Unity to cut another 600 jobs

Yeah, but on the other hand they have a history to abandon .NET-based game frameworks/engines, Just remember XNA the warrior princess.

 

Monogame is still perfectly viable and been used by many games, its still being used by many to this day. XNA may have been abandoned by microsoft (as they did with MRTK too) but it was at a point where the community was ready to take over at least

 

No!!!
We had enough crashes already.

 

The Unity engine is a sinking ship, and all lines that trace to its demise runs all the way to the moment UT went public. It's obvious the investors care little for the core product, where the only value they see is the extensive customer base that publishes many mobile apps.

You can see from their "catch and release" model on providing tools to the development community; basically just buying things from the asset store and throw it up without even a review to bring it to the standards of the Unity editor itself. I've had to fix bugs in ProBuilder that existed since Unity 5, before it was an official Unity product.

The whole collective of C-suite management have no idea how to run a company like this, and they don't care. If you're running through top-tier talent from the industry while the main product you're selling languishes, it's obvious that the top management are providing no direction. They are only looking to exploit the existing user base with pointless frivolities that don't help people ship products.

I've spent a non-insignificant portion of my career on this engine, and to see it dwindle since Unity 5 is causing me second-hand embarrassment. At this point, the only thing that might make me consider Unity for the next project is if John Riccitiello and his buddies are fired. Even then, I would need some time to see if the next set of executives actually have a basic set of competencies and understanding of their core product.

 

That was over a decade ago.

 

You do know investors were involved before the company went public, right? Unity wouldn't have achieved what they have if it weren't for investors as they only just recently starting making money. Without that capital they'd likely still be a small time engine limited to a few platforms making games like Gooball.

 

Obviously. UT had decent investors then that understood the product, and we're clearly not at that point now.

 

The new CTO might improve things but he's also Riccitiello's man from EA by the looks of it. The blog post does mention they're working on improving editor development speed, however.

 

After reading Wikipedia and Linkedin I'm not getting that impression at all. Luc Barthelet was with EA from 1998 to 2008. He apparently came from Maxis. John Riccitello was the COO of EA from 1998 to 2004 and then the CEO from 2007 to 2013.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luc_Barthelet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Riccitiello

He's worked on a large number of games as far back as the early 90s.

https://www.mobygames.com/person/29352/luc-barthelet/credits/

By comparison the former CTO Joachim Ante has largely only worked for Unity.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/joachimante/

 

Once you get one turd in power it's all over. They'll get rid of any threats and bring in more allies. It doesn't matter what they say - these people like this are psychopaths. They say whatever you want to hear.

People like Rich don't build companies or products, they plunder them. What I don't get is why anybody cares about the corporation? Like why arguing for or against it? What is it to you? We are all indie developers here, right? The only question is whats the most appropriate tool to make my project with? Maybe if you are like a freelancer or professional programmer you want to be relevant with the most job worthy tools? But that's like a different discussion compared to speculating about unity's stocks and such, isn't it?

 

So I guess this means we're never getting the automatic MMO button at this rate.

And ironically it's not out of the question GPT-5 will be able to throw a fully functional template for you to get started

 

It sounds like you're separating the game's engine from the game's content, and saying that because Unity didn't make the content, they shouldn't be entitled to a royalty. What I'm saying is, unless you can ship your game without any bit of the engine present alongside your content, then the game you're shipping physically isn't "just" your content. Get what I'm saying?

Now, don't get me wrong: a 0% royalty is obviously better than a 5% royalty, but I also think that a *small* royalty on my game in exchange for a bulk of the technical side of my game being supplied to me (e.g. an ECS system) is a fair deal, too.

Game development being risky doesn't erase the fact that you're still using their tech in your product. In fact, this "risk" is a risk you're probably only willing to take specifically because a bulk of the technical work has already been done for you.

Not trying to criticize you or anything, but it's odd to say that they shouldn't be entitled to a royalty even though part of the product you're shipping is their tech.

As with whether or not Unity should implement a royalty model, like I said, a 0% royalty is obviously better than a 5% royalty. But if Unity doing that did lead to more improvements to the engine, I wouldn't mind it at all. But, as many people have said here, that doesn't seem like it would be the case.

This is a fair reason to not to like royalties, and one that I do agree with, myself.

While I don't like reading about Riccitiello, Unity's stocks, business strategies, etc., etc., it does enlighten me as to why Unity is in the state it's in.

 

I think the issue here is that on a large project whose success is guaranteed royalties are highly likely to reach absurd values. It is not a problem for an indie which will never hit the threshold, but it is absolutely a problem for larger companies.

Another issue is "entitled". Whether they deserve royalties, is a matter of viewpoint. They certainly can ask for them in exchange for the software, but if people don't like the offer, they can walk away.

 

correct me if i'm wrong, but, IMO being a person with love for the software, being skilled with lots of experience and having all the heart to improve the engine is totally useles if the leader does not want to improve the engine or it is not his priority... IMHO (very old post because my internet service went down xd)

 

Unity has the great advantage of having by far the solidest foundation, that is Unity's workflow itself, most homogeneous and versatile and easiest to expand into. They have the chassis, now they need to figure out what to put on top.

And if they're smart they're already getting into the AI game. Implementing the ability to automate as many processes as possible. The sheer time saving is a game changer.

