Unity is now a Game Developer ...And It's About Time!

If you attend Unity developer conferences, you will hear a very consistent request... Unity should actually dog food their own tools by creating games. Being a game engine maker that doesn't make games means you never really find those pain points and problems that game developers in the wild run into on a daily basis.

At GDC 2022 Unity started to address this with the announcement of Gigaya... which they cancelled, because creating games is hard it turns out. Well finally, in 2025, Unity have finally done it, they have created a game from concept to publishing (Survival Kids for the Switch 2 published by Konami) using Unity 6. Hopefully this process continues, and we start to see better more robust tools as a result!

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[HeartcoreMitRA]

It's never too late to cancel this game and sweep it under the rug

[magnetomage]

I maintain that Gigaya was a failure and proved Unity's failure of planning and folow-through... as the axium goes, the last 20% is 80% of the work... so, they skipped out on like a third of the work. i hope this goes differently.

[dingosmoov]

Unity started as a game Development studio. The name of the company was Over The Edge
Entertainment. Their first game release using their then new internal 3d tool was called Goo Ball. Unity was their internal tool that they decided to release. Eventually they changed the company name to Unity. SOOO for us old timers we know Unity started as a game studio. I was on the forums for their first game and before Unity was even a 1.0 release. Also back then Unity only ran on Macs, there was no PC version.

[ExpensivePizza]

If you think about it Unity releasing a game is a pretty big risk for them. Even if the game is well made and serves its purpose to make the engine better, if the actual game is terrible it still looks bad for the Unity engine. Let's face it, making successful games is really hard even when you do everything right. Unreal doesn't really have this problem because Fortnite is already a massive hit. What Unity should probably do to get around this is make the game entirely open source including all the assets. This would be a huge benefit to game developers because it let's them see how the game engine developers think their engine should be used.

[skidzR]

Unity did make a game tho, GooBall! :) It failed commercially but spawned the Unity Toolset afterward.

[adamodimattia]

Unity was my day job for a few years, and although now it's Unreal, because we had lay offs in previous job, I am still using Unity for some of my own after work projects and I still like it a lot and can't wait for Unity 7, so I am really hopeful they will pull it off this time!

[DonGroutsVideos]

And here's the big question.... will it have the "Made with Unity" splash screen?

[cryingpsycho]

Mike saw a cartoony colorful game and said "yep, that's survival horror"

[MayankKMiKi]

I really wish Unity release full version of "GIGAYA" as what it devs can do with Unity as game engine. "Harold Halibut" is the best example with HDRP pipeline, Which took 10 Years to develop. If Unity develops a lot of tools with production tested use cases that don't suck, then it will be mind-blowing. Unreal Engine still polishing the tools in version 5.

[kobbyg]

It took 20 years to come to this realization, but better late than never. I guess I'll go back to working on my game.

[madduckling]

I suggested that Unity make games, on reddit basically I was met with anger and hate, I hope whoever saw that post and all they did was roast me and make fun of me for being childish while calling my grammar garbage like my suggestions see this video.

[SG-jsqn]

Looks like they're playing it super safe on their game choice. It looks about the same as their "Chop Chop" tutorial game, or some of the other tutes.

Unity has a tendency to hire people to make something and then when the consultants have to mix up some magic brew to get it working, somehow that gets left out and is unavailable to Unity users.

[pnvgordinho]

Man, that gigaya thing looked cool. Not the enviroments but what the character could do.
Pity that they didnt released it, not even the "gym" version. And with the stop of the project they fired their best man, Andy Touch.

[tapo]

Unity was a game developer under the name Over The Edge Entertainment. They made GooBall which was a pretty meh Mac Monkey Ball clone and that engine became Unity.

[robb]

Most games developed in Unity are stylized, so creating another game like these won't help much in improving the engine. Unity should make a game with realistic graphics and a complex TPP/FPP character controller.

[thanatos]

My money is on it was developed entirely by contractors and they didn't bother listening to any feedback. They've permanently burned all the good will they could have hoped to get from me.

[ermilburn]

Not only does Epic dogfood Unreal with Fortnite, but if you actually look in the metadata, it's using the next version of Unreal that isn't even released publicly yet

[fbot]

It seems that Unity is making a comeback like NoMansSky, and I’m all here for it 🙌

[mandisaw]

This is *less* useful IMO. Contracting in-house devs out as a service means they get exposed to issues across genres, platforms, at different stages of production, in lots of different contexts. More likely they encounter something you're actually affected by. Plus it's less risk & distraction from their core business lines.

When I spot forum or Youtube comments about "Unity should dogfood", most times it's either failure to read the docs, a skill-issue, or a legit bug that's already been reported or resolved. Unity's gonna drop this mid game, and the same ppl will still be complaining about long asset-reload times (because their project architecture is lousy).

[vsantox]

Speaking as Supercell dev intern, this is literally the most no sense shit about Unity that im always hearing about. Unity is more battle tested ( making games cross-platform, not in bugs or features is another topic discussion ) rather than Unreal, It's the same as Source Engine ( source engine v1/v2 had a lot of security issues ), just because has some huge games doesn't mean its perfect or not. All public/private game engines has telemetry, automated tests, even small scope game's testing features and QA team. Unity needs to stop making bad decisions.... And Unreal Engine keeps evolving to fit their own "game", doesn't mean it will make your game development experience easier.