The Commercialisation of Unity

First of all, I would like to apologise in advance if anyone finds this to be more of a "rant" than a discussion, I just felt like I should voice my opinion as a designer and see what others think.

Over the last few years we (the Unity community) have seen some huge advancements to the Unity game engine and how UT (Unity Technologies) approach it's community and conduct business in general, and now with the release of Unity 5 on the horizon, these elements from both a business and creative standpoint are more important than ever.

This is my personal opinion so feel free to add what you think, I'm always open to constructive criticism.

I think UT need to engage more with the smaller side of AAA game development, those small groups who have a wild ambition and a unified idea way too big, but might just be crazy enough to make it happen.

I believe that UT and the community could massively benefit by bringing more awareness to the games industry and make larger companies seriously consider Unity as a main engine. This would lead to much higher quality assets being introduced to the Asset Store, while still maintaining the cheaper indie side of things as they continue to engage with the smaller market.
I myself have a great level of ambition and am lucky enough that my hobby is my job, and I believe that UT working with small ambitious AAA or large indie studios could be of huge benefit to UT, the Unity game engine and the community. As larger studios have the money and resources to improve on the engine with UT, the Unity game engine could very easily overtake engines like Unreal, with its already much improved workflow (which in my opinion always bested Unreal's, even with Unreal 4) and constantly improving rendering system, I think that rapid expansion into the smaller AAA market could boost Unity to move even faster than it is now.

As always, feel free to add what you want, voice your opinion on this matter, we are always interested in other designers and developers opinions.

 

I am pretty sure AAA companies like Ubisoft and Blizzard are aware of Unity engine.

Unity is a good engine for mobile and indie games in general. Something AAA companies dont need.

Many companies make engine of their own like Acivision and Valve or simply use engines which are created for AAAs like Unreal Engine.

It's least likely AAAs will make their resources like plugins and 3D models available on the Asset Store. They don't need it because they already make millions off their games, not by selling resources to developers.

I am not trying to create game engine war as it became as ridiculous as console vs PC wars. Unity is aimed to be designed for ease to use, not hyper realistic graphics while UE 4 is aiming towards Desktop market. IMO it's not strong when it comes to mobile.

 

I would assume they are aware of it since both those companies have released mobile games using Unity.

 

@elmar1028 @CaptainScience
Thanks for your input and opinions.
@elmar1028 when I talk about AAA studios, i'm not just talking about the very mainstream studios like Ubisoft or Blizzard, I'm talking about the smaller companies who have entered the AAA world, and while yes, Unity has made a name for itself as a mobile and indie engine, Its quality matches that of many AAA engines in the market today, it has this almost stereotype due to the people who use the engine, not the engine's limitations.

The Unity game engine is much more powerful than most people realise and I am certain that it has in no project ever been pushed to its very limits to see just what it can do, and this is the problem with UT's current business plan.

Yes it is a good thing to stay with the smaller indie markets and industries, but in times of economic uncertainty, smaller companies in the big sea (small studios entering the AAA industry) could hugely benefit from Unity and contribute to its development, larger studios will not have this problem as they have the resources to pay to have an engine developed over 2-3 years, but smaller development teams don't have that luxury, so they go to what looks good according to what they see made from it, not its potential, this is why so many smaller developers to go Unreal, despite its large incompatibility with some systems, badly designed delaying character controllers and general lack of any real optimisation, but they go to it because of what they see it has rendered, which I will admit is beautiful, but if a small AAA studio were to try, I see no reason why the Unity game engine could not reach the same quality, while maintaining its good optimisation and compatibility, and reach larger markets at the same time, saving smaller AAA studios money to develop better games, raising awareness further and thus boosting UT's worth as a company, without alienating the smaller community.

 

I was very disappointed by Unity performance and speed with game like the last Dreamfall or Wasteland 2 when bringing settings up.
I think Unity will have to work on the performance lot more and it shoud be ready for bigger games while using many advanced effects and having lot of stuff in some 3D level. Companies like CD Projekt put a heavy work on Umbra 3 to optimize at maximum the engine. The big difference is that Unity don't make big industry games , this would force Unity to work towards making the engine more powerfull on that area.

Other issue is some big tools and features are missing out of the box.

But it can be possible in Unity 5 perhaps, and who knows some studio will perhaps take Unity 5 and make some big games in 2015 ? It is improving each time so UT5 should go further than UT4.

 

@zenGarden
Could you elaborate on what features Unity is missing? I may be able to clear some things up a bit, we have access to U5.

 

I gather you mean like us? Team of 15, (Semi) openworld RPG split into 2X 20KM2 terrains / cut scenes / shiny particles and heavy amounts of post. I'd love Unity to excel at the forefront of small to large A / AA and AAA games and with John leading the charge now I believe it could be a possibility. The problem is how long? Not turning this into an engine debate, but development of there competitors is rapid with only a percentage of the overall staff.