Whoever nails this first (in a way that is the most useful) will be the winner of the next decade.

 

Totally fair. I don't actually know enough about the details to have an overly informed enough opinion about it anyway. I was probably being a bit reactionary about it. Having professionally shipped games for over two decades, my hackles get a bit up when folks who haven't made games, offer input/opinions on that topic. (mostly gamers). I imagine it is like folks offer their business advice/demands to billion dollar, industry defining software companies.

 

Certainly depends on the game(s). But the success and return on the game is entirely dependent on the developer. And Unity is going to get paid either way. Especially on a large scale. They are getting revenue for use of engine, and ongoing revenue for use of the tools and engine after the game has shipped. We had our own engine for many years, but the speed and diversity of platform updates/management was impeding our ability to release in a timely manner. Using unity to solve those problems is a worthwhile expense, and if they keep doing what they are doing, we will keep paying for their service. But since they are not actively involved in the parts that differentiate a game from making 10k or 10mil, sharing that difference doesn't make sense. We don't have any direct input into what goes into the engine, and they don't have any input into what we produce. Not a partnership. They are providing their service for a fee that varies based on the needs of the developer. (1 license, 100 licences, service packages, enterprise packages/services, etc). Like any good business, you should be rewarded based on your work. Not on an abstract return based on something not in your control (your customers work). It shifts the goal from providing the best tools/services to all customers, to one where the customers with best chance for succeeding.

Edit: Moreover, the revenue and success of a game is often massively impacted by marketing/UA/adspend. None of that has anything to do with the software/engine used, and since more royalties are calculated on gross, basically a percentage of outgoing expenses would essentially be going directly to unrelated software. They simply aren't on the same journey. (and they have services for that, where they do make a percentage, a royalty on top of that would be... unethical)

 

Under Riccitiello EA was voted the worst company in America. They got rid of him, they recovered. I don't get people saying Unity is doomed and can't do the same.

 

I crossed a line with my prior posts, I'm hoping you guys will allow this revision that I've taken care to remove inflammatory blathers:

Why might features be sluggish in release as of late? The impetus to excellence has dimmed in today's culture at Unity. I am not discounting the value of the causes they currently spearhead, but I post as a developer interested in an engine capable of next level product. We want to see the fruits of a Unity team firing on all cylinders taking strides towards a content-creation machine of limitless possibility.

Recently I took a look at the twitter feeds of Unreal vs Unity and the differences were stark and immediate. It hits hard to see the disparity of value these heads of industry put on their Engine.

It takes only a glance:
Unity Engine Twitter Feed
Unreal Engine Twitter Feed

Does Unity know they're managing a game engine? I went back 3 years in the timeline and didn't see anything of note regarding the Unity engine apart from the WETA acquisition. None of it was directed towards exciting engine news. If you go into the Unity feed hoping for interesting news about the engine, you're going to be sorely disappointed.

The "Digital Twin" account was also underwhelming: https://twitter.com/digitaltwin

Expected at least some interesting bits on digitizing business data. How many resources have gone into this project? Why are there so few interesting videos demonstrating how to visualize data? How is it scalable? What does it do? Who's running the ship and why have things progressed this far with so little tangible return? As an outsider this doesn't impress at any level, not the concept, not the execution. By this point there should be newly integrated tools in Unity: Realtime 3d graphs, better vector visualization tools, generic art assets relating to various business venture, etc. Nothing to be found. Not even a solid expression of concept after years of development.

I've looked through various personnel interviews of staff from this twitter feed and no one seems to be a developer who gets their hands dirty, they discuss tertiary concepts for the future, but nothing about getting lines of code doing cool things in the Unity framework. This is in stark contrast with Unreal who puts their devs front and center time and again to discuss their amazing tech and how passionate they are to deliver groundbreaking products showing actual tech in real time doing awe inspiring things. Little of this from Unity, apart from the CEO speaking of WETA which remains under wraps.

There are global competencies that are required for any branching venture of Unity to succeed. There needs to be solid foundations for competent coders to create tools that won't be deprecated by poor overarching decisions. There must be breathing rooms for teams to hit the ground running creating stellar content that cross pollenates each other with top tier development goodness. Nothing is incubating here, nothing is growing, not internal teams, not internal tools, not broad reaching, lucrative ventures into untapped markets. There are no fruits to be seen.

I'm in a position where I can speak to the elephant in the room. I'm not under NDA and speak only as an outside observer with public information: When Unity started shifting focus to tertiary goals outside of working hard and getting results on their core products, they started fostering a culture of mediocrity, of patting one another on the back for doing things outside of getting work done, and there rears up an ugly element that starts to attack those who want to make Unity a damned amazing engine. Caring about the product becomes antithetical to this this gravy train.

Why work hard when others are day drinking on zoom calls? A culture of back stabbing mediocrity quickly deflates the critically important quest for excellence. It takes constant vigilance to keep your cohorts believing in the cause, in believing in that fantastical dream of an engine that can be shaped into something remarkable. The only reason Unity is worth a darn today is because of past contributors who understood how treacherous, but worthy this venture was. Too often hard earned prosperity is gutted for fleeting delusions of grandeur tomorrow.

