Can Unity Survive?

Unity is a fantastic game development engine designed for use by indie developers and teams alike, while the tool itself is well designed the company surrounding the product is failing. Towards the end of last year, Unity announced major changes to its pricing policy and terms of service. These changes were without consideration of many situations such as piracy, bad actors, and customers with multiple devices. While they have walked back some of the changes made to their new pricing policy, many still remain in place. Will Unity survive this bad management? I give my thoughts on the situation and whether or not I believe Unity will weather the storm. Share this video to get the message out and help expose the greed and failure of this corporation.

[JoshChristiane]

For those who think I hate the engine, I want to clarify that I used Unity on and off for multiple projects for something nearing 12 years. I love the software itself and most of its capabilities. While I have my complaints about the engine, overall the software is still quite good by industry standards. My primary issue is with the company that runs it, not the software itself. Myself (like many others) switched my indie-game company over to UE5 and ported all current projects into it.

[Saltience]

Fun note on the "Frog in the boiling pot" saying: Much like the idea of an Alpha Wolf, it stems from flawed science. The Frog in the boiling pot had large chunks of their brains removed before being put in the pot, which may have hampered their ability to notice that it was boiling. A real frog will simply leave the pot once they're too uncomfortable, and we saw that with Unity.

[adanjsuarez]

Second video, second success for me! I really like your approach and knowledge. I cannot wait for the next one. Now is time for me to review your old ones.

[TheAurgelmir]

This is the same thing we saw with Wizards of the Coast as well. They tried to change the game to squeeze more money out of the Dungeons & Dragons market - in the end it created a mass exodus as people used it as an excuse to not play D&D anymore.
(There are tons of alternatives, many of which are a lot better suited for the types of games many people played in D&D - D&D was just the main thing)

[killkiss]

2 and a half years ago, I hesitated between Unity and UE. I finally chose UE because there are a lot of free and freely usable resources even in a commercial game. (free assets on the market place, quixel megascans etc...). The first weeks were difficult but since then it has been nothing but happiness. I love its very professional graphics out of the box.

[exoZelia]

I was getting moving with Unity when all this went down. I was floored, like what an aggressively bad and greedy idea. Now I'm even gun shy about going with UE. I'm using Godot now and at least I didn't get too far with Unity before they did this. Open source is always better when it's a usable alternative and it sure seems to be one now. I don't want my game to be locked to some corporations policies.

And yea Adobe ruined everything with that move to SaaS, now even basic apps for making white noise to help me sleep have subscriptions, uhg

[johnq.public]

Switched to Godot 3 months ago for my small hobby project. It's been super fun and it's nice to be able to start the dev app with the project in about 5 seconds compared to 30-45 seconds for Unity. Also auto save is great! Got burned by that in Unity tons of times.

[DanielNistrean]

What matters in the end is that you make enough money to start the second and better project. Pick the engine that would allow you to make your project faster and consider potential fees.

[Programming-Is-Easy]

Their primary "user" now is government customers and contractors. There is an entire industry that has solidified around using Unity for DoD training contracts. Flight sims, equipment sims, process training, etc. A large portion of these folks use Unity currently. And Unity can "keep" these customers because the company doesn't pay. They just add this pricing to the contract bid and pass it on to the government.

Essentially, Unity is getting US taxpayers to pay these fees.

And the entire reason they became so entrenched in this market is because Unity was a "free" engine. It was easy to put together a development studio to support government contract work and hire people with Unity experience. Companies that built sims using other engines lost contracts because Unity was "free" and didn't cost anything extra, so studios bidding on jobs with CryEngine or Unreal had to bid higher prices.

But I think you're completely correct. I think we'll see a shift towards Godot for most of this, at least over the next few years. Unity pricing for government and Serious Games is kind of insane as well. As soon as contractors realize that they can undercut their competition and win bids with Godot, we'll start seeing that happen.

[subbiaharun]

Great to hear an actual paying user perspective on how the company and stock might perform. Thanks for the video!

