work a little harder at tuning out such behavior.

If Unity designs their advertising network around the ESRB and various national and international privacy laws I think they will do very well. Legitimate advertisers don't want to piss potential customers with attention getting insults and scams.

I think it would be nice if Unity worked with OS / HW manufacturers and designed and manufactured embedded maturity / content advisory ratings into published games which the host HW / OS would refuse to play if the game exceeded the HW / OS's allowed maturity content ratings. Parents and businesses want this.

Such tech is needed in many work places too, not just schools. And it need not always be about the typical sex or ghoul content - a worker in the fashion industry does not need to be browsing political rants at Fox News or Huffington Post to give a vague general sense the type of things content advisories on those articles should do to aid and foster productive and enjoyable work environments. A fashion worker should be browsing fashion articles. A systems administrator, systems administration articles - that's always been the pretext for allowing internet access in the workplace anyway.

So you see the net effect of content advisories in games and in advertising is better targeted advertising without the intrusive cookie collecting and spying and all manner of disrespectful advertising tactics. It's easy to design a protocol to reject displaying content if it doesn't state what type of content it is as well as a maturity rating for that content. Heck, if Unity is going to design an advertising network they should buy Opera and Ubuntu and engineer a sensible targeted content and maturity rating system into Opera and Ubuntu.

The type of attitude of serving advertisers by respecting the wishes of their prospective clients and not behaving like the intrusive traveling salesman of lore that sticks his foot in the door and barges his way into the house is a advertising model that is due.

 

As a customer with a team of developers, you raise very valid points, MasterPrompt.
I too, and in general the community as a whole are awaiting an official response from UT of some sort.

This is another area where Epic blows UT out of the water. Tim Sweeney and practically the entire engine development team is very active in the forums (nearly chiming in every thread whenever there is some uncertainty or confusion to anything regarding the engine). Here in the UT forums I feel like the community has been left in the dark.. and we get dribs and drabs and are lucky if we get one official thread response in a week.

 

In response to:

I'm sorry but I don't see how I was telling you to shut up. I was asking how posting another "I'm off to Unreal" thread helps matters? I've said: Don't like it, then move on - as you, yourself said you were doing with:

- implying you've already spent a while thinking about this and have moved on. But I would ask you be patient and check out Unity 5 - the editor being 64 bit alone may solve many of the issues you're having.

I also left the door open with "move back" (to unity) - which is quite common - people do check out the latest kid on the block then realise it's not quite to their taste after all. Hopefully, that clarifies things.

I find it interesting that people were happy with their investment until someone came along offering sparkling wares at a cheaper price point. How though, does it justify angst toward Unity - which is a pretty decent product?

 

Umm what? Since when has most of the issues described been exactly unheard of? There's threads dating back months if not years outlining the main issues (I was one of them). Only reason why it's worth a response now is because people finally have choice!. And we had better thank Unity for doing that, because I'm not sure it would of turned out that way without them.

People putting in there 2c is a good thing, they must still have some emotional / preferential thoughts and / or emotions towards the product. If it falls into apathy where nobody cares about Unity like engines before them. Then there's an issue.

There are only three main players in the engine world, Unity, Unreal and CE.. The majority steer clear of CE for obvious reasons. So you have Unreal or Unity! We don't want to see the competition fail they are making our lives easier.

 

Taxes from what? You only pay taxes for the money you own (you don't own that 5%, either Apple's 30% portion). Take it as 30 + 5% from gross sales, would be simpler to understand. Still, If you wanna pay taxes for others peoples money (5% that belongs to Epic) then go ahead, you are doing your gouv a favor with extra voluntary taxes!

 

.

 

And there's complaints over on cryengine and unreal engine 3 going back many more years. It's the nature of game development that no one engine can be bug free or without problems. It's the nature of game development that makes it challenging.

