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Comment by greggman | Hacker News Reader

I am curious if we are ever headed there again. Unity, Unreal, GameMaker and all the others are super amazing in that they let almost anyone make a game. Unfortunately they also allow cheap clones and shoveware to the point there are apparently 20000-40000 new games shipped per month, mostly on iOS and Android but even Steam is at or around 1000 a month.

Not that there is anything to be done about it it's just when the barrier was higher it forced at least a small increase in "average" quality

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Now, as then, the key is good journalism.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com

Link unrelated?

There's a deluge of crap games on Steam, but there are also journalists sifting through all that crap to find the hidden gems. RockPaperShotgun are (IMO) the best of the bunch.

Not really, RPS is (I feel) one of the best journals out there when it comes to gaming. Too bad they only review PC games though :(

Every Unity game I've played seems to suffer performance problems of some description, or completely shits the bed when you try to add mods.

I've basically just learned to stay away from Unity games at this point.

Unity is fascinating. I remember upgrading from a old gaming PC to a brand new one. I sat down and fired up Kerbal, and it was almost as bad. I don't play Unity games any more.

I really hate that Unity games are mashed with traditional games as well and that I can't filter that shit out on any popular stores such as steam. Drives me wild.

It's not Unity, it's the developers. Unity can perform very well if enough care and effort is taken to understand it. The problem is a lot of Unity developers don't take the time to learn it's mechanics or just don't understand programming all that well. If you were to attach Unity's profiler to a majority of the Unity games out there, which I'm sure with some you could because they're probably built with the autoconnect profiler set to true, you'd probably see a monstrous amount of garbage collecting occurring. Not understanding update cycles or the performance implications of newing each update is what I've seen be the true source of performance loss in Unity, in general. Unity also has a GetComponent<T> because they need to access a class attached to a Unity GameObject, but instead of caching that reference to the gameObject they just do the GetComponent each frame or each method call, which has a performance impact because Unity needs to filter through all the active GameObjects to find either the first one or all of the ones that have said component. Stuff like that is why Unity games run so poorly, the engine is almost to accessible.

I predicted the same around 10 or so years ago with the massive deluge of free mobile games flooding the market, making it hard to find genuine quality. Turns out I was wrong.

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