[KalinovGames]

Exactly what you said “There really is no reason to use Unity anymore”. I am actually very happy with what Unity has done, because this had me tackling other engines and made me realise that Unity has been falling behind for yeas, not only with their business decisions, but also technologically… The editor itself is so clogged with slow executing code you get frustrated you have to wait 2 minutes on each build you test. And if you are building something big, like open world game you are doomed to be waiting for life…

I also realised that they have strategically monetised their Render Pipelines. They market the URP and HDRP like it is something pretty cool and scalable and other engines do not have it so we are the best. But in reality it’s just Unity trying to clear out their technical debt that they have been piling up for years.
At the end for me it was either pay the nonsense taxes to Unity and continue using their slow engine or implement IK in Godot and just migrate the project. And when I did migrate to Godot I realised yet another thing that Unity was slacking about - their multiplayer libraries are just amateur man. They are broken and not working as expected and you will always have to work around your way this abomination of code, which also has a crap documentation… In Godot that just works, the documentation works, the multiplayer libraries work, the implementation is straight forward and guess what - benchmarking both multiplayer solutions Unity is just a mediocre half-solution… Use third party libraries in Unity, they say, for multiplayer. But why? Why would I pay somebody else ANOTHER subscription just to have a multiplayer working in a game engines where it you have to pay for services?

[Kinos]

Honestly, more game engines should make a game with their engine. It's the one thing I like about UE, the devs made a game with it, multiple games.

IMO, if the engine is so good, why not make a game with it. I don't care if the story is crappy, as long as the gameplay is good. That means the engine works.

[Spartan]

Godot (specifically Godot 4) also has numerous advantages to Unity, especially for independent studios:

1. MIT license is super permissive alongside being free
2. You are not required to use a GC language for development, Unity's requirement for C# means it needs a GC runtime, which is responsible for bloated memory and hitches caused by GC freeing, if you wish to avoid that, GDScript has no GC, so even if it is less CPU performant then C# (for now) it will have lower memory usage and no GC hitches
3. Godot can natively support any language via GDExtensions to nearly the same degree as GDScript, and there are many well supported community language extensions including Java, Lua, Rust, and C and C++ can be used out of the box.
4. GDExtensions also allow you to extend the engine without needing to recompile the engine which means you can integrate external APIs into Godot pretty easily
5. GDExtensions are closely related with Godot modules and some modules already can be interchanged between GDExtension and modules if you wished
6. Godot is already very small, only 108 megs, and can be shrunk further by stripping out modules and even core nodes you don't need at compile time, and it makes it easy to set a profile to strip this out even from the engine
7. Godot's UI and input controls are probably one if not the best, especially for a game engine, and they are adaptable to your needs
8. Godot's many pipelines and even platform support is very modular speeding the process of pipeline and platform development (like the Render and Physics pipelines are already fairly abstracted, and they're only becoming more modular as Godot develops) and is on track to get "official" support for the latest consoles soon via W4.
9. Godot is already fairly easy to build
10. Godot is entirely capable of being designed and achieving the performance of even AAA studios with its modular and FOSS nature, its just a matter of someone adding the necessary details, either by forking the engine (in which they get an editor for free by doing so) or by adding on the existing engine and messing with it in all sorts of ways. Its not been updated of late, but there was even an ECS version of the engine called Godex and it mostly followed Godot 4's development quite closely before Godot 4's release.

[andreasoberg]

I have been a game dev a long time. 10 yeara ago I thought Unity had many limitations. Sadly those limitations have not been fixed now. Almost every feature that I want to use is worse implemented than in other engines I work in. I doubt those features will be implemented in 10 years from now.

[alphaweeb]

Hey Josh, how did you move from Unity to Unreal? I'm not sure where to start.

[rommelstrafe]

Nice insight! Do you think when it comes to XR development, Unity is still the way to go? Should I switch to other engines? Is godot capable now for XR development or even in the future?

[BTDiLmarinen]

Pretty rare to see a dev on YouTube who knows what they're talking about (based on previous videos I've seen)

[kpm]

is it easy to make multi-player games in Unreal? I haven't looked into it. cheers for the info ..

[mahkhardy]

The Road to Vostok, 100% ported from Unity to Godot. Amazing. Hold these companies accountable, looking at you Epic, don't slip up.

[anDREasgr]

One thing I dont hear enough people talk about is the commitment that comes with learning a game engine.

I was a good example for this, I am a 3D artist and I was just starting to learn how to make games. At first everything is wrong everything is against you and you have to stop your process to go look for information because theres a problem that you have to solve. Its not fun. I imagine it would take years for me to start having fun creating games and make a living out of them.

So when this happened with Unity I immediately dropped this dream, and even after they went back to try and salvage this situation, I didnt return bc they still are the ones who were willing to do this. Theres is no doubt in my mind that if they survive the backlash this time there will be another and many more. So I am not going to invest the colossal amount of time to train with their software, no matter what, it doesnt inspire trust in me to give the years of my life to learn Unity when I know they are constantly looking for sneaky ways to fk me over.

For the time being I completely lost my excitement for game dev. I'll check back with Godot when my life is more stable... But those shady fks that dare to look at peoples dreams like potatoes in a shop, wont even see bronze out of me!