I can list a large list of issues I have with Unity but it doesn't make it any less than a decent product. Because it is a decent product. If you don't want decent and want to go downhill then there's bags of other engines which you could accuse of not being actually decent. I didn't say amazeballs or godlike, after all.

Aside from that, I was referring to the price. People thought it was worth it before UE4, now some people think it isn't worth penuts? It's pretty extreme considering that glittering visuals aren't everything.

Part of what makes Unity so compelling for me is that google is stuffed with solutions. I can reach out and solve pretty much everything. In another engine I can't do that. It may be years before UE4 is at the level of solved issues which would enable me to do that. Being open source helps no doubt.

 

I must disagree here :-( their communication is really no better from what I've seen.

 

My opinion is use the right tool for the right job.

For mobile, web, and tablet I would use Unity because it was built around these technologies

For an AAA game for PC or console I would use Unreal because I would need all the source code to modify and optimise and Unrealis proven in this field.

I wouldn't dream of using Unreal for mobile when the frame rate in the editor can't even run properly on my laptop.

Likewise I would find it extremely odd if I found an AAA company was using Unity for their latest console game.

So there is room for both in this market.

IMO Unity should stick to its strengths and focus on the indie market who are mostly making casual games. (Which require a good GUI but not so much things like Enlighten etc. which are really just gimicks that a hobbyist doesn't really need in their game.)
And Unreal should stick to its strengths and focus on the AAA console market.

 

Personally I don't get the price thing either for people to take advantage of UE4 and not just to play around it's going to cost you in everything else, so why should the engine matter? CryEngine suffered from game breaking bugs. Unity is good for certain things but bad for others, we've discussed that one at long length Hippo. There's a difference between a few cute bugs and a farm of cockroaches..

If you could afford Unreal 3, which most wouldn't have then you could fix it yourself for the most part. UDK well it never really took off did it? ( Yes I know there were plenty of people using it) Unity was still leaps and bounds in everything but OMG GRFX.

We all should know by now fancy graphics tech whilst it helps you sell the game, you have to have a bloody game to sell first ..

You're talking about downhill engines? As I said there's on three worth considering and it's an honor that Unity IS worth considering.

Still I'm a minority, as said I did a hack and slash wayyy back and didn't run into nearly any issues.. It's just not a platform for AA and AAA games. Doesn't make it a bad engine, but it doesn't make it an awesome one either.

I could see small teams of 3 - 10 doing some Epic stuff in UE4, which that MMO we know of was made by three or four people in 8 months or so in Unity (With many issues).. So no reason they couldn't do it in UE4.!

 

Yeah I'm not saying that's not the case. Open Source is pretty much the only way epic is going to keep up. They could keep up with AAA only using the engine because that's support that has a paid solution and experts on hand for. That would never, ever, ever fly for a mainstream product (which UE4 now is).

With that in mind you have got to give Unity some credit here for fixing bugs. It sounds like Unity's been sucking at it but when you consider the vast scope, the number of platforms and users, with all manner of games, then you begin to respect Unity a bit more.

Epic would have failed hard in Unity's shoes and possibly been subject to the same amount of bug whine (if UDK is anything to go by, they already have).

But Open Source. Two words that solve that issue. Did Epic predict this? Should Unity be Open Source? Would that solve our problems? Hard to say, bigger questions than I can answer. But it's certainly done Epic a lot of favours going that route as they likely won't have to solve the thousand or so bugs that remain in the engine because the community will do it faster.

 

I know Unity 10 years ago, and only can say that Unity never answer this type of customer messages, is a hermetic company, if you spend many money in unity licences then try use unity most that you can and try will be update with the less upgrade cost possible, if not then enjoy the new options and low prices in the high level services of the game engines market.

 

AAA publishers are not going to share their bug fixes with other AAA publishers. Indies might, but they may sign contracts with publishers that explicitly don't allow them to share code with others.

I've also seen contracts that explicitly state that open source is not permitted to be used on the project.