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Comment by crysin | Hacker News Reader

Unity is not inherently bad. It's garnered that reputation because its super easy to learn and make a somewhat workable game out of, even if you have absolutely 0 understanding of the workings of your code. I'm not familiar with Kerbal's code or any blogs / videos on it but I would imagine they're doing Newtonion physics simulations which are going to be rather intense for a game and probably add an unavoidable burden to the overall performance of the game. They also could have just been doing things that are not efficient in Unity and not realized at the time and maybe will not repeat the same mistakes in Kerbal 2 if it is written in Unity. This meme that Unity is inferior to either Unreal or a custom built engine are annoying. Sure, if the Kerbal team built their own engine from the ground up and hired on their own engine team I'm sure they'd be able to make micro-optimizations to make the game run better but at a much higher development cost.

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I heard a fascinating explanation for the general belief that Unity == bad, and it has to do with licensing.

If you pay at least $300/year for Unity, you are permitted to disable the splash screen. If you do so, it is not at all obvious that your application is based on Unity. If, however, you use Unity's free, "personal" tier, your application may not disable the Unity splash screen. This tier is allowable until your game is making at least $100,000 per year.

The effect of this is that less successful, low budget, and therefore buggier games are much more likely to display the logo then polished games with multiple people working hard and a budget. Thus Unity has accidentally created a licensing scheme which causes gamers to associate them with lower quality games.

Is it really a meme?

Every large AAA Unity game I've ever played has a certain jankyness to it...microstutters, glitchy UI. At some point you just have to accept that the common variable is: Unity.

I've played plenty of games both ways, and as a developer I have to agree with something I've heard before - The reason that so many Unity games have "cartoony graphics" or performance issues is because Unity is one of the easiest game engines to learn (also cartoony graphics are one of the easiest styles to achieve because of it's inherit lack of details).

So you end up with more asset flips, unexperienced devs, etc. on the Unity engine than say the Unreal engine.

It definitely is a meme. Cuphead, Hearthstone, Ori, Cities Skylines, Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak, Subnautica, Hollow Knight... There's a bunch of great games made with the engine that I've never seen issues with, many of these games are performance sensitive as well.

Edit: Maybe you could provide a few examples of games with those issues?

Games like Cuphead or Hollow Knight I wouldn’t call AAA games.

Cities Skyline is the poster child (well besides KSP) of Unity Jankiness. Just look at how many mods there to fix basic things in Skyline.

Ok. Sure, those are games made by small teams. Still, they have a high degree of polish and depend on good, consistent performance because the combat requires precision.

I suspect that KSP is janky because of KSP (or because it was built on a very old Unity and ported over across many engine versions.)

I agree. Quite a few times was I surprised to find out a game uses Unity. But the better ones usually don't show a big Unity splash screen. Return of the Obra Dinn was on I totally expected to be its own engine.

But yeah, AAA games usually have specific requirements better satisfied by a custom engine.

"Subscription limitations

The Unity Pro and Plus subscriptions have no limitations to customization of the Unity Splash Screen.

The Unity Personal subscription has the following limitations:

    The Unity Splash Screen cannot be disabled.
    The Unity logo cannot be disabled."

I wonder how much the logo displaying has an impact on your perception of the game.

https://store.unity.com/ - I think these prices have changed since Unity first appeared.

Logo: Some

The abomination that is the Unity launcher: Very much.

"Meme" doesn't mean "false" or "exaggerated" but it seems that's how you took it.

1. An element of a culture or system of behaviour passed from one individual to another by imitation or other non-genetic means.

2. An image, video, piece of text, etc., typically humorous in nature, that is copied and spread rapidly by Internet users, often with slight variations.

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