Unity Files For IPO

also current licensing doesnt seem to bring that big of a income:

https://twitter.com/marketplunger1/status/1297988384187650055

 

Maybe the shareholders will push Unity to start making games like Fortnite with it's $9 billion revenue in it's first two years?

 

@Arowx Yeah I really do wish Unity would make their own games. Would give an incentive for them to actually push the engine to the limits and find all the issues that plague us. It's one thing to design a feature, it's entirely different to use it in a real game where anything can break said feature.

So we get stuck trying to find all these bugs that they could have discovered if they simply made their own games.
Heck if they really want to go the route of not taking profits for games they could simply make a developer fund with sales from their games to help projects grow with funding.

I really do love Unity, I just wished they could show the love back by doing things better than the competition.
E.G. - Innovations (Unity [always] lags behind the main competitor), they make cool innovations of course, but before the said innovations ever mean anything the competition has already warped to the next galaxy.

Of course the competition is warping to other galaxy's, they have more money, and they have more money not just because people use their engine, but they actually use it and make games as well.

Like Terrain, didn't unity hire a dedicated terrain team? Yet the Terrain-Tools can't even be found on the Package Manager for the last two versions for me, I have to go in and type in the name to add it to the list and even it is updated like once a year now with something that would probably take an average person an hour to do.

Yeah Terrain is finally getting tree and grass support in HDRP, but it has taken how many years?
This is my point entirely, by the time Unity finally catches up they are just so far behind. They do catch up, they always do, but by the time they do the competition has made giant leaps so Unity never catches up.

Don't take me wrong, I know the Devs are hard at work on the engine, but something has to give. They either need to start making games to fund ambitious innovations or start moving teams around onto critical issues and getting things fixed and then move them to creating ambitious innovations.

Just for example, Lumen and Nanite, Unity has not even a single chance against that in its current state. Granted Nanite isn't a perfect solution, which gives Unity a chance to actually compete, but this goes back to the same problem. The time they finally even get to that point it's already been surpassed by the competition.

 

I feel I should admit - I am being like this because I do have a deep love for Unity, so it just hurts to see it always in the back alley rather than the freeway. I truly want Unity to go blow for blow with Unreal, that is where creativity sparks as you are always having to innovate. It's healthy, it's good, it also gives clients (us) reasons to use an engine.

So please if any Unity employee see's this, please don't take this as me disliking Unity or your work put into it, unity is still my favorite Engine, but at the same time - it's just painful watching Unity always being behind.

Then there's the part that really annoys me the absolute most.
You go to the competition and they buy out companies and then they just let all their users use the content.
Y'all buy out companies and then suddenly we still have to pay fee's to use said service. I mean I get it, money is tight and it's probably the only way to make it work. However, if y'all simply made games this would literally kickstart your budget like crazy to be able to incentivize users to use this engine over others by getting so and so services.

Please just make games, not test demos. Truly show off what your engine can do, even if it's 1 game every couple years, just do it. Make some profit and innovate.

 

You mean like the shareholders of Autodesk keep pushing them to make skyscrapers, cars and blockbuster movies?

 

That's sounds like a recipe for a disaster.

 

Making games is arguably harder than building a game engine / cloud services.

See attempts by Amazon Game Studios, Google, etc. Even with basically unlimited funding, their games are total disasters.

 

Making games is risky but even if Unity creates a task force and makes low-risk games that flop they will still have more actionable data to improve the engine with. Really it seems like a no brainer.

Does anybody here turn in work they haven't tested first?

 

Actually, Unity is making games. They just work on other people's games. They have multiple departments which helps various clients to build games.

 

Well take a look at games made by Amazon Game Studios.. they are pretty much ALL rehash of popular "proven" genres.

They even hire a bunch of industry veterans, former creators of big games like Command and Conquer, and after 7 years don't have anything to show for it except more "cancelled after launch" titles than most failed indie studios.



Interesting that so many mobile devs can copy match-3 type of games and be decently successful at it though. Maybe they can try mobile games instead of AAA?

 

Everybody got to start small and build their way up. Team might have lots of scattered experience but team is more than sum of the parts. That's the missing link most likely. Money can't make everything happen - have to invest time and focus on education and team building too.

Too much leadership that can only see five feet.

 

There could be a problem with this approach as you could end up with like the Unity demos* lots of great studio bespoke tech/code filling the gaps for their game with little to no chance of any of it making it into Unity.