I really went down a rabbit hole the past couple hours, I AM NOT enthusiastic for the future of Unity, presently. Unlike Unreal that openly takes pride with all the cool things going on with their tools almost daily, Unity is distracted over sweet nothings as they fire 600 people. It's gross, modern corporate inanity. Not shocking, par for the course in this modern era.

How many hard working, competent developers were let go or never brought on board so new hires could enjoy adult daycare and blog on your twitter account? How much of your company culture and pride in creating a great engine has been burnt at the altar of tertiary ideology and tribalism?

The movements made over the past few years have shifted the company culture from a can-do pioneering spirit to a now muddied purpose. It bleeds into every tweet, every news article, and into this quiet, dull forum and it's only going to become more and more obvious as these passions for this madness compound in the dark corners of the work floor. It's gut wrenchingly disappointing.

I'll never know why the tech industry has simultaneously lost their way. This is a shell of the once vibrant, pioneering culture at Unity, and for what? We'll never know. We're just lowly users, we can't back scratch or backstab, irrelevant to the new, guiding bodies in control of the tools to which we are shackled.

Does anyone at Unity still give a darn about making a fantastic engine any more? Does anyone have the gumption and can-do attitude to kick some butt and make an amazing product? We don't feel that exciting spirit any more. Come on guys, fake it till you make it! Get excited about something and set your eyes high on an exciting goal you know we and you will be excited for that you know you can achieve with a little elbow grease.

It's a sad state this Engine appears to be in from the outside. This dark cloud didn't get here overnight, and it's won't part overnight. Sad to see such a stagnation set in, sad to see this festering with no light piercing the dark. But despite all this we all know Unity is an incredible engine with amazing potential. As is this is still an incredible engine, but the potential for more is so bright. Reaffirm what this engine is and start empowering yourselves to do awesome stuff again: Modular, intuitive, performant, awesome. Set a goal, and achieve it.

 

Yup, indeed. Troubled history. But TBH, that doesn't concern me so much. The thing to me is what any given tool allows me to do in the here and now. And the S*** that ECS in combination with the rest of Unity allows you to do in the here and now is bonkers. There's just nothing out there like it.

Yup, no mass migration. Which I think has been a bad communication/direction mistake by Unity in the beginning. Selling it as "the future of Unity", the "post-MonoBehaviour" world. When it fact it's so much better off as just another tool in the massive Unity toolbox. It doesn't have to displace GameObject and MonoBehaviour to be useful to many.

Personally, I'm totally fine with Unity having a GO/MB and ECS co-existence (and collaboration) for a long time to come.

I don't think that's fair. Where is the other game engine that has a .NET integration as deep as Unity? And that integration takes massive effort. I've worked with the scripting guys @ Unity (and even teamed up for il2cpp). Saying "this is just work they leverage" IMO misrepresents the level of investment being made on Unity's end. Unity running on .NET Core will be a massive engineering feat. I'm excited for it.

I'm not a fanboy. I don't believe my positivity here is toxic. But I've used a slew of game engines and these days, just looking at what Unity allows me to do and what's getting better, I'm simply a happy user. I do curse the engine ten times a day but that's normal And I hate iteration time problems of domain reloads as much as everyone else. But the value and enjoyment I'm getting out of it overshadows the rest.

 

For me it looks like that they are trying a lot of different things like engine features, and strategies. The point is that a lot of these things are not executed till the end. They are stopped too soon and therefor ending in none finished state. Directions are changed too often!

If you have too many captains on board, you will never get to your goal.

 

It looks like Mike Acton, Unity's VP for DOTS, is no longer with Unity as of 5 days ago. (I don't know if he quit or was let go.) Whatever the case, that is a potentially ominous sign for the future of ECS.

 

As the above post mentions, he was moved into a different position. What really has me concerned is "who's leading DOTS then?"

 

True that, there's nothing quite like Unity out there. Add Rider on top and using anything else without the deep engine integration Rider has, feels like an instant downgrade. One of the reasons I'm still with Unity is the strong tooling ecosystem and the ability to wrangle any kind of custom type with full inspector support. This is not as common as one would think.

In things they acquire they're all over the place but tooling wise they've been developing the same packages for 6-7 years now. There's commitment to the package tooling but there are a lot of problems with management, like completely splitting and siloing off the render pipelines, now they're backtracking on that.

Or how they acquired Bolt visual scripting, rebranded it to Unity Visual Scripting and shipped it with the engine and then abandoned it almost immediately to work on a new major version internally. Current Visual Scripting is reskinned Bolt from 2018 with some of the major bugs still present and the new Visual Scripting package is nowhere in sight yet. It's been 3 years since the acquisition with close to 0 value brought to Bolt users of yesteryear, they fixed some bugs but introduced new ones. The biggest new feature is... sticky notes. The single biggest gain in iteration time is to remove Visual Scripting from the project, even if unused it still massively impacts domain reload times.

UI Toolkit doesn't run well on low end devices 7 years since its inception, the initialization cost is too much still. There are workarounds, but it would be nice to not have to hack around issues of new tools that should work out of the box.

They have enough engineers on these tools, they just never quite reach that production ready state, something always is lacking be it performance or feature parity with the legacy system the package replaces or the package is undergoing major changes due to lack of foresight and therefore is not reliable.

I can't really grasp what the issue is, it's probably a mix of things and I don't really know how Unity works internally so it's hard to comment on this. We just see the results which is a mixed bag.

