The State of Unity

Unity have undergone massive changes since the ill-fated Unity run-time fee disaster, including a complete reworking of the leadership team. This week Unity had their first financial disclosure since the new CEO took over. Today we look at statements Unity have released and interview with Matt Bromberg and look at the state of Unity and what developers should expect in the near future. Oh, they also hired a new CTO and CFO, so we cover that too.

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[rxxlznu]

It sounds good, but the truth of "Trust me bro. We won't be bad anymore" remains to be proven. Ask me again in a few years. In the meantime, I'm getting back to making games.

[HeartcoreMitRA]

What would indicate a shift to the right direction for me personally is two things - moving away from mindless greedy approach and cultist mindset. These two things basically led Unity to a state it's in now.
Trying to monetize in any possible way, ignoring all the problems with the toolkit and making it as bad as possible, forcing devs to buy external tools to do basic stuff. And an audience ignoring and justifying all the issues and problems with the engine, instead of pointing them out and demanding fixes.

[BGW]

Mike, I literally just had the thought "I wonder what's going on with Unity now that the dust has settled" and when I searched "State of Unity" this video was the first in the list. You're doing good work man.

[ViRiXDreamcore]

They should start making a game so they can actually see what designers and devs need.

[DirkTeucher]

I am an Unreal Engine dev. And I bought Unity stocks after they rolled back that insane runtime fee because I want Unity to succeed and i think they could if they play their cards right. So far so good. I hope they do as having Unreal as a monopoly will not be good for anyone long term I would imagine despite the positive feelings I currently have for them. And hopefully the stocks will get up to 35 or 40 at some point in the next couple years so I can make some cash too :D ... time will tell.

[rock]

In some apps I use, Unity Ads always play with maximum volume, which forces me to use AdGuard to block them. And they've been trying to fix this issue for two years, but it's still not resolved.

[LordCritish]

Not too excited about the former CTO of a shitty mobile game becoming the CTO of a game engine that is supposed to be doing a lot more. Zynga, King .... these are names of mobile game companies that have a very questionable past.

[zentec]

The first thing they need to do is organize their documentation it's a mess. It's barely up to date and when it is updated, they still forget to use the correct version of the engine which they give examples. The documentation / version of Unity shown is so frustrating. I have five versions of Unity installed on my computer so I can follow documentation then still have to go to the newest version of unity find where things have moved, dropped or name changed.

Unity seriously needs to work on their learning tutorials some are so old they have some still written and recorded in Unity 5. They need a dedicated learning page where they constantly just update everything to unity 6 going forward and answer some questions. The only time we should dig through forums for problems that haven't been solved for years are some hard-core programming topics.

[foxmulder]

For as long as they have the annual loss, the devs are not safe with Unity. They will have to find a source of income one way or another...

[autumnthriller]

Have you seen some of the publishing companies Unity are affiliated with? Supersonic Studios is a great example which will literally encourage people as young as 14 to submit their games to them for publishing, at which point they declare ownership of your game and there is nothing you can do about it. They publish barely finished clickbait games in order to just farm addicted mobile gamers for money.

[Tymon]

Do you speed up the audio recording or do you speak that fast?

[MetaverseAdventures]

I like Unity 6 and think it is moving the engine in the right direction, but "most stable" version ever? No. No it is not. It has felt like a beta version since release with many very obvious and show stopping bugs that really should have been addressed before release like the light baking bug that prevented baking until we recently got the fix in 6000.0.25f1. I feel Unity 6 needed another few months of polish before release, but here we are. I am a VR developer and I am finding even more bugs with the various Meta SDKs and XR plugins, some that totally break apps. I feel like the industry needs to take a closer look at their QA teams and figure out why obvious issues are making into LTS releases. There will always be obscure bugs which is understandable, but this has not been the sort of bugs I have experienced so far with Unity 6. I feel like my time is wasted when I am discovering, validating and then reporting obvious bugs.

[ujugamestudio]

People who had to change engine from Unity know the pain of multiple years of hardworks for dream games and the burnt out never helps them to trust Unity Technologies even if world dies.

[TolgaDurman]

Thank you for covering this aspect of the industry as well. I really appreciate your work

[bogoid]

all good things...

So in the end Riccitielo wasn't the hero we deserved, but the hero we needed.

*end credits start*

[cacticrown]

finally someone makes a video on this topic 🙏

[screenapple]

Unreal Engine requires all parties involved—CEOs, executives, and employees alike—to sign a strict NDA that prohibits them from disclosing details of the next free monthly asset release. The confidentiality policy is so stringent that release information is only accessible in sealed envelopes (either in sealed or traditional yellow envelopes) to prevent leaks, as billion dollar competitors like Rockstar Games, Activision, EA, etc... may attempt to eavesdrop for a marketing edge.

By the way, the Paradise Game demo is generating quite a buzz! Its graphics and gameplay almost rival what we might expect from a title like GTA 6—definitely something to watch out for.

[ScaerieTale]

The (war torn) state of Unity. I'd be genuinely curious to see an anonymized survey of game developers who came back to Unity versus those who stayed away (not to mention the ones who for whatever reason, chose to stay - no judgment!)

[Skeffles]

In some ways this is a big win for Unity after the whole run time fee fiasco but I wonder if they could ever go lower than that.

[colin_actually]

I'm cautiously optimistic. Installed Unity 6. The fact is none of the other engines are as fun/easy to work with if you want to mess around with 2D custom render passes. "Renderer Featuress" are awesome.