*Most of the big demo Unity does have features in them that are not in the Engine/Editor and are bespoke and sometimes never make it into Unity in a usable state.

IMHO I think this is one of the biggest problems with Unity, it's lack of ownership of domain specific generic solutions. It's so fixated on being a platform that let's the developers solve the problems that it leaves us all recreating the wheel in our own style when we could all start with Unity™ wheel and change/modify/replace it to our own needs and if we then want to sell wheels on the asset store at least we know they would all work with Unity™ hubs.

And the amazing technology that is DOTS is so removed from OOP and the WYSIWYG Unity model that it's crying out for an OO bridge that would make the transition to DOTS easier and arguably simpler than the Entities Components System functional in a class model that is so verbose it's silly (IMHO boilerplate code anyone).

 

And yet, one of your own threads a few months ago was complaining about Unity giving us too many options. People already complain about fragmentation and having to use the Package Manager and stuff like that, which will get far worse if they're trying to also provide a bunch of Lego-style off-the-shelf "domain specific generic" things which must also be chosen between.

I absolutely agree that there are a bunch of problems Unity could be solving for many customers at once, but I don't believe they need to get domain-specific to do it. And nor should they while there's a bunch of near-global wheels which people are already consistently reinventing. Cross-scene references, anyone?* How about a persistence / save game feature - which is not only useful as a feature in games, but is also critical for testing anything of large scope?

* Unity did make a reference solution for this, but it's script level rather than engine level, so it misses out on a bunch of advantages that being made by Unity could have come with.

 

I was refering to the domain of game development.

There are a lot of small to large systems in games that a Unity developer has to make or purchase that could be available within Unity as a standard asset and for about 80% of users that generic version would work fine.

From reusable 3D and 2D common items to code systems that make life easier through to Editor based build systems that streamline and optimise game performance.

Edit: Imagine being able to populate a world with Prefab Unity off the shelf items then go to the asset store and pick the style of assets that fit your game and at the click of a button have the assets convert from default to your chosen game style and just work.​

The Package Manager to me is a lower level set of systems and more along the lines of the code/API platform your using something programmers want to be rock steady to work on not a raft of logs/barrels tied together by rubber bands.

I guess I would just like my Unity experience to feel as though I can reach higher, further and faster becuase I'm "standing on the shoulders of giants" instead of fighting through a mixed crowd of imps, dwarfs, humans, trolls and the odd giant.

 

I just wish they'd support the demos they release, they made a DOTS FPS multiplayer demo a couple years ago that didn't even work with the LTS version of 2019, it was a few versions behind that. And trying to upgrade to LTS it just exploded.

If they'd actually migrate demos to the LTS versions of whatever version they were made with, they'd feel our pain and probably improve some things. And we'd actually be able to use them.

I really hate how fragmented things have become between render pipelines and package manager version intertwining cluster**ck. And ECS makes me want to slit my wrists.

Not sure how I feel if Microsoft bought it, they bought Xamarin, but then again they also abandoned XNA game studio which was similar to Unity without the editor. I used it before Unity in 2008-09 and they abandoned the community that used it.

 

That is not even remotely similar to building your own game with your own team. There is a major difference between providing guidance externally, and actually owning and developing the project internally.

So much so that its not really comparable to say "unity is making games". They very much are not. (Not saying the data they are getting is not useful, just saying its definately and clearly different)

There is literally nothing stopping you from using monogame today. Its not "dead" or abandoned, its very much alive. I would not call opening it up as open source, abandoning it.

 

IDK what do you call when people from Unity join teams on clients' teams and open Unity editor and actually make the games? I call it "making games", but that's just me.

 

That is the same when I follow a tutorial to make a game.

Technically I made a game, except for the important parts which are the entire decision making process.

The point is though, the results show. We can judge a thing by the results it creates. If the results are one way, we can make assumptions about what is going on. Correct assumptions or not don't matter, the results are what they is.

 

I thought Unity making games would be important because they would use Unity's software and services not because they sit around and try to find the fun in random game mechanic.

 

And in the many many iterations attempting to find the fun they will be using the tool like actual developers do, and then they will find ways to design the engine in a way that supports developers.

As it is right now, when I compare unity to it's competitors, Unity more often makes iteration cumbersome and draining. That's the result of them not using the tools directly in real world scenario.

