Discussion Unity ArtEngine is now discontinued.

Was looking through forums and stumbled upon this:
https://forum.unity.com/threads/update-on-artengine.1320831/

 

Two years ago:

 

The desktop app is cancelled but they're working on an online version which will be included in a new subscription service containing most of the recently acquired tools.

 

I see. Any clue on the subscription price?

 

No one knows.

 

For the price it was offered, not surprising.

 

Wow, last I heard about this was they accepted the subscription price was way out of line with the market, or more specifically what existing Unity users were willing to pay and as such we’re going to announce new subscription prices that would be far more acceptable.

I was waiting to see what the new price model was going to be and see if it was worth investing any time in, but well, I guess that’s not happening now, and there is no way I’m going to pay for a browser/cloud solution that can be taken away at any time, for any reason at all. I mean they’ve literally just killed the desktop version but at least existing users still have the application, cloud solution you have nothing! So this kind of move really doesn’t provide any confidence.

This seems to be an area that Unity is constantly failing on. I feel like Art Engine has been the only purchase since TextMeshPro that really interested me and could have provided extra value to Unity. However unlike Epic who buy or create cool tech and bundle it with the engine for free, Unity is obsessed with selling it piece meal to boost earnings

 

They're not really comparable. Unity has never been profitable and Unreal is coasting on Fortnite, Tencent and AAA licensing money. They don't have to worry about how to become profitable. Any new Unity acquisitions will inevitably cost more money. The question is only how much extra money they'll ask and what demographic they are aiming for. The Ziva and Weta stuff they're introducing recently costs literally thousands of dollars a month for several new subscriptions and services aimed at AAA and movie industries.

 

Yeah all true ( though I might debate that Unity should be profitable from the engine/asset store ),but I guess my point is more the perception it creates, which for Unity is obviously a bad look.

This is even worse when Unity market/blog these new acquisitions as being amazing new developments for the engine or pipelines, when in reality they barely effect the vast majority of users if at all and when there might be some overlap the costs are just unacceptable ( again for the majority of users ).

I can't see myself ever using Ziva or Weta due to costs and not really needing that functionality in my client projects, but I would definitely be making use of MetaHuman, Quixel ( actually had a license before it went to Epic ) and Quixel Megascans if I were using Unreal.

I'm not even sure I would honestly expect to get this stuff for free from Unity. Reasonable level of subscriptions would likely be enough to invest in some of them ( hence my interest in ArtEngine if they had adjusted the cost ), but I would also have welcomed Unity promoting these acquisitions with some free content, for example SpeedTree.

In summary I guess i'm a bit annoyed of Unity shouting out about these wonderful acquisitions and even some development tech that ultimately does not affect me or my decade of client work, yet in comparison Epic's announcements have all been appealing in one way or another. So I just wish Unity could move in that direction a little.

 

Yea, none of the acquisitions of the past two years have affected my client work either. Meanwhile, exciting things are happening all the time in Unreal and Godot lands. And news relating to those engines almost always are applicable to the work I do or plan to do in the future, unlike Unity with their loud non-gamedev acquisitions and packages that still can't match features from legacy systems that stopped being developed 4 years ago.

And while I can find lots of information about Unity's legacy systems, anything new in package manager is poorly documented and tutorials often are out of date due to these systems undergoing breaking changes on the regular. It's almost like learning a newly developed engine, at which point I question why should I stick with Unity if I could spend the same time learning a different engine that has its priorities on game development.

I feel like Unity 2023 will make or break the engine for me. A lot of forever in development packages should become the defaults by then and maybe it'll be a bit clearer where management is steering this ship.

 

So what you're saying is that Unreal has been profitable off of successful games? Hmm, it seems pretty obvious what Unity should do. Offer this and other software for free in the hopes that it attracts AAA devs and/or allows a dev to create a game that's a big hit. Sure, it would take a leap of faith but honestly at this point what does Unity have to lose? It's slowly dying anyway . . .

 

A very small number of people participate in traditional "Unity's Impending Doom" discussions on the forum. If you only listen to those, you might get an incorrect idea about actual situation.