Question has and always will be why? Yes I understand they have a plethora of platforms and old stuff to support. I believe the reason is Unity's bread and butter is mobile, so if there isn't much gain in our segment then they may not be inclined to make an out of the box powerhouse.

I could be wrong, but nothing has happened to prove otherwise over the last 5 years or so.

 

@Labyrith Studios We can't expect Unity the company to cater to such a wide array of users. They started as an Indie, low resistance game engine, at a reasonable price (free), and I would guess the majority of Unity's patrons got into Unity because of this. Unity's selling point was never the greatest graphics or a rich feature set.

If they start to focus their efforts on AAA studios rather than the average indie dev, they risk alienating their current source of revenue, which is possibly not a wise business decision. To realistically compete with UE4 in terms of features, I would imagine a lot of investment would be required.

All that said, they are still improving, UE5's PBS is a huge improvement. Alas, I fear Unity will always be 3 steps behind the "big boys".

 

As far as I've ever heard, the biggest negative AAA studios have with Unity is that it doesn't scale well in terms of team size. Once you get to a team of twenty, Unity's easy of use ends up taking a nose dive. The easy example is multiple people working on the same scene, it's a nightmare if not planed for. It just ends up being more problematic with workarounds that cancel out the simplicity and elegance that Unity originally started with.

Unity being AAA capable is more about saying that an entire studio of 200+ and a football team can have at it without any explosions that aren't from the particle system.

 

The majority of you appear to have moved to Unity solely due to its mobile capabilities, for us this was slightly different.
The move to the Unity game engine (Pro specifically) was because I could see great potential for its applications and see that it had never been pushed to its limits, where other engines like Unreal have.

And yes, I do agree that Unity may never be an out-of-the-box powerhouse but that is where the studio comes in, if you look at any game engine, they are ridiculously basic at the core, its only little additions by developers that make them what they are, and with U5 coming out soon with physics based shaders and reflection probes, I believe that Unity can reach the same point, the only reason Unity isn't as powerful as it comes is because unlike most engines, it isn't designed to tailor to a specific purpose or genre.

We mainly moved to Unity as it was the only commercial engine with anywhere near the kind of optimisation that we required to keep our products beautiful and running fast, and not alienate those with slower machines.

 

"a wild ambition and a unified idea way too big, but might just be crazy enough to make it happen."

If you're crazy, you can accomplish anything...?

 

Here we go again

 

Basic at the core? We just talking about base (template) rendering functions here because any AAA engine I've ever come across required a boat load of staff and are ridiculously complicated. Even home brew engines are pretty complex.

Got to give Unity a lot of cred in areas, making a multi-platform engine which is simple to use with C# is not easy. Nowadays artists and VFX specialists are needed in bulk: What I've suggested they need to book up the game out the box:

-Material Editor
-Cinematics (cut scene editor)
-Physics point of origin reset
-World creation tool (Automatic tile import / minimap preview with automatic texture / mesh streaming)
-Native Apex support and hair sim
- Upgraded VFX suite
- Better terrain tools and shaders (For foliage) (physically accurate with bump offset, tessellation, sculpting tools for erosion etc.)
- Better dynamic lighting and shadows
- Better post "effects" (SSDO, TXAA, Colour Grading, better DOF / MB / contrast expand).
- Speed up Enlighten exponentially for larger scenes (this might have been done, need to check out the latest Beta).
- Vertex painting materials.
- It would be nice to have SSS built into the default shaders for characters etc.
- Would be very nice if we had an out the box dynamic skybox like CE and UE4. (which most will change, just a good way to learn).
- Some actual AAA examples, there are an abundance with the competition and in some respects you just realise how simple it is.

After that were on the money and were on CryEngine level, I still think CE is by far the best looking engine out there.

Pro's for Unity so far is the forward rendering path for foliage and water etc., performance is on the whole is great. Shader compilation is ni-on instant..

 

Yep the great points with C# supported directly.

Better terrain seems coming as it has been some thread from Unity people about it.
For the rest i think Unity will prefer to stay simple and let people pick up the missing features or tools they need from the Asset store depending on the project.

I don't use Unity for big or medium scale project, but some important features :
Will UT5 be better on performance and scalability keeping a good frame rate when the 3D scenes becomes very filled with assets and good effects like new games (Lords of the fallen, Dragon Age Inquistion ) ?
It's Unity not Cryteck team making big games and the engine, but will UT5 do good enought on performance ?

 

Well I'm not sure, but it can't be any worse than the one were using now. There's a big issues with the asset store and support, throughout the duration of us using Unity a few assets were dropped with the most known being Daikon Forge.

All the ones I've mentioned are pretty much core concepts besides from a couple of niceties and would aid developers with bigger ideas quickly and easily make games at a rapid pace IF they get the performance component right.

But with Unity having a lot of older (PS3 / Xbox / older PC) and mobile going on, there shouldn't be an issue switching bits n' pieces when things get too heavy.

I'd still come running back if the above came into play, I still think Unity is way more productive.