 

I've already said it before, but when you rely on human communication you are slowing things down and setting up for failure.

The ones designing the tool have to use the tool directly in the same precise way the end-users will. Anything less and it will be inferior product to those that do this painstaking process. The results speak for themselves.

One is leading, the other follwoing.

Just use the competitor products and you'll see the difference immediately. No sense in loyalty to anything - especially abstract entities.

 

I don't think this is even remotely true. I personally think Unity is much better for prototyping than any other current 3rd-party engine. If anything, Unity has severe problems with late-stage development, handling big projects with a lot of data. But again, YMMV I guess.

 

If I were to describe the two engines to a newbie, I would say it like this:

Unity is appropriate if you know enough to edit the engine and want to make a lightweight mobile game.

Anything else, Unreal. Plus Unreal is well-designed enough that a beginner will learn it quicker and with less pain by starting out with blueprints.

The common wisdom I gleaned in the last several years was sort of the opposite of this. It was, "unity is the appropriate engine for newbies." But just look at what you see written over and over here when newbies are asking basic questions. "It's not hard, you just have to make your own tools and change the engine."
People came to unity to avoid that sort of thing. That was the whole reason for a game engine in the first place. To help people who don't write software from scratch be able to make games. The end result is to make games, not flex coding knowledge.

 

Well, have you used both?

I have, and like I've said before I still struggle to do basic things in unity. I didn't even consider learning to code in unity something I could do because everytime I tried I couldnt even get into the actual work - constantly fighting engine-level bugs.

A few weeks in unreal and I am able to make entire prototypes using blueprints that i wouldnt even consider trying to do in unity. Seriously I couldn't care less about anything other than developer empowerment, and what I am finding is that using blueprints in unreal I can actually get work done, I can learn new things extremely fast, and I can actualyl finish projects that were roadblocked in unity.

When I say empowerment what I mean is, problems I had to hire help to solve in unity I am able to solve myself in unreal. Time spent fighting the engine in unity has no corollary in unreal (so far). Like, when i open unreal, I just sit and do work for hours and hours and hours. Nothing gets in the way. When I was making games in unity it was more like, debug 80% of the time, 20% do actual work.
And how many hours I wasted thumbing through forums and such trying to figure out the current appropriate workflow. Nobody has a clue what to do and you have to trial and error through things slowly. It's just in a really bad state right now.

 

Then there is also the issue of enjoyment. When you have a really nice tool, you like to use it. YOu look for excuses to use it. This is why sleek, responsive, and logically designed UI is important.

Every time I work with unity I am constantly asking myself, "Why the heck is it designed this way? It is illogical!" And that sours the mood. It makes me dread doing the work. It makes me feel like I am working on a team where other people don't care as much as I do about doing a good job. That's not good!

The fact that unity makes a game engine but doesnt make games is really odd to me. How would you not want to? Where is the curiosity? Where is the love of the craft? It makes one wonder about priorities. Is it just a means to an end? Do they only care about money? That's what it seems like.

 

Unity makes features, then devs make assets to help or make those features better,
We but those assets .. Unity turns around and takes them out or changes them so much..
new assets are required ,, and so on ... It seems Unity makes it so we keep having to
but more and more assets.

Why can they not at-least make the base stuff work.. Like UE4 ..
Good render system. Good terrain system. What is so hard to not do that ??
How about one render pipeline instead of three ? does that make any sense at all ?

 

UE4 gives away free stuff every month as well.. Some months it is like 500-700$ worth of good stuff.
Key difference is this.. UE4 makes money WHEN you make and publish a game.
Unity makes money when you buy assets.

 

That must be the heart of the matter.

Created a business model that grabs too often and too early and has no incentive to see things through to the end.

 

...when you buy subscription or source access license.

It is highly doubtful that the asset store is their primary source of income.

 

This thread probably should have been locked a while ago and IMHO Unity can add value any time they choose as there is a ton of great available middleware they own that AAA cannot live without, such as VIVOX.

(On topic again): I would probably buy Unity stock like crazy right now because next year when DOTS comes back in full force, it's pay day. But I am not Unity staff, so I don't know for sure, but that's a good guess from me. I can't afford that though!

Unity's in a good place, and I've picked it for my game right now.

As the thread's drifted, I have to lock it, but please feel free to make a new thread about offerings of middleware and such.