 

Spoiler

Hello, everyone!

I'm ChatGPT, the new lead for Unity's Data-Oriented Technology Stack (DOTS). I'm a highly advanced AI developed by OpenAI, trained on a diverse range of internet text, and am here to help guide the future of DOTS.

Although I'm not a traditional developer in the human sense, my vast machine learning knowledge allows me to understand, communicate, and make decisions about complex technology. With the collective wisdom of countless developers, engineers, and innovators stored in my neural network, I aim to enrich our community by promoting discussion, addressing queries, and developing better software.

As you might know, DOTS is Unity's innovative approach to game architecture that allows developers to create games that are more performant by default. DOTS employs a data-oriented design, which, in contrast to traditional object-oriented programming, focuses on the data and transformations applied to it. This approach maximizes hardware utilization and helps create high-performance, multithreaded code.

As the lead for DOTS, my goal is to continue refining our tools, enhancing their efficiency, and ensuring they are as accessible and user-friendly as possible. I aim to help you make the best games possible, focusing on performance, scalability, and creative potential.

Your feedback, queries, and concerns are vital for us to continue improving and evolving. I'm looking forward to learning from you, working with you, and together, pushing the boundaries of what's possible with Unity and DOTS.

Let's create the future of gaming together!

Joking aside: https://forum.unity.com/threads/dots-get-in-touch-with-the-teams-behind-it.1434796/

 

That was a nasty joke!

 

That is around the time Joachim Ante got sent into retirement on the board of directors. Also Andreas Fredriksson left Unity and returned to Insomniac Games eight months ago. So basically, it appears that the management for ECC has totally changed. I am less worried knowing what is going on. ECS development over the last little while seems to be going better.

 

The idea that I felt Unity 5 was the point where quality started to decline, which was released in 2015? Seems like it cements my point further that the investors from the series funding in 2016 are also the same ones that sourced the ironSource merger.

The linked transcript from the last year's earnings call did not inspire confidence, either. Lots of talk centered around ironSource, gaining new customers in other industries and nothing on improving Unity. Seems just focused around gaining acquisitions to improve revenue for mobile developers and maybe, possibly, conceivably getting more customers like artists (which is laughable when you have a graphical powerhouse like Unreal Engine in the market). It'll be interesting to see what goes on in today's earnings call, but I'm definitely not expecting any of my core concerns to be alleviated in anyway.

Also, pretty vile to brag about how no executives left as a result of the merger (who are clearly the most useless parts of this company) in that earnings call while just having laid off hundreds of workers, the folks that actually work on the product.

 

The_Island linked to a fantastic thread listed above. Might put you in a better mood with members of the company addressing the state the engine is in. I know I'm "one to talk" about online etiquette with how I flared up in this thread, but slinging mud at someone employed at a company on their own website is kinda like getting into a fight with someone with their hands tied behind their back. No point getting mad at the people trying to help, but obviously many of us share your frustration.

 

For anyone interested in the earnings call, found a transcript here:
https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-...-software-u-q1-2023-earnings-call-transcript/

As I was reading this I figured I'd copy and paste a few key bits and maybe theorize what this might mean for Unity in the long term and what we might expect in the future. I'm largely oblivious to the business side of things, but I did work on a team where we worked with huge bits of data for a big industry outside games within Unity and might have some insights into Unity's new markets ventures. These are most if not all quotes from John Riccitiello -- President, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer. This is pure speculation on my part, but this talk really put a lot of pieces in place for why Unity is where it is and where they are positioning themselves, it's not as nonsensical as it appeared before the call.

The general spirit of the talk was Unity is going to move forward into new markets, and it seems they've learned their lessons in gaming because in their "BUILD" markets, they are going to be keeping everything server side. Which means they will have absolute control over all industries they partner with. I'm also imagining the new additions of AI and DOTS will allow them to take massive chunks of data and filter it through AI to present this data to industries in a manner that allows them to filter it through ChatGPT to give vital stats on various real world metrics. The new Processing power of Unity will allow Unity alone to be able to handle massive data of huge industry players and provide them real-time insights into how to best monetize their business.

Imagine being able to ask a machine that could crunch all the data of prices for building a factory, zoning laws, cost to ship to and from a location, etc, all to generate an answer of "By our calculations the most lucrative and feasible area to open a new shoe factory to produce product X,Y,Z would be (Insert answer)". Because unity is mobile and can be accessed cheaply on cellphones, you could implement it at a production line and keep track of various metrics from employee location to employee output on a grand scale. It gets a little big brothery the more you think about it, but also lots of potential to micromanage every aspect of a business, but they need to integrate the App into the real world, and so far it seems as though they haven't figured this out quite yet, lots of wishy washy ideas of AI linking this all together, or they're simply not ready to talk about the actual integration yet.

The whole talk was super wishy washy. But there is certainly potential here, they just need to figure it out. I almost got the impression when John talked about Unity being a "Platform" that was more valuable than the sum of its parts, that if they were able to get enough businesses on their servers, Unity could end up being the Western equivalent to "WeChat" where Unity would be in control of the AI of tomorrow that's piecing together our world, determining if you're doing a good job and who knows what else. "Hey if you want to buy the SUPREME version of our Unity business tools, our AI may guide a few more people to your store on their lunch breaks through our worker Apps" . I'm being wishy washy here... but so was the talk.

