Question For Unity Developers

Hello Unity Developement Team,

I have a little question for you, why you dont developate some video games with your engine, like epic games do with their fortnite.

Your demo's Team is doing amazing work with megacity or fps sample project ..why not enlarge this team and affect them on full time video games developement ?

Thanks

 

They don't want to compete with their customer ... that's the official stance, despite the customers asking them, to make a better engine.

 

This. How would you feel if you were in the middle of making a battle royale game that you felt had an awesome chance only for the company developing your game engine to come out with their own that completely owned the market and left you picking up the scraps as a "copycat"?

 

Have you seen the volatility of the games market?

 

The issue Unity would need to worry about is making something amazing enough to generate a lot of excitement in a future and unknown market situation. With Epic's Fortnite, they completely failed initially. Basically nobody wanted to play Fortnite. When Epic saw PUBG's success, Epic decided to rebuild Fortnite as a cartoon clone of PUBG plus the building mechanics of the original Fortnite game. Then Epic had a hit game.

Would Unity be willing to do the same thing? For example, would Unity be willing to build an entire game and then pivot to copy the success of the most popular game that was already using their engine? And if Unity was willing to do this, why would any developers want Unity to do this? Epic was already getting paid good sized royalties from PUBG, since PUBG was built using UE4. Epic chose to attack one of their success customers. Why should developers want Unity to do the same?

 

I take fortnite Just for example but a full game like the 3d game project could be great too

 

Fortnite didn't just happen.

 

Epic Games has always been a company who's primary business is developing and selling their own video games. Licensing their engine is a side business to them; a way to generate more revenue off of the engine they built for their own games.

Unity has an entirely different business model. I find it unlikely that Unity could deliver a Fortnite level success without the 2+ decades of delivering quality games that Epic had before they released Fortnite, and without a complete restructuring and reprioritization of the entire company.

 

A game like Fortnight Fortnite would certainly flop because everyone who wants to play a game like Fortnite will just play Fortnite instead.

 

The statement, "We don't want to compete with our client", I heard it from 10 years ago when I asked why not add this and this feature into the editor. So it's not just about making a game but they used it on improving Editor itself. I heard the same statement from GDC Keynote again by that EA dude. I was speechless. What a lame excuse.

The truth is that they just don't have the capacity to make the full game. And even if they do, they are afraid of the failures. If they succeed, it's possible to make a couple of competing developers unhappy but the millions of developers benefit tremendously from lots of improvements to the Editor and the Engine.

I never heard of complains that Epic making their own games other than PUBG but that's only after Fortnite had a miraculous comeback from the initial failure. Right now, UE has really solid Network engine from the Fortnite development being back-ported to the engine.

So, my petition is that "Please do make a AAA game and feel the same pain as we do!". Now, it's the time to step from the excuses and I don't want to hear the statement ever again. How could you improve anything if you build something that you never use?

 

If I may add one more thing. Here is the painful truth.

They don't make much money on our success, thus are not interested. They are more focused on selling licenses and assets. Having a really good game engine that has everything like UE, they will lose lots of potential income. Thus the statement, "We don't want to compete with our client"

 

The 'sad truth' is that what you have written here is just not true. Many of the unity engineers and managers are working on games on the side. Also the demo teams are creating game-level examples. Developing them into a full fledged game wouldn't help 'tremendously' anyone, it would be a giant waste of time and money and resources. Resources which can be spent on developing the editor and the systems instead or QAing the editor or such systems.

Because they're a game making company and they always were. They aren't just making a game engine. Unreal (the game), do you know what it is? From 1996?
Unity should not start to make games. I would be really angry if half of the tech team would be moved to make some AAA junk instead of developing the DOTS so I can work on my AA junk. Capeesh?

 

Epic is a game company first, that happens to sell an engine afterwards. Its been this way forever. As a result their engine is great if you happen to want to make the same kind of games Epic makes. The whole engine philosophy feels like its built around a FPS concept. And while you can make other games with it, you are going to have to do a bit of rework to get going. And good luck getting a feature added that Epic doesn't need to use in their games.

Unity is a game engine company first. They make all of their money off of selling licenses. This leads them to build features as widely as possible. They aren't set up to be good for a single type of game. They are set up to be decent at every type of game.

Unity probably has the technical skills to build a game. But its unlikely they have the design skills to make it good or the marketing experience to make it popular. Its unlikely Unity could produce a chart topping game. And having a mediocre "made by Unity" game is probably worse for their revenue model then having no "made by Unity" games.

Plus I don't want my license fee to go to pay someone else to make games. That just feels wrong.

 

Unity does have several internal game development teams, and produces a fair amount of content, both for testing and as resources for developers (see the learn section, blog and asset store for content released by Unity).

The question has been asked and answered many times. Search the forums for responses from Unity staff. Closing for massive redundancy.