Why I Still Use Unity

Sharing my perspective on Unity and switching game engines

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[acegikmo]

I'm happy to hear my stuff has been so inspirational to you ❤ We're all in a weird situation now, with a company mismanaging an engine so many of us love, but like you said, they've definitely felt the pushback. I was in conversation with marc whitten (head of games) both in meetings during the, uh, cataclysm, as well personally at unite 2023 afterwards. I got the impression he genuinely cares, and is fully aware of just how bad this turned out. They're in a rough spot, which, I guess we can tell from all the layoffs. There seems to be a bit of a political divide internally among management (roughly, those who care about games vs those who care about Growth™), but, it gives me hope that there are some people who are genuinely trying to make a change for the better

[EricEngel]

Everyone should use whatever tool they feel most comfortable with. That said, I initially had a bit of trouble getting over Godot calling everything "scenes" but now that I have, it feels WAY more accessible to me than Unity did. Things just seem to come together so much easier, even if Unity's documentation was better. I totally understand people not ready to jump ship just yet, though. But within a couple of years, Unity is gonna have a hell of a fight on their hands to keep their spot. At the very least, in the eyes of smaller independent devs, Godot will be THE standard. It's so good!

[ribdot]

I played with a few engines when I first got into game development, including Unity. I settled on Godot myself, and it was easy to feel like I dodged a bullet when the initial pricing changes were announced. Even though I don't use Unity, it's nice to hear some calm level headed thoughts about the engine now that the dust has settled a bit and everyone is in less of an uproar. Thanks for sharing your thoughts on why sticking with Unity works for you, and 100% agree that everyone should use what's best for them and their current project.

[midniteoilsoftware]

I agree. Drama aside, Unity is a fantastic, jack-of-all-trades, make-any-game-you-want, engine. I see no compelling reason to switch at this point.

[darkmattergamesofficial]

As developers we have one mission: Make a good game players will enjoy. The engine, tools, languages, whatever, doesn't matter! Players don't give a flying you-know-what about the behind the scenes, they just want to play a fun game!
A lot of developers shot themselves in the foot by switching engines at an inopportune time out of fear, when in reality nothing changed... I personally know a few that had a great project going in Unity, but switched to Unreal and now they are floundering. Never let yourself fall into the drama. Lots of those "Unity is Dead" videos were made purely to capitalize on the trend and gain views.

[flashheart]

I agree 100% with your assessment. And I find it comforting that someone else came to the same conclusion in the end. When this debacle first happened, I dove into Godot for a month and found it lacking. The I went back to Unreal. I stayed with the engine for quite some time before throwing in the towel. I think Unreal is a great option if you are really good at programming and you have been in the industry for many years. But for a low level indie developer, Unreal is not very accessible and doesn't (yet) have the same community you spoke of. I will continue to use Unity but they are on a tight leash. To be honest, I think the company will recover, but it will no longer be what it was.

[howdlej]

I think the pricing structure is completely justified. Most people kicking up a fuss about it will never even get to the numbers required before it affects them. Unity runs at a loss, it only succeeds when developers do with most of their income coming from established companies using their software. What they ask for once you start earning enough to even cut them in is completely reasonable. Granted the wording and lack of clarification on how reinstalls and piracy was handled left a lot to be desired. I chalk that down to poor PR and upper management. Its something that usually happens with every company.

I know a lot of people tout Unreal as 'THE BEST ENGINE' but as someone who spent many years working with Unity before UE4 dropped and has worked with both engines I still prefer Unity as my personal engine of choice. Not only do the devs seem passionate about actually making real improvements to the engine with long term goals like ECS but the documentation as you pointed out is stellar. Unreal still has a very long way to go to even come close to the level of quality Unity docs has.

I can't really explain it but there is something about Unreal that just puts me off. I find I spend more time fighting the editor then I do actually creating anything.

[MuffinManProductionsD]

I completely agree! Unity needs us to make money so if they make everyone leave, then they won't make money. Plus if they try to do something retroactively they would face a lot of lawsuits.

[_.-.]