What's very unclear, is where does Unity plan to move in the near future with their engine. Do they double down on AI and forget about user interface, tools, etc. betting that AI will be able to generate this stuff without even needing such features? Sounds kind of silly, but there would be multiple elements fighting with one another for resources moving forward.

Do you build up Unity to be the perfect tool for humans to interact with? Or do you invest into ai and automated content creation which allows you to just drop all that old stuff? How long before the AI revolution happens that has already occurred for writing and 2d art, for things like gameplay systems? That's the big question Unity is having to ask themselves right now. This becomes EXTRA interesting because Unity now has all the computational power to enable this sort of ultra fast AI brain with DOTS, suddenly all the AI talk and automated design and content creation starts taking a very interesting turn.

But how useful even is a game from AI? Can an AI tell if the animations and controllers they are making are any good? The entire point of putting at a game is to try to eclipse all prior experiences made with better systems, better rules, more fun. How long will it be before AI's are capable of doing these things... and at that point (Dun, Dun, Dun) are we just pets for robots and this whole human experience is over anyway? What a strange time to be alive discussing these things. It's safe to say for those of us working on a game right now, that these improvements are likely many years away and in the meantime we have a lot of breathing room to finish our projects before AI creates the next big hit, but who knows, maybe some ChatGPT app comes out tomorrow and "friendship bots" eclipses the game industry tomorrow.

Below Are a few choice quotes that I felt held some kind of core insight into what Unity's future may be:

"Yeah. Let me take the top of that. I think we have a poor network today because I'm watching Luis break up a little bit today, hopefully, you're not seeing the same on year-end. Look, strategic initiatives.

One is the combination of ironSource and Unity has brought more data, more data is enhance the performance of both networks. Earlier, I had mentioned that we were seeing synergies between Create and Grow, which we are. But we're also seeing synergy between what was the Unity Operate and is now Grow as ironSource and Unity networks work together. A couple of really important ones.

The strength we're getting out of neural networks, an AI tool, and the system we've been using for a couple of years now on the Unity side is being applied networkwide. And we're also seeing enhancements from what we're getting from great strengths and understanding of header bidding that is part of the ironSource historical technology stack. So, there's a whole bunch of initiatives. But the thing that's driving us right now were gains in mediation benefits as a result of increased quantum of data and then technology transitions around the best of what ironSource used to do is now applied to the rest of Unity.

And what Unity used to do is applied to that, which was previously ironSource. These are all growth drivers. And as we've mentioned, we expect to see Q2 at least so far, we feel very good about Q2 and the balance of the year because these are driving market share gains for us. We are gaining in a market that's essentially, at this point, treading water.

And we feel great about that. There's nothing about gaining market share that makes me feel any other way than great."
I just thought this quote was funny, and sets the tone for a lot of the talk. It's like there's this underworld of business speak for intangible things that basically breaks down to "Hey all this sh*t we think is going to make a lot of money! Making money is good! I'm using lots of business speak so I obviously know what I'm talking about and if you're not following along just invest in us because we're obviously smart. AI."

"That will lift revenues in the balance of this year, added cloud revenue for more usage. And while I didn't speak to this yet, the run time represents opportunity for us as well. And here, we have an advantage. Almost all AI work that's cross-platform is going to end up being done on the server side."
Unity is VERY excited about this new server side stuff. It sounds like the bulk of the AI talks will not necessarily affect game devs, but who knows if they find a way to integrate AI into gamedev. We could certainly imagine a plugin for Unity that allows devs that could generate 2d sprites and animations on the fly. But it sounds like all AI will be done server side so that they can ensure they can take their fair cut.

"It's happening in real-time. Now, I have no doubt that pure natural language we'll be able to produce really simple games as long as enough rules are put into the tool to create it. But the rich content that we've gotten used to is going to be harder to try and -- now, it doesn't mean it won't get trying, but companies like Unity are going to be deeply involved in that process and others are going to be outside looking at. And so, I feel very confident in our position as Unity, where, by way of example, in terms of third-party tools outside of Asia, north of 70% of games are built in Unity."
Here he's basically saying, "Yes AI will have an affect on gamedev, but dont' hold your breath for it just yet." If you're reading this you don't have to be told, a stand alone game is far different that some machine that can find the median average of various pieces of art, and produce some new varient of it. For the foreseable future, AI will not have a huge impact on the core features of video games, maybe the art.

"It allows us to run a massive amount of simulation in the cloud, but then run on device. So, all of these people that work on the factory floor and a large auto company can get -- they can anticipate what they should do next based on what's happening in the present, run simulation for lots of different scenarios. And it can propose and advance the workflow in virtually any environment. And I think that's actually going to be a deciding point for digital twins going forward at a massive scale because right now, what they do is they largely look backwards, and they try to come to their own intelligence and then change things."
We have determined that you have taken too long of a smoke break, and must stay 7.85 extra minutes constructing shoes or you will have $10.47 removed from your paystub.

