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Comment by sombremesa | Hacker News Reader

> If I was Unity, I would setup 2 internal game teams. One team building PC & console games, another team building mobile games. Build real games, release them on the app stores, and keep them updated for 2 years. Who cares if they don't make any money, that isn't the point. This is a realistic usage of the engine and it would expose problems that Unity doesn't seem to know about.

The reason Unity doesn't do this is pretty simple, and it's the same reason people get really angry when Amazon begins to manufacture high margin products themselves and pushing other sellers out of the game.

Epic has no qualms with such things, and it seems like there's no end to what they can get away with, so why wouldn't they?

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>The reason Unity doesn't do this is pretty simple, and it's the same reason people get really angry when Amazon begins to manufacture high margin products themselves and pushing other sellers out of the game.

I think you do not understand why people are angry with Amazon. Say there is a dude that discovered that he can make money if he sells coffee cups with black cats painted on them, Amazon then runs an SQL query or run some ML and find all profitable products including the coffee cups and they then find where the dude buys the cups , negociate a better deal with the manufacturer, make tons of money and the dude gets frustrated.

Unity making 2 games would not upset the developers, they could make the game "open" for all customers so anyone can learn from them.

> Unity making 2 games would not upset the developers

See Epic v. Apple.

Making games is a huge liability if you’re a game engine. Making a game store even more so.

Unity has made plenty of “demos” as you’re suggesting.

Why is it a liability? It’s how every other commercially licensed engine was built in the past. Unity is actually unusual in that respect.

See id, valve, unreal, crytek.

Because you're competing with the businesses who decide your fate as an engine. If you're Valve, you want games to be on Steam - and you'll push for that when games use your engine, even if it isn't explicitly stated or even intentional. This doesn't make Sony and Microsoft happy, obviously. You might argue that the platforms are different, but that continues to become more and more irrelevant as it becomes easier to release the same game on many platforms and crossplay becomes more commonplace.

As a result, these marketplaces will try and favor some other engine, such as Unity.

I think it's tough for the average techie on here to really grasp the nuances of business (mostly due to lack of direct XP), so I'm not going to belabor the point.

I understand that there is potential a conflict of interest involved... but Unity's customers also want an improved product. It's a competitive disadvantage compared to unreal that they don't dogfood their own product.

Direct product flaws in Unity are more likely to push customers away to a competitor compared to nebulous business relations conflicts.

In theory you have a valid point, but in practice it just hasn't been an issue. See the previous commenter who pointed out that every engine company, with the exception of Unity, has always released games on their own engine. I have literally never seen any complaints about that.

You seem concerned about app stores, I think this is a different topic, I do not remember of any engine that is forcing developers to use a specific app store but I could see it happening that some engine will get features that would create such a dependency if used.

A different