Unity is laying off staffers

Every creative person should go to work at Moon studios who made Ori. They have the most excellent vision how you can push Unity to your needs.

 

yeah, ask ubisoft about that

 

Did they fire staff or staffers. If they booted all HR departments everywhere that would be a step forward for company profits everywhere. Let the managers hire their team based on merit..not the HR department karen's politics. For cripes sake. They have soft ice cream and a slide at Unity HQ. Yer luring the wrong folks to work at yer company with perks like that. Howzabout the perk where you take that money spent on frivolities and give me a raise. I will buy my own ice cream and do my own activities when i am off the clock.

 

It impacts Unity's high end users not one iota. All the work on all the Gigaya systems they spoke of meant nothing to me and the last ten+ contracts I have executed. Not that I am high end but the folks paying good money for Unity created product do not want to make games. Automotive, architecture, NLP, animatronic and stage lighting control, AR apps for in field repair, military simulations, them e park rides systems control and visuals. They are the crews forking over 5K a year per seat for the Industrial bundle. The folks wanting games post things like "Wanted - passionate Unity game developer with least five years experience-multiplayer rogue-like shooter with configurable characters and weapons choices - 3 to 6 months - fixed price 2500 bucks." Yeah, right pal. Mr. Passionate here.

Unity started as a game engine. The community pushed it's limits and 20 years later it is better referenced as a 3D realtime interactive content creation platform.

 

I gotta say. Eff Unreal. I don't want a commie company getting it's grubby mitts into my OS and I will be damned if I open my company books to them. Oculus is another SOB. I went to clean out my C drive to get space back and found 47 gigs of oculus logs. They were storing up to 750 mb per log. To stop them you have to totally remove all vestiges of them. They will start up with your services and begin logging.

Can Unreal get rid of that same ole same ole sepia tone with coloring look that every inexperienced eye thinks looks photoreal? Unreal is a Samurai sword. Unity is a Swiss Army Knife. I prefer utility.

 

Exactly, right?

 

lol. not blue enough for my eye. Hacks.

 

Not wrong here really, outside of that it's microtransaction filled korean games or something.

But it's not like games couldn't help with Unity's image. IMO it all works together.

Well I didn't say i would switch to unreal, for me I use Unity and URP cause of scalability. WebGL , Android to high end PC visuals all in the same project.

But also Unreal games have a bad habit of all looking the same to me. Unity might be more difficult to get visual fidelity, but I have way more shader and effect control.

 

Where are you actually getting this from?

 

Epic Games has their own perception problems. For example they're known to crunch for long periods of time.

https://www.polygon.com/2019/4/23/18507750/fortnite-work-crunch-epic-games

 

TBF, Gigaya never meant much to me. I saw that previous FPS Sample project for Unity HDRP, and it was a pain to open and decipher. Tons of custom stuff and workflows everywhere. It was more confusing than helpful.

Perhaps Gigaya would have been better, but ultimately, I don't think these kinds of projects are necessary. They are worked on and then abandoned, making them outdated and deprecated almost as soon as they're released.

What Unity and users need is something like what Unreal Engine offers with its Content Examples project. In it, you have access to hundreds of tiny example scenes, each one demonstrating how to use a specific feature in the engine. These samples are maintained and updated with the engine, making them always up to date.

When you make a game and have questions, you want direct answers. Gigaya and FPS Sample project aren't direct answers. They'd require you to invest a significant amount of time to understand how each one is set up and how it does things. With tiny examples, like those in the previously mentioned Content Examples project, it's easy to immediately understand how something works and how to adapt it into your own workflow. That is a lot more valuable than huge sample projects.

 

Gigaya served a different purpose than their past projects. It was intended to teach them not us.

 

I think it's unfortunate that we're even in the situation where we've given up hope of them listening to us complain about fundamental core issues and instead have to rest our hope that they'll see the glaring flaws themselves when they are forced to use it for anything other than barebone demos. Given how easily they shut it down I have to imagine they weren't set up to use the project's results in that way anyways. Really sad to think about...

 

Not a daytime scene. I guess I wasn't specific enough but i really could give a flying hoot. The lighting was grey and the environment was filled with colored lights. This apparently gives it a blue cast <sarc> because Hollywood lights night scenes with a blue light. Made it look CGI. Nice meshes. Too bad they can't not destruct a well hierarchied model when importing and leave it hanging arounds in the object browser in dozens of places. Documentation sucks and I am a programmer, not a developer. I do not want to visual script. My tasks to put bacon on the table would be giant masses of spaghetti even if the engine could do what i wanted without massive jiggery pokery. Crashing every five minutes didn't help me acclimate to it. It is not well documented and the community is nowhere near as expansive as Unity's. If you run into a snag with Unity someone has posted a workaround or solution somewhere for the most part. You want to use it go ahead. Not my problem. You want to spend the money on art assets to produce such impressive work..well I hope your VC has a ton of spare cash around. You are never gonna get that level on your own.