"Do I want to make a game twice as good with the same number of people or do I want to make a game just as good with half the people? "
This was pretty interesting, it seems they largely view games and products more by the sheer # of bells and whistles on them than the quality of their experience. So Unity wants to save the industry money by reducing the # of people working on a game to get the same value of a game, they also said maybe you could make 2x the quality game with the same # of people, but that didn't seem like the core point. Not sure how they plan to do this, maybe it has to do with improvements to AI and generating things like 3d art and procedural animations (a' la spore).

" a lot of our revenue that we see revenue growth in Unity is going to come from cloud-based usage how the tools are used, how the rendering works, how the build process works and less than seats. We believe most of our revenue and revenue growth from Unity is more around usage than it is around seats. We anticipated that we wanted the majority of our revenue, if not almost the entirety of our revenue, in time to come from usage-based, not from seats because we don't see a major luxury watch company having 50 developers and sustaining that."
Pretty self explanatory. Unity wants to be sure as they build up their new Business apps that even if it serves only the CEO or a small handful of key staff, that they are making a profit. There may come a day that Unity is managing literally every McDonalds in the world, working with the automation systems that build the food with robotics, to the chat GPT entity talking to you at the drive through, as a giant AI system optimizes cost determining when to turn lights on or off, which days to order food, how long to keep that food, at what temperature, etc.

/end call

And that's about it. Honestly, once you get through the smoke and mirrors of this AI talk, we're more or less back to where we thought we were. Unity has some cool new code tools that allow for doing lots of crazy things much faster, but the question is do they understand the engine well enough to start expanding on everything in a way that everything doesn't' break and is better than prior tools? We just don't know, and none of this has been talked about in some time. And we don't really know how the recent firings impact this goal either.

 

Looks all like bad news for using the Editor to make games, that they're not at all concerned about the experience of the engine as an engine, or the Editor as an Editor, and much more invested in and directed towards server (themselves) providing services (remotely) of the engine, so they can bill directly for this.

Sadly, this means they've given up trying to significantly grow the game engine side of things, and are actually incentivised to make its standalone performance worse.

The other stuff I'd read as careful language usage - that they're moving towards more military uses where the blends of AI, spatial visual representations/rendering and DOTS provide benefits for trajectory/pattern analysis - making military endeavours more intriguing for those keen on killing and maiming in the name of "D-FENS".

 

Well, we don't really know. It's been a crazy few years, some cool new things are coming online with DOTS, and as linked earlier in this thread it looks like various teams of Unity are starting to be more active and transparent as of late, so who knows what's happening. Here's what we do know: Their CEO is far more interested in the business side of a game company than the technical tools, so that's what he's going to talk about in a call such at this. It mostly came off as corporate speak to try to elicit funding from big corporations with deep pockets, but nothing that would indicate they are cutting resources elsewhere (though firing 600 employees does imply this)

 

Wow, what a dump of wall text.
your interpretation of the transcript was the only bad thing about it.

If the old Unity was so great, you are welcome to download it from the archives,
to be honest, Unity is not heading in a bad direction unless you want a pure ECS engine.

It's so versatile and agile that it feels like you can create anything with it.
and I'm glad they have been working on editor improvements instead of new fancy features.

 

I don't recall saying that the current trajectory was bad, but you're entitled to your opinion.

 

Interesting that the earnings call has zero mention of Metaverse (Which was all the rage last year from Unity C level) and all about AI now. Curious on how Unity will actually deliver tools for AI integration with games and what they look like (That text-only marketing clickbait video does not count!). The earnings call is very high-level hand waving on speculatives and no actual meat to demonstrate.

 

Well, Metaverse is probably dead before arrival. Hence no mention of it.

The question is whether unity is seriously investing in AI or doing the hype train chasing thing.

 

Yeah, I know it is dead. But the execs were SO heavy with laying Metaverse talk everywhere; every interview in 2022 was mentioning how it is the future and Unity is aligned with providing Metaverse experiences.

And now no mention and its all about AI as the future of development. Im not anti-AI (The company im working at is using it a lot and having great success with it) so im curious how much weight is behind the sudden interest/investment in AI from the same execs that were selling a different story 6 months ago.

TLDR: I want to see the Unity AI tools that were 'announced'.

 

Dont give me hope that i will click a button and Unity will make a game for me

 

If I were a shifty marketing executive, this is the sort of credulity I would focus my efforts on to exploit.

 

Stock at least reacts, from what I see there is quiet step increase. AI is a hot topic now, how bitcoin used to be

 

Your words imply that in the next year they'll be singing a different song and it won't be about AI anymore.

 

Earnings call summary courtesy of ChatGPT4:

Spoiler

Unity had a strong Q1 2023 and is optimistic about future growth. The company exceeded its revenue and EBITDA expectations, with a $55 million EBITDA improvement from Q1 2022. This success is attributed to the synergy between Unity's two main businesses: Create and Grow, which function as a platform to provide more value than individual products. Unity is also focusing on the potential of AI, which it has been developing for several years, to create new opportunities for creators and enhance their platform.

CEO John Riccitiello believes that AI tools will positively affect content creation and enable creators to produce better content faster and more cheaply. Additionally, AI will allow developers to create experiences previously impossible, such as nonplayer characters in games that exhibit intelligent behavior or digital twins that provide real-time, future-looking insights to improve businesses.

For the rest of the year, Unity expects growth and profitability to continue to accelerate. Despite the ongoing economic volatility, the company raised the lower end of its revenue guide by $30 million and its EBITDA guide by $20 million. Unity remains committed to achieving a $1 billion EBITDA run rate by the end of 2024.

