User Research: We're looking to understand how you build communities surrounding your games!

Sorry, but another terrible Unity survey.
Other did suffer from various issues.
This one can not go back to previous question.
Seriously, are we talking to professionals here ... ?

I suggest to make survey how Unity should make surveys.
Unity first need to learn how to build communities around the Unity engine.

But I do understand, why we get flooded with such crappy surveys, if someone is just an internship.
No offence. It is just Unity guiding interns badly.

 

Amazingly, I don't see a back button even now, many hours later. Is it in a preview package?

 

No back button for me, either.

 

It is in different survey. Probably.

Is unity selling this survey data ?

 

Community is a little tired of polls now, I think. Just my 2p as a moderator who is here many times a day.

Why? Why is Unity focusing on our customers and not on us - basically we came here for a game engine, not a social media platform.

 

Polls and surveys are fine, personally. If I don't care I don't have to click.

The bigger thing to me is that I want better support for the stuff that's already being done, rather than things being stretched thin to cover even more stuff. If I need help building community then there are specialists I can approach for that. I don't need my engine vendor to help me do it. I do need them focusing 100% on making me the best tools possible so that I can make the best game for that community.

 

Somebody should already tell Unity management to stop hiring this non tech people.
It's just sink for money that could be spent in a constructive way by hiring more programmers.

 

We really dont want yet another additional service that nobody asked for.

Even less interested in more surveys and polls. This is not the type of communication anyone means when they ask for better communication from unity.

 

I have cleaned up some posts, don't forget to have professional conduct. We can make our points without veering toward the personal.

 

The surveys seem pretty relevant if your target is developing games - especially mainstream mobile games. Social and community targeting is an important part of business these days...

Google Play, Apple Arcade, and even AWS regularly do surveys and run programs to help build community/social/marketing knowledge for smaller developers, so if Unity can provide helpful tools or resources then why not?

 

You don't understand. Unity is only allowed to work on things what rando' users on the forum say so.

 

Hey now, you just destroyed my "likes mine".

 

Because Unity has yet to finish (ie reach a stable and feature complete state) most of the projects it has started over the years. By the way I love that you've chosen Google because they're an excellent example of a company that starts projects only to quickly abandon them even when people love them to the point there's a meme now.

 

There's only one question that needs to be on that survey - "Do you want us to finish the stuff we start?".

 

Yeah I mean perpetual communities and patreon are fine if you're never going to finish, and this adds more people organically using Unity. So basically if we can string along all these indies, and convert their followers into Unity customers, that would be fantastic business.

...in the short term.

In the long term, customers will attack the parts of the company that aren't benefiting what they signed up for if it's done badly.

So community is a great business move from Unity. If they listen. They sure didn't listen to a single forum mod regarding Unity Connect, but got a bunch of other people from random places to cock it up.

So honestly it's up to how much money Unity wants to keep flicking at a fireplace really but if they want to make money from community and customer acquisition the first thing to do is not Unity Connect 2.0.

The fact is Unity doesn't have a clue how to market games since the only game it's done is Gooball, and most of the Unity tech demos (the closest equivalent to a game) no longer work, so that should tell everyone what they need to know, and what they should be asking for.

 

You know what's worse?

We already had basically the same thread in February. I even left some replies about the dramatically poor community building efforts here.

tl;dr: why should I care about what Unity thinks about community building when they're awful at it?

 

Well I doubt Unity are going to touch the forums. The forums are atm functional for a lot of people. What Unity is doing here is looking at being out in front of the indie and branding the indie's customers. This isn't a terrible thing in theory but it's the wrong place to focus.

Unity needs to focus on getting democratised networking including 'free' BaaS for every Unity Customer. This sort of thing has legendary potential for growth and - yes - locking people in - but the point here is if Unity needs to grow, BaaS and networking stack is how.

I guess what I'm saying is there's no such thing as a cheap customer acquisition at this stage in Unity's life and they need to grow with retention instead aka hard work.

 

https://unity.com/products/game-growth-program I see, it's probably related to this. 50/50 split

 

Ah, the Unity service that was so poorly explained that it looked like an outright scam because it implied falling below certain thresholds meant you'd have to recoup UT thousands of dollars.

Extremely "Did You Know Gaming" narrator cadence: DID YOU KNOOOOOW? Effective communications strategies that prevent this are a huge part of a community manager's job!

Edit: I should point out, the reality isn't much better. Unity set up the system so that it could ultimately result in developers using the program would make absolutely no money. With that sort of thing in the hands of a company that seems more likely than not to completely mismanage things? Well...

https://blog.unity.com/games/introd...share#vf-4747fcd4-8845-47ed-956e-cbff266ca6cd

 

I think Unity's biggest problem is they have forgotten who made them what they were, they are branching out into so many things - automotive, architecture, etc. While I haven't personally looked at the stats to who uses Unity more (Game devs, film, etc). I can assume it's still game devs.