 

I think it's more sad how we've all been telling them about the discoveries they had with Gigaya for literal years at this point but it took them actually working on it to acknowledge our issues in any capacity.

 

With a team around 10 and a minimum 100k a year per employee I guess they learned it may be a hell of alot cheaper to just read the forums like one of the desktop platform engineers who pokes his head in from time to time to see what the community has to say,. Then he gets back to work presumably earning his paycheque. Unity needs to stick with it's core work and not become another social justice climate change wielding fix the world with their product and go broke company. All this fixing the world ain't doing anything but breaking it. Hopefully the staff remaining are focused engineer types.

 

People don't have the time to tell the whole story on a forum.

Theres many issues I have where they ask for a working example but I just don't have the time for that.

Reading the forums is not remotely adequate, asking devs is not adequate. With more perspective it might be reasonable, but clearly that perspective is still lacking.

 

But that's what Unity is. And that's why I use it. I'm looking for a high quality, stable, affordable game engine. One that doesn't get in my way when I want to do things my way, but also offers plenty of systems, tutorials, and assets (from the store) to help along the way and learn. And that's exactly what Unity is. I don't want some out of the box "one size fits all" PRODUCT like Unreal.

Unreal Engine is a PRODUCT (and worse than that, it's a product used to advertise their own products), it's like buying a game. It's some feel good tourist thing for amateurs and lazy people who have three weeks to do something. It's more like RPG Maker or Mario Maker than anything else. A lot of us aspiring developers would be so boned if Unity ever turned into that.

If I ever stopped using Unity, it would be to make my own engine, not because a "better" one came out. We're talking about the "top of the industry", but they all use their own solutions, because that's the best solution. I think Unity was and is a huge break through in bridging the huge chasm between beginner (especially self taught) to professional.

 

...Also, there are bugs that has been reported here and with the "bug report" tool and they have been there for years now, like, they do not care

 

Unity is a product too, my guy. It is literally nothing BUT products and services. That's how this S*** works.

 

Yeah, I'll be honest that whole take was wild. The engine that gives full source code access is more of a "product" than pay-for-basic-functionality Unity? The engine that a significant number of AAA studios choose as their primary engine is somehow only for lazy amateurs?

Like...tell me you know nothing about UE without telling me you know nothing about UE.

 

I found few members of gigaya team are still there in the staff list (maybe their profile wasn't updated) , does anyone know if they were moved to some other "important" places or are they going to work on gigaya and release it atleast

 

You miss the point of Gigaya, it was not just meant to be another example project for the community, it was the result of a long-time community request to Unity to make their own games all the way in (releasing it on stores and maintaining) so they can see first-hand the actual flaws and needs of the users in the wild with the engine, and as this Unity's ex-employee mentioned in Twitter the amount of feedback collected from the community is nothing compared with the amount collected by these internal teams with these type of projects which results in improves for the game engine, so yes, this will be a big loss if gets canceled.

 

This sort of stuff comes with major tradeoffs.

Source Code tinkering require skilled C++ programmer, and won't help you by default.
Documentation is far worse.
Some things that are trivial to do in unity are incredibly difficult or impossible in unreal. My favorite example so far is AssetPostProcessor.
Design is inheritance-based which is a huge negative.
Focus on blueprints is also a huge negative for code-oriented users.

But we're heading again into unity vs unreal territory, and that generally results in a waste of time.
------
Both engines could improve by miles though.

Unity could improve by adding C++ support and bindings, providing source, and providing royalty-based license as an alternative.
Unreal could improve by ditching blueprints, improving the docs, adding a normal scripting language, exterminating discrepancy between scripted and C++ apis, adopting component-based architecture, fixing their PHAT editor, etc.

Both engines could use multi-world support where several worlds that containt scenes are running in parallel with their own physics.

 

Absolutely not and this is a lie that can only be born out of not listening to this feedback in the first place.

We have seen Unity ignore feedback. We've even seen Unity outright get rid of a feedback process. We had a whole feedback site that was ignored by Unity for literal years, with some stuff on there having been there for nearly a decade. Gigaya was never anything more than them actually having to acknowledge this first hand instead of being able to handwave away the community.

A great example is how, ever since dx12 was implemented in the engine, developers were complaining about how many performance drawbacks it had, how frequently it just broke, and how those things only started to get fixed. The same thing happened with graphics jobs, a long complained about feature. This feedback would be invaluable if anyone actually listened. I still contend that Gigaya is an expensive boondoggle that could have been completely avoided if they paid any attention to the people using their engine.