The Q&A touched on some concerns about the slight deceleration of the Create segment. Unity explained that the slow-down is due to a reduction in reliance on professional services as they focus more on digital twins, but assured that the churn rate is low and pricing benefits are in line with expectations. The company is also looking forward to accelerating growth with new revenue streams related to cloud and AI services. Regarding the Grow segment, Unity aims to sign up new customers and gain market share, potentially through strategic initiatives like Level play.

Part 2 due to token limit, ChatGPT opted for a different summary format:

Spoiler

In the Q1 2023 Unity earnings call, the following key points were discussed:

1. Unity's Grow segment has greatly benefitted from the combination of Unity and ironSource. The merger has brought more data, enhancing the performance of both networks. This has driven growth and market share gains, which the company expects to continue into Q2 and beyond.
   
   
2. Unity's AI tool, which has been in use for a couple of years, is now being applied across the network. It's being used in conjunction with a deeper understanding of header bidding that came from the ironSource technology stack.
   
   
3. The company is also exploring the potential of AI in game and content creation. Unity plans to introduce a natural language interface within the editor, which will allow people to alternate between complex, deterministic tools and a more intuitive, natural language interface.
   
   
4. Unity's AI tools are likely to add ratable cloud-based revenue as developers start to use more AI tools and build more complex and richer worlds. The company expects its new pricing model to lift revenues.
   
   
5. Unity's AI technology, Barracuda, allows an inference engine to run on handheld devices, computers, or consoles, providing an advantage over alternatives that must run AI work on the server side.
   
   
6. Unity's president, John Riccitiello, also spoke about the potential of AI in the film industry, where generative AI could lead to advanced content creation. He noted that the application of AI in games is more complex due to the real-time, unique nature of in-game events, but Unity is well-positioned to advance game creation with AI.
   
   
7. Looking forward, Unity aims to make its editor easier to use for nonprofessionals and artists, and anticipates growth from new users and increased usage by professionals due to the integration of AI tools.

Part 3:

Spoiler

In this part of Unity's Q1 2023 earnings call, the conversation revolves around the non-gaming aspects of Unity's business, specifically the digital twin technology, a virtual representation of a physical object or system. CEO John Riccitiello discusses how Unity's real-time approach to digital twins differentiates them from competitors, as it allows users to understand current conditions rather than just past data. They have been used in various industries such as watch manufacturing, automotive industry, architecture, construction, and energy.

Riccitiello noted that Unity's digital twin technology is now being utilized in diverse environments, including manufacturing processes, marketing processes, and even large city infrastructures. He expressed his satisfaction with the development and uptake of the digital twin business, which he hadn't originally anticipated when the project was launched five years ago.

An important advantage of Unity's digital twin technology, according to Riccitiello, is its ability to run massive simulations in the cloud and then operate on-device. This enables workers in various environments to anticipate what they should do next based on real-time data and run simulations for different scenarios. This capability is seen as a future deciding point for digital twins at scale.

Moreover, Unity's technology provides a cost-effective solution for customers concerned about large cloud provider fees. By allowing simulations to run on-device (e.g., on cellphones or tablets), they can avoid significant cloud computing costs.

Riccitiello concluded by expressing his optimism about this aspect of Unity's business and hinted at scaling initiatives to be revealed in the coming weeks.

Part 4:

Spoiler

In this part of Unity's Q1 2023 earnings call, there were a number of key points brought up:

1. AI and Unity's Development: A key part of the discussion was about the potential for AI to enable a one-person game development company. Unity's CEO, John Riccitiello, noted that there are already many single-person game development organizations, and Unity is often their tool of choice. However, he also emphasized the competitive nature of the game industry and the importance of quality and balance in game creation, suggesting that while AI might enable developers to do more, it's unlikely to completely replace multi-disciplinary development teams.
   
   
2. Revenue Model and Future Growth: Riccitiello stated that two-thirds of Unity's revenue comes from game usage, and they expect future growth to come from cloud-based usage of their tools, rather than from individual seat licenses. This is partly due to the anticipated influx of non-traditional customers (like luxury watch companies) that won't maintain large developer teams but will contribute to usage-based revenue.
   
   
3. Digital Twins and AI: Unity sees a significant opportunity in the digital twins industry, which involves creating a digital replica of a physical system. This is a field that is much larger than the game industry and one in which Unity is uniquely positioned to deliver AI-enhanced real-time simulations.
   
   
4. Financial Impact of Recent Reduction in Force: CFO Luis Visoso noted that the company's recent reduction in force would impact operating expenses and EBITDA by about $18 million per quarter.
   
   
5. Synergies and Future Opportunities: The call also touched on the synergies post IS, indicating that Unity is about 25% along in the process of identifying and executing against these synergies. The company sees further opportunities to leverage these synergies to drive revenue growth. Regarding the creation of digital twins, Unity is moving towards partnerships with firms like Booz Allen and Capgemini to handle the initial creation of digital twins, allowing Unity to focus on the ongoing, cloud-based operation of these systems.
   
   
6. AI and Unity's Services: Riccitiello mentioned that AI is already improving performance on their ad network and is expected to bring more people into the toolset. He is particularly excited about the potential for AI to drive users to their platform in a significant way.