So what does Unity do? Give us unfinished tools (HDRP, Terrain Grass/Trees for HDRP), etc. *I know it's coming soon*.
But how many years has it taken? And what have they been doing throughout these years? Building arch-viz stuff, building automotive visualization stuff, buying companies that don't even have anything to do with game-dev and when they do, we are charged an arm and a leg.

Let me be clear though - it's not bad that they are doing all the above with the exception of taking literal YEARS to give us usable game-dev stuff. I mean perhaps there's more money involved with the other industries for them - I'm sure there is (us indies are broke LOL). But they should at least be transparent with their intensions moving forward with what their priorities are. For example, watch a unite, it's all game-dev this game-dev that and the next day it's all about posting about their new arch-viz workflows and tools.

 

How did I miss this? It seems like a bad publisher deal, only you still publish and launch by yourself? Or even worse... it's a service that's intended to find more clients for their ad network?

Because I'm feeling the "spending" for user acquisition they will do (the "100k per month" the blog liberally mentions) is to advertise the games on their own ad networks, further eliminating their risk, because they're not really spending anything, at worst they're selling you ad space at a discount, and at best, they are selling you a lot of ad space -and then taking another 50% of your revenue on top.

And all you need to do to have that deal, is make a game, publish it and make it a success AND THEN Unity might offer to take your money. What a deal.

 

So can this deal provide double or more of mobile players, than withouth a deal?
Because if not, indeed it sounds like a scam, for the market which is already screwed long time ago.

 

I imagine it's a better deal for developers who make a somewhat decent game but are in a lower income area where getting investing an initial $25K-$50K out of pocket on ads is not feasible. OR you have no idea what you are doing in terms of growing and monetizing your game. (i.e. you have good player engagement but terrible monetization) Otherwise you are probably better off just self funding it.

 

But it's not really funding, since you need to have a published and semi-successful game first for them to consider selling you their ad space.

 

Please, Unity, instead of doing these polls, be productive and solve the issues the engine has.

I've recently started the latest LTS versions and since then, I spend half my time waiting...

 

Epic Store guarantees 2M$ sales in exchange for exclusivity.
If unity guaranteed double or more players (and zero payment otherwise) it would be possible to consider the deal.

 

50/50 are you actually joking? That is worse than any publisher deal out there, but you are still launching and publishing yourself.

 

50/50 is fine actually, and I have had a deal like that. But it depends quite strongly on what the other party brings to the table.

50% profits from 100 customers sure is better than 100% from 10 customers. And that's roughly what you should expect and ask about really.

Not sure what Unity's track record here is though. A publisher with an amazing track record can ask for more than one that is just getting started. If Unity has any smarts here they would simply cherry pick what they think are winners and pretty much bankroll it so they can build a portfolio. Nobody is exempt from requiring a track record, and that track record is not transferrable from other similar fields.

Unity will learn that profits can only follow proof.

 

Yeah but thats my point, this isnt a 50/50 deal with a publisher or experienced company - they have never released or published their own games. Everything they know about game development comes from staff experience from past jobs, and 3rd party info. Its not the same at all as having as you say a track record in this company doing this stuff specifically.

So in this case, no 50/50 is not an okay split at all, its a greedy ask when you are starting out. Unity is starting out in this regard, they should wait until they actually have some proper stats to brag about in this regard before going for the most extreme end of the pricing scale.

I expect this isnt for any of us though, its an attempt to get in on some of the profits from all the unity mobile games out there which unity takes 0 slice of, while unreal gets to take slices of successful games and benefit from their success. This again, doesnt seem like the best way to start going about that though IMO.

 

Anyone who's half aware of what they're doing wouldn't pursue an open standing offer like this until after they've pitched to anyone who might offer a better, project specific deal. If you've tried a bunch of other avenues and not got any traction then getting a push from Unity and going 50/50 on the results is probably a better position than most starting indies self-funding their initial user acquisition might otherwise get.

It's not just about the raw numbers. Context is important. Of course it sounds like a bad deal to someone who's experienced enough not to need it.

 

only place i follow any of this is here, so whatever that means, but basically behavior of the unity company looks to me like one of these get rich quick indie-wanna-be types.

they dont really want to make a game, they hate doing the work, they are deathly afraid of failure, they cant focus on a single task because they have no confidence and no faith, so they incessantly make half hearted efforts at whatever seems like low-work to profit ratio, forever noodling, in the end producing nothing. Crisis of leadership.

 

I agree entirely, just want to make sure anyone coming here knows that they should definately try every other avenue first and use this as a last resort (that might change once they get a track record though if its a good one)