The trouble with this is the sinking ship effect. People who stay need to be convinced enough people will also do the same keeping the engine afloat.
Making a game is a long commitment, and a lot of engine-specific effort can go to waste if the company maintaining the engine you are using stops doing so. Thus, you need others to "feed" the engine while you too are using it for the decision of staying stay to make sense. Or at least have the *perception* of this feeding taking place.

The same snowball that perpetuates Unity as a very popular choice can turn into a negative one, were enough people leave for the engine to start limping, so the engine gets worse, which in turn makes more people flee and so on and so forth. When they went on their money pinching attempt, many people took it as a sign of the engine not being profitable, so basically a start of that negative snowball, which made many people angrily leave out of fear of potentially wasting effort

[ChristopherCricketWallace]

You're not wrong; but that same amount of community knowledge/support/content could (and probably should) be invested into a safer engine for LONG-TERM security (and games preservation). Unity's market constraints (shareholders) will always push them towards enshitification--hence the recent debacle. If the current and new generation put get behind a new, open source, king we may never again have live under Unity's Sword of Damocles.

Everything is fine for today... But for how long? Stock price number gotta go up right? That's not necessarily the best thing for us little people and our families.

[dragoons_net]

I must say that I do agree: I used/switched to Bevy, which is fantastic, but lacking a lot of features (editor in particular) and with a community too small: some questions asked on formus, socials, etc remain totally unanswered so too early to switch finally...

[DashzRight]

Unity is probably fine for 99% of the users that used this before or start making games to learn game dev.

[SG-jsqn]

IMO, Godot has to grow up more to be equally useful to me. If people making smaller, less complicated games move to Godot, maybe they will get there.

[DePistolero]

I'm finishing my already published game in unity, and I already started making a new game in godot... And I'll stick with godot from now on... and Sebastien and Freya are pure legends!!!

[Woogy]

the thing is it's not the first time they made bad decision and they tried to hide this by changing the TOS. i just feel like you can't trust them even after they back paddled. it happend twice so why not try it a third time in the future? i agree that unity has the most tutorials out there but many of them are also very outdated. freyas tutorials are mostly math as you said so that is not a clear point for unity. Godot, Gamemaker, and Unreal have great tutorials out there as you said yourself. also other engines have shader editors too (i know godot has one and i bet unreal has one too but i don't know that).
you have good points but i feel like they are not really a reason to stay with unity. the only reason to stay with unity is that you have a lot of knowledge working with unity and that is fine.
personaly the risk is way to high to accidently make a million dollar hit and then get skrewd by unity. just by saying your goal is not make a 200k game will not solve the problem in the future.
good TED talk though. Thumbs up

[viktorhugo]

im almost recommending u to give a shot at godot, its vicious~
I think that what unity made is actually better for some game engines to grow, for example, defold and godot have been so much popular since what unity made, this also applies for some frameworks like phaser and love2d.
sorry for the awful english and my limited vocabulary

[JayBekkr]

Godot is not a replacement for Unity, its open source nature does not mean that Godot development is completely democratic, the Godot foundation leads the direction. Of course if you don’t like that direction just don’t support the foundation.

The 3D alternatives for Unity are Flax engine, Stride engine and Godot, where Godot is the probably the weakest 3D contender so far (especially if you use the default physics engine).
Flax and Stride also seem to be more accommodating for C# developers. Godot does support C#, but from my observations it seems flax+Stride have a workflow similar to Unity. Flax also have console support out of the box.


I liked your video, but I would like to give a tiny bit of criticism.

Your voice is a tad grainy/grating, consider recording while standing up or slightly increase the tone of your voice.
It’ll probably also make your recordings less harsh on your throat.

On a positive note on your voice, you don’t have a ‘sibilant S’, which many YouTubers (even big ones) struggle with. Or not really struggle since they don’t seem to notice it… to be fair I only know what a sibilant S is because I struggle with it.

[littledreamergames]

If developers actually ended up having to pay, I'd be a lot more upset, and less forgiving. But Unity listened to the comunity, and readjusted. Companies rarely do that until it's too late. I think that makes Unity an even better company than before.

[flamart]

Most of the game devs will abandon gamedev anyway, so doesn't matter what engine they will use... or try to use.

[Ranakade]

I still have it deep in my heart to use Unity. But I got a Python course I'm finishing learning, so I went with Pyglet lol.