 

I'm not saying that because Epic started with games a long time ago when player expectations, manpower requirements and budgets were a lot lower. In today's markets, a newcomer, even with deep pockets, is more likely to flop than not. Just look at all the Amazon's attempts. They have endless money and also a lot of failed video game projects. The big giants are also failing on the regular even with proven IPs. It's a high risk, high reward endeavour and shareholders won't sign up for the possibility of hundreds of millions puffing out into thin air.

What they've been doing so far has been a lot more reliable revenue wise, and they're likely intentionally sacrificing short-term profitability for rapid growth, which is common for IT companies like this.

AAA is not attracted by free complementary tools. The few thousand required for Ziva/Weta licenses and services per seat is already within AAA budgets.

If anything, Unity's growing right now. Especially outside gaming. The only demographic where it's dying might be a select crowd of indies who don't need any of the new, poorly documented tech Unity have been developing for the past 4 years. Unity is becoming increasingly hard to pick up and stay up to date with. New indies are starting to flock to other, simpler platforms which don't have 4 render pipelines, 3 text engines, etc.

 

Fortnite is owned by Epic, all proceeds go to them. This isn't a case of benefiting off the success of others, but rather themselves. The chance that Unity could create a game so successful as to fuel both development and cost in the future is ... 0,00......1%

Would be interesting to know how much the big companies are charged for using UE. Its stated that deals can be negotiated rather than the flat percentage rate of earnings above the threshold, would be interesting to know the outcome.

Considering Epics financial situation, I'd imagine they'll let it go "for cheap" just to gain/retain a strong foothold/dominance in the market.

 

Fortnite made so much money they were able to sacrifice half of that by nuking one big market, the iOS market, to try and secure longer term return, by trying to strong arm this close garden into opening up.

 

You mean that Unity should get 30 years of experience how to make commercial games, and then make one? Cool! Let's see how that works in year 2052, after the company gets these 30 years of experience.

I'm slightly exaggerating, but my thinking is that you can't just "decide" to make a successful game and do it. That very rarely happens. Epic has literally had multiple decades of game development experience -- and you can't quite make up for that by just "hire some people who had that experience" -- as a company you need to have that experience too.

 

Agreed, this is another important aspect that is often missed. Maybe I'm just getting old ( actually I am ) but its becoming increasingly tiring constantly running just keep up with Unity developments. That might not be so bad, but they rarely seem to offer any tangible benefit for doing so. Its not that new tech in general is bad/hard, but that Unity's stuff seems to go through never-ending cycles of breaking updates or straight out abandonment.

Perhaps had Unity continued that from the start, they would have at least 15 years of experience by now

But yeah your main point stands no matter, betting on making a successful game is simply not feasible, even large AAA companies regularly fail to make a game that takes off, even if they get everything right. Still I can't help thinking that perhaps had this been a sub-focus of Unity from the start they may have had a hit.

I still have hope Unity will find a way to resolve all these issues eventually. Having been around for over a decade I remember so many times when they made 'anti-consumer' changes but listened to the community and made changes for the better. I guess time will tell.

 

Also, you don't need to drive the car that you're making in order to understand the steering wheel isn't working . Its of cause preferable, but listening to customer feedback can still go a long way - then deciding a direction.

 

Right . . . I can see how you would draw that conclusion based on the sentence you quoted. But if you wanted to know what I actually meant, you could have just kept reading, because I literally answered my own question immediately afterward.

Now, argue with what I actually said (others have done so and I don't disagree with their points), but please do not misrepresent my words when their true meaning is right there and not open to interpretation.

 

They don't need experience making successful game, they need experience shipping (complete technically ambitious) game. Even bad games teach you.

 

They can buy an existing studio.

 

Cough cough shadow gun cough cough

Back then, anything that got out of this association was ground breaking, technically ambitious rendering on low end machine, largely documented, and slotting nicely into workflow. That was the unity we loved. Punching way above it's weight.

Still the best part of the manual.

 

Or do a publishing deal.
Or do some more creative custom license agreements like epic does with ue5.

 

Well my suggestions to Unity in the past, and including even as recent as a couple of months ago was... if you're serious about game dev then buy a successful AAA studio. Meta, Sony and MS have been doing it on the regular. These studios go for as little as 250m so if they can afford to spend *billions*, they can afford (easily) to buy a small but successful AAA studio.

So your example is baseless. Nobody's been spooling up game AAA dev studios from scratch for at least a decade now, these things are bought and improved.