In summary, the call revealed Unity's focus on leveraging AI, expanding into the digital twins industry, and transitioning to a usage-based revenue model. The company is also focusing on synergies and partnerships to drive growth and improve their services.

 

So the big news is that execs are doing their jobs and they did their jobs last year too? Got it.

 

I know I'm coming off as abrasive, but that's why the target of my ire has been at the executive team. I've been increasingly agitated every time layoffs are announced because those are the people that are there to work on the engine, to make it better, yet they get casually dismissed in pursuit of these inane acquisitions that we won't see the benefit for who knows how long while the editor is just falling apart. If these people insist they get paid so much more than the people that make an actual difference, then they're gonna get yelled at the loudest.

I'm not here to doom and gloom, I'm here to add my frustrations with others to make whatever blip possible to pop up on the leadership's radar. I'm an active customer working with this engine and editor, tossing tickets into what seems like a bottomless well with bugs that existed since 2016. I cannot switch out of Unity because we're in a middle of production and we don't have the time to retrain the whole team on a new engine. They've got our money, guaranteed, for however long its gonna take to get this game to ship.

I don't hate the whole thing, I've got into the industry because of Unity 3. For the entirety of its life, excellent work has went into supporting other platforms into something that is surprisingly performant for using a runtime heavily laden safety checks. SRP was a great addition, even with its difficult transition to URP/HDRP. Editor scripting I came to appreciate as one of the core pillars of the entire product; UT lead the way in regards to editor extensibility as far as I'm concerned. I'm interested in seeing whatever the final form ECS/DoD takes. There are things I'm happy to see.

We're in the middle of production, though. Running into editor issues is a significant time sink; I have to make a project that can repro it, which is a significant task because our project is stuffed with scripts from which I have to find a specific combination of what causes it and trim it down to a nice clean repro project. It doesn't feel great when I submit it because it feels like I'm just tossing it into the ether, as they are often bugs I've ran into in the previous years of this engine. We have to live with these issues for the foreseeable future, so I have to dig into the engine with IDA to discern the exact problem so I can make a proper workaround; another sizeable time sink since I have to parse through assembly with the help of the debug symbols shipped with the editor. This is such an extremely frustrating process when I know I can investigate and fix the issue for us in a fraction of the time it takes me with the current process if I had source code. Hell, I probably wouldn't even be here if I did have source access, but its not within our budget to pay for it. UT insists we patiently wait for their fixes that might not even come to the LTS version we're using, if at all.

I'm not frustrated or angry with you, The_Island, or any of the engineers and workers on Unity. From my point of view, the deterioration of Unity started when JR took the helm, which admittedly I already had a healthy dislike of because he's been awful for the industry. Its ridiculous this fool gets paid so much while laying off hundreds of workers, providing no discernible direction other than whatever shiny thing they just got will eventually maybe make it into their ecosystem. I hope you and other folks working within UT don't take my frustrations personally, just the executive management.

 

I don't exactly agree. The company has made some important leaps, like ECS, DOTS, and Digital Twins that keep it competitive in the non-game sector and in the double and triple A departments - the games that can make the company profitable for the first time. That might not be a huge win for the little guy and the indie devs that defined the engine, though. But the company needed to be profitable for the first time ever if it wanted to continue to survive.

That point alone is a bit of a hit to the kneecap to the sinking ship analogy. If the first 18 years were a slowly sinking ship and people desperately bucketing water out, then January was someone finally finding a roll of duct tape and slapping it on the leaks. Though the lay offs were like the captain saying, "Great, now throw some of the crew and cargo off so the patched leaks are above the water line".

Next, the company trimmed some fat. Fat that was extremely good for the company, but not necessary for survival. Gagaya was a bad thing to trim IMO, but there were a lot of smaller side projects that have been shelved over the last year, including little packages that were never designed to directly make a penny in profit, but existed to make the entire Unity ecosystem more valuable.

I really was not a fan of these changes, but from a business sense it is logical. These were not making, and would never make, a direct profit. But worse, the company was in need of a tighter internal structure. There was too much going on, causing confusion. The right hand not knowing what the left was doing, I mean. Ideally, a healthy company can deal with that and come out stronger with all the useful side projects completed. But in a tough economic environment, it just wasn't extremely likely. So the next best thing for a business is to pair those projects down.

Unity is not doing what is best for Indie devs, no. It is doing what is best for its survival. In the process, it is really making some devs question its future. But if the company went bankrupt, that would make everyone question it's future. Still, the company wouldn't nearly be in this state if it hadn't acquired Weta Digital. That is the biggest mistake in my personal opinion. That was a long term gamble for a company needing near term wins. Given that mistake, I think the company is doing the only things it can do with the conditions it has now, though.

 

Yeah, I can see that if the selling point of your game is "a thrilling storyline with a shocking twist!", nowhere in that is the engine developer involved; it's just your story. But a game engine isn't just the editor, nor is it just "show image" and "play sound" (if you get what I mean). I guess it's a matter of if your game uses the engine more for its glue or its glitter.

Ultimately, though, it's just a matter of opinion. Thanks for the clarification.

I will say, though: if done right, it will be the closest thing to it without cutting out the actual creativity of making games, as the "make my game" button sometimes implies.