Unity jumped the shark.
Engine was trash anyway. Unreal for lyfe.
Proprietary software A is bad. Long live proprietary software B!
(Or maybe check out Godot)
Unreal is open source, although it isn’t free. I would certainly prefer it to unity though.
Nah, unity is/was a good engine. The reason why it has a bad reputation is for the same reason that Game maker used to have a bad reputation. Almost everyone who’s learning how to make games uses Unity because it’s easy to use, is extremely well documented, and has a massive store full of add-on scripts, programs, model sets, etc. As such, all the poorly optimized games and 0-effort asset flips end up being made in unity (though I’ve seen some unreal games that make even the most poorly optimized Unity game look good). The result? Even though there are a number of high-quality, highly-regarded games that use unity, it has a reputation for being a shitty engine.
Don’t believe me? Keep an eye on Godot or Unreal. If unity sticks to their new license, then it’s highly likely that one of those engines will become the new “newbie engine” and gain a reputation for being shitty.
I disagree. I’ve been/am working on several pretty large projects in Unity (some of them sold hundreds of thousands copies), and especially once you start porting to consoles, the experience goes to shit. Their support is vague, documentation is plainly wrong in some places - I’ve once spent few days figuring out how to use a documented and explained feature, only to find out later that there’s a closed few years old bug on their issue tracker that it’s actually not supported, and the documentation only does not explains it very well. (The feature was multiple hits per single Raycast in jobs, here are the docs. According to the bug resolution, only one hit per ray is supported, and the docs only don’t explain it very well. The docs are still the same.)
You also inevitably run into issues that you simply don’t have in other engines - it’s closed source. You have no idea how is something implemented, or whether something isn’t working because you are doing it wrong, or if it’s Unity bug/fault. In Unreal, if something doesn’t work, you can always just check the engine code, and either fix it yourself, or better understand why it’s not working. If you need to slightly modify some engine behavior, you’re out of luck with Unity - you have to resort to ugly hacks that sometimes work, but usually at a cost. In Unreal, you just modify the engine code and be done with it.
Trusting Unity with any feature is also a gamble. Have you started developing a multiplayer game on Unet? Tough, we don’t want to support that anymore. But, we will create a better multiplayer system, just wait for it! Then they removed Unet, and the new networking relacement is widely regarded as pretty much unusable - or at lest it was last time I checked. Thankfully, there are a few amazing open source networking addons.
In general, while Unity is an ok-ish game engine for smaller hobby projects (but for that, Godot is better), it’s really an awful and frustrating experience once your project size grows and you need to build bigger games, or if you start porting your games to consoles.
And it’s also really apparent from the way they communicate and threat you company that they don’t give a fuck and only want your money.
Which company will become insolvent 1st, Twitter or Unity?
RED FLAGS!! red flaaags. RED FLAAAGS, get your red flags heeeeere folks 🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩
Red flags are always free. Upfront anyway. You pay for them at an unexpected time in unpleasant ways later. So feel free to have as many as Unity is providing. 😊
This needs to be adapted into a three part movie (think Creepshow) where a seemingly innocuous vendor selling flags rather than balloons is the “host” and the people who buy red ones get them free…but “You pay for them at an unexpected time in unpleasant ways later.” And all the parts are just FULL of red flags the characters don’t see but the audience does (as per usual in most horror films).
It would mean every Unity game was not-so-secretly shipped with code that phones home to the Unity company upon install.
Either they’ve been egregiously spying on gamers for years (and by extension, game developers using Unity have just been fine with that), or they’re lying through their teeth.
Unity includes telemetry for some time
I believe you can’t actually disable the telemetry (or Unity intro logo) in the “free” version
So then this falls under “devs didn’t care” because it was useful information for them and they didn’t see how it could be used negatively.
Probably the opposite actually. The devs who utilize the feature probably enjoy having some numbers to look at and analyze. They’re trying to make a game that people enjoy after all; the more info they have on how you’re playing the game, the better. The devs who don’t use it probably aren’t even aware that it exists. Additionally, I’m not sure if it requires a subscription to view the telemetry (the page suggests you have to sign up for it in some capacity), but if it does then it makes sense that devs might believe that it’s something that’s disabled until you manually enable it.
Personally, I know if I was a dev I’d be checking that shit every day. I like watching the funny numbers go up and down.
Why couldn’t someone set up a script to install, uninstall, and reinstall Unity games on a loop? That would fuck with their numbers hardcore.
Right but if it’s something that’s affecting every single creator then why would anyone continue to want to use Unity
The only reason people will continue using Unity is because they’ve already made )or are in the process of making) a game using it and switching to something else would waste massive amounts of time and effort. Unity is depending on this - this is basically them squeezing everything out of existing customers without regard for long term growth.
Remember, the whole idea here is that Unity is demanding payments for already existing games. They clearly don’t care about whether people keep using Unity for new games in the future; the executives who made this decision will have cashed out and will be long gone by the time all the existing Unity games in the pipeline are done and things dry up.