But they didn't. I don't see the excuse given the piss poor acquisitions in the past. It is 100% clear Unity have no interest in this and continue to believe Accelerate is good enough. If it was, I wouldn't be using Unreal for serious games.

Even Epic bought Fall Guys. Valve bought Campo Santo. Everyone's buying and improving game dev studios.

But here we are, Unity bought in with ironSource for some shovelware that will stop being monetised in a couple of years due to the quality bar being just too wide and the tools just too lacking.

Or maybe people are making this awful bet somewhere that mobile titles will remain small and and Unity will remain relevant.

 

This is a tool they should have given away for free.

 

Honestly, at this point, this far down the abyss of sunk cost fallacy the best thing they can do is become a premier middleware company that supports other engines properly as well. It didn't hurt microsoft to realise that opening things up was better business. Unity as an engine doesn't have the capability* to fully utilise weta, ziva and the rest for years yet, so pimping it as a sub toward at Unity's disillusioned creatives/indies is hilarious and will fail.

Spoiler: *

Unity doesn't scale well. Only DOTS would be able to stream constant data like you'd get from Ziva/Weta/Large AAA assets and this lacks the tooling, testing, research, massaging that only an AAA studio would be able to even start using. Unity isn't going to effectively (meaning it makes business sense) scale without source for very many years yet. That's just how it is. I don't even know if I will be in business by the time they do, so I wouldn't choose Unity to even use these tools with, so any subscription offering should be engine-neutral.

 

Unity should have done what photoshop did..
integrate AI into the engine to smooth out the daily workflow
you don't need to compete with fancy graphics if the process of creating games is simplified

ArtEngine would be perfect candidate to make part of the engine (integrated - not separated sub based)
also all the sunken money on their AI division would not be for nothing

 

You're a smart guy. You know full well that focusing money on game studios is focusing money on the engine. Or is game dev so far removed from your area of expertise?

I get it, you do enterprise and video stuff. Also maybe you forgot that EA is still buying AAA game developers practically every 2 years on average. Next time you enjoy codemasters or racing games you'll also enjoy an EA acquisition.

Anyway, zero people will be angry since they'll be using Unreal Engine 5 like I am. I'm using that engine for high end 3D content because it seems no-one at Unity gets the memo... you aren't going in the right direction.

Unity today, really, really sucks at making ambitious games, and it will be the core reason most people trying ambitious games are still working on them years too long later. You want to talk about customer anger?

Talk about why so many notable studios are cancelling their Unity projects and moving to Unreal, year on year on year. Happy to list 'em. Happens often, after all.

After 12 years of steadfastedly helping Unity, you name one thing Unity ever did for me or for anyone really developing a bigger project? Apart from give the runaround, delays, walls of silence ...empty promises... bla bla bla bla.... nah.

 

That's the thing though, Bolt could've scaled if they didn't discontinue Bolt 2 and integrate and the out-of-date Bolt 1, which stopped development back in 2018. More than two years have gone by and UVS lacks even the most basic features Bolt 2 had.

Anyone who knew Bolt 1, and its state at the time, didn't think it's a good idea. There was a lot of community backlash to the point the UVS product manager at the time bailed out altogether, and we don't even know who manages it now.

We can only guess why they decided to go for Bolt 1 but from what I've gather higher-ups requested Visual Scripting to be engine integrated for Unity 2021.1 and they couldn't do that in time with Bolt 2 because it wasn't finished yet, but they could do that with Bolt 1. So we got a non-scalable solution for a marketing check mark and two years later it's received 0 improvement and doesn't even integrate properly with other Unity tools like TextMeshPro because they're basically rewriting the tool from the ground up. Years wasted because management don't know what the F*** they're doing.

Not to mention historical visual scripting development in Unity. They had their own GO visual scripting solution in development before DOTS hype started in 2018, then they cancelled that because DOTS was the future of Unity and they started on DOTS VS which didn't go anywhere because DOTS itself wasn't anywhere near design complete so they cancelled that too. Then they asked the lead DOTS VS dev to integrate Bolt 1 as a native engine package and write new runtime for it, which he did and then left for another internal Unity team. The new runtime, however, is still nowhere to be seen.

The problem here is not that Bolt 1 doesn't scale, it's that Unity's management can't make a single correct decision when it comes to visual scripting in Unity. In fact, they've consistently made the worst possible choices for the past 4+ years.