This has been a problem for years and pretending Gigaya was necessary shows just how used to it people are.

 

At least it was a step in a good direction, that in the end was destroyed by suits and execs that are out of touch.

 

Those same suits and execs who are out of touch are likely the reason that community feedback languished as it did.

 

The biggest mitake was to install ex-EA CEO as Unity CEO

 

I agree with you, the problem with Unity don't listen to the community is real, this is clear with just the recent tries of shutting down Unity Answer, also they getting rid of the Unity Feedback site, which shows their position on the matter, but that is not related to the point of Gigaya.

Gigagy or Unity releasing their own games in general is needed and pretending that it is not, just shows how not experienced with Q&A testing or developing user tools someone has, getting feedback from users is of course essential but getting them first-hand also is, so canceling it just throw more fuel on the fire, so now they don't just not listen to the community but also they get rid the team that collects feedback internally.

 

I don't think the CEO alone is responsible for this, he must have given the power to the technical head for deciding whom to fire

 

In general hiring that person as CEO was a mistake, not that particual situation that happened now

 

I Agree

John Riccitiello was not just hated at EA by the user base for his consumer-unfriendly policies, but he also step-down after leaving the company rated as the worst American company ahead of companies like Bank of America, Wells Fargo, etc... which says a lot, he also said last week that no-layoff was planed so he is also trust-unworthy, he fille Unity IPO which in my opinion was not a good decision for the Unity mission of "democratize game development" since being a publicly held company encourages neurotic and self-destructive behavior just as we are seeing now where the executives don't listen to the community and instead just focus on the investor interest and cut expenses to maximize revenue.

At this point, I would prefer Microsoft did acquire Unity.

 

Actually that would be great. MS changed over the years for good imo, so they could straighten the engine...dreams

 

A CEO's sole purpose is to expand the business. He has done an excellent job in doing so.

 

Well the stock price is not in good shape even considering the recession + the customer trust is kinda low. The price of expanding business the way it was done could be quite sagnificant.

 

I wouldn't put too much trust in Microsoft if I were you. They are already doing some shady censorhip nonsense in minecraft, tried to put ads into File Explorer in Win11 and so on. I believe corps like MS shouldn't be trusted, I wouldn't want Unity free tier license to be similar to that of Simplygon

 

Lol, really now? A feature to report misbehavior in chat (like what about any multiplayer game out there already has) is "censorship"?
Claims like those are drastically watering down the meaning of censorship for the cases when it truly matters (when it's politically relevant)...

 

Unity Ads were massively affected due to a change in policy at Apple.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/2...ion-in-market-cap-as-privacy-workaround-fails
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/u...nges-lead-to-self-inflicted-wound-11652291876

 

Not really report feature only. They also forbid to write stuff on nameplates with lists of words that are weird to say the least.
Also minecraft may not be the best example, but lets also not forget about drama around hot reload in .NET which wa supposed to be Visual Studio only feature

 

Microsoft is the lesser evil here. The other companies that would be interested in Unity are Adobe and Autodesk.

 

Well this I must agree with, Adobe would be far worse. Though I think ideal solution would be for Unity to just sort their problems out... Somehow

 

Knowing this is Unity, I'm unironically waiting for the blog post, that advocates the importance of inclusiveness and diversity in a mass layoff.

My well wishes go to the over 225+ people who got sacrificed in the name of shareholder profits.

 

Like the fact the new input system does not work with windows touch.

An issue that's been there for years apparently.

 

As a user of Win 10 Pro, I'd prefer Microsoft to stay the hell away from any publicly available game engine.

There are worse options than Microsoft, of course (for example, Autodesk and Facebook), but even Microsoft is not a good option.

 

And now u have virutally EA.

 

Yeah, we really don't want Bing search results from every search box and ads in the assets window.

 

Not to derail the topic but I still have no idea what people mean about ads in windows. But I guess the complaining keeps it so whatever it is it's so minimal I still don't see it

Anyway...

Imo Adobe isn't bad but suffers from the same issue Unity suffers from now. Old bloated software. But at the same time the substance acquisition has gone great. Added features I wanted for years.

 

Yeah, neither Microsoft or Adobe are known for listening to the community. I don't know if any of the tech giants are. At best some visionary benevolent dictator could take over the development and make things right. Not very likely though.

 

They where considering/testing adding adds. Its still way to early to implement features like that (the uproar would be too big), but they will keep trying.
It really is a war of attrition, and people will loose ground inch by inch. The state of the free to play market would've been unthinkable 10 years ago, today it's a reality; bound to get worse.

Autodesk would ruin Unity. They've spend 20 years twiddling their thumbs updating icons in 3dsmax and Maya, charging premium prices - buying and killing off the competition (like softimage/xsi).