I do hope the new hires are actual engine developers and not marketing, sales, etc people because all the main systems in Unity I care about have been developed by skeleton crews consisting of a few engineers at the best of times. At one point URP 2D renderer had only one graphics engineer working on it which is why we can't get basic features like shadow falloff distance to this day.

 

Can you guys please stop putting words in my mouth? If you want to know what I think Unity should do, just read the rest of my post! Seriously, it's not a long post, and I wrote the answer to my question in the next sentence . . .

Where did I say that Unity should make their own games?

 

Funny you said that, apex is doing very well, and had the amazing feat of being a cult fps in Japan, a market notoriously allergic to that genre, and is the only reason the game is on switch.

Ubisoft tried with hyperdscape and failed hard by messing with the structure of the genre too hard. But it's not like they are running out of live service fps or shooter, they cornered the market with Tom Clancy's licenses games.

Add Activision on top, last time I checked cod warzone was doing well.

I mean like, you would think they needed the code source of their own engine, that was already able to make open world and multiplayer before pubg, which is why pubg was built on it in the first place because of those properties.

And since we are bringing apple in the discussion, the audience reveal that epic doing Fortnite and epic doing the game engine were separated entities, which is why the judge cancelled apple abusive conflation between the two.

And there is this misconceptions that cultural product are competitor, like if I like marvel, I won't consume DC, in practice you are more likely to consume both, which is why new game advertise themselves as like X but with Y, to entice player, it's synergistic, the hats in time works because mario established the formula, people who plays mario are likely to play hats in time, and vice versa, and even make cross over fan art or mod, I play Fortnite but I also occasionally play apex.

Quality and fitness to market are more indicative of success. Fortnite and pubg have very very different experience, only the premise of the genre are the same. Traversal, shooting, items, graphics and targeted demographic have zero or little overlap.

 

It was a well-known fact that the tool scales terribly, even before unity bought it. Companies weren't using it, they are using things like behavior designer, playmaker, and amplify shaders editor.

Why Unity bought Bolt? Management issue.

While it's true that plugins typically are made for specific problems, there are more general ones. Things like Odin inspector, bakery, mesh baker, amplify shader editor, shapes, rewired. I would honestly prefer getting better solutions from unity, but I know it won't happen. After all, there is a reason why we have 2 input systems, 3 render pipelines, 2 VFX systems, and 3 UI systems, and people still need to buy assets to replace basics or write in-house solutions.

Honestly, I have noticed that. But I haven't seen any significant progress from teams that got new people.

Also, the company likes to claim there are thousands of people working at unity, but most of these are non-developers and companies unity bought. I would be surprised If more than a few hundred people are working on crucial, currently needed tools.

It's already known (between developers) that unity tools scale poorly. The default way of thinking is to buy an asset or make an in-house solution. Tools like Zenject have become standard because you have to glue dozens of assets together.

That's why I think publishing would be a better solution than buying game developers. There is a lot of know-how behind making a game, which the company doesn't have. It's not only about knowing what is currently selling but also things like what your engine can do, and how to create a realistic, competitive deal.

The best publishers in the market do more than just give money to the studio and sign greedy agreements with short deadlines. They often can provide a dedicated QA studio, a studio to help with making trailers, help create a marketing division just so both companies work together, and even bring experienced developers whenever there is a serious problem with the project.

Some publishers go much further and are looking for teams to do specific projects they have researched and know will sell.

My point is that unity can manage and squeeze some easy money through this.

People tend to say that simply because pubg is in a poorly designed game. They are known for making the worst decisions that primarily hurt the game, then spending at least months fixing them. Also, epic published most improvements they have made for Fortnite. I believe most of the new features and QoLs they made, were playtested with Fortnite at first. I mean, I wouldn't be surprised If the epic was actively looking into the pubg code at some point, but I don't think they've copied anything.

 

Indeed, it's a management issue. Bolt outsold anything else in the asset store by a mile. It perfected the marketing for Unity/coding newbies, who are the main Asset Store audience, and it had the most streamlined UI/UX experience for that purpose. But actual game development is a whole another beast, an entirely different use case the tool was not designed for. Management only cared about the sales numbers.

Bolt 2 was to address nearly all major problems of Bolt 1, though. It was scalable, performant, had all the missing usability and debug features Bolt 1 lacked. It had two years of progress packed into it from 2018 until Unity acquired it in 2020. But Unity threw all of that out the window in favor of integrating a toy for Unity newbies. Now two years later, it's still the same toy it was in 2018, just under a different paint of skin and name.

 

Perhaps this was hyperbole, but these numbers are way out. iOS wasn't "half", it wasn't even one of the top grossing platforms, which are PlayStation and Xbox by a large margin. It was the 5th largest, at around ~7% (source).

I disagree. A game that's technically impressive is nice, but it's not enough on its own, and that's one of the things that making a bad game teaches you.

I need my tools to support my capability to make a game that is successful on multiple fronts. Not just technically, but also in whatever other ways engage with my players. And, frankly, unless we're a big AAA studio the chances of engaging an audience on primarily technical grounds are slim. Those audiences are already well tied up with Call of Duty and Horizon and Battlefield and Assassin's Creed and so on and so forth.

The ways that we need our tools to support us is in enabling high-end creativity. Unity used to be awesome at that compared to the competition. As an example, the ability to make an edit in an off-the-shelf Editor, then press play, and be running the newly edited thing in seconds... that was fantastic. To be fair, it still is fantastic, but everyone's doing it, so it no longer sets Unity apart from competitors*. Back in the 2000's iteration time was a huge issue for many developers, and Unity solved it. Where Unity is falling behind, in my eyes, is identifying the challenges that small- and mid-scale game developers face today and addressing those.

I'm always one for making custom tools and systems for my game, but I really ought not to be doing it for stuff that's genuinely common. Epic are doing a great job of identifying stuff that's common and just dealing with it. It's worth pointing out that they have an advantage here in that their focus is narrower than Unity's. Where Unity is trying to help everyone do everything (and, I'll be honest, doing a decent enough job in that context) Epic are specifically helping people to make AAA-looking 3D action games. That gives them a very clear context in which to solve problems.

Hence the contemporary acquisitions of MetaHuman by Epic, and Ziva + Weta by Unity. From the press release alone I knew exactly what problem Epic had just solved, for who, and had a fair idea about how it would impact a game developer's day-to-day work and a small- to mid-sized studio's capabilities. It's taken months to get a video of a couple of lions from Unity and, while it's really cool from a technical perspective and I'd love to play with those tools, I'm still not entirely clear on what problem it's solving for me in the broader context of wanting to create and successfully commercialise products in a dynamic and competitive market.

* There were competitors back in the mid 2000's who also did this, but they either had significant shortcomings elsewhere or price tags which were inaccessibly high to many small studios.

 

I'll be glad seeing yours too. But you made a reasoning mistake, revenue from the games isn't tied to number of time played:

- If the player paid 50£ upfront, 2000h or 30mn of play don't change your bottom line
- if the game is a free to play, probably 80% of the install base isn't paying and is the content for the remainder, and still they pay when they need the benefit, be it skins or booster. Hence the reliance on fomo for timed cosmetic and loot box for everything. Heck they even have a 'stop playing' mechanics with energy type of resources that only fills up back when you are away. It encourages consistency, IE coming back checking the game, over pure hours. See genshin impact or any mobile game, or the battle pass system with a free track and a premium track, that unlocked week by week to throttle player progression, like Fortnite.

And on top of that, number of hour doesn't translate necessarily into enjoyment. You gotta play the game your friend play, when they are available, which is more about consistency than hours. That put the burden on dev to have the dreaded content threadmills, hence the themed seasons structure to encourage checking back. You don't want your player to burn through the content too rapidly or burn out the game. That's also why they tend to have story that never resolve, but build up to have big epic events per seasons, like honkai impact.

Also player putting big hours tend to be a threat when there is competitive design, it create unbalanced in the game, so they have mechanics to subtly push player. When I pull long hours in Fortnite, I notice the bot are more agressive, they put me with higher tier player, the loot are less good.

But if I'm away for a long time they definitely hand me over a victory, and after near win I'm definitely getting good loot with rare version of weapon I tend to favour. After 1895h of game time, from season 3 of the first chapiter, and roughly 60£ spend on the game, you start noticing the pattern.

Source, any good talk about game design monetization from the casual, then Facebook, mobile and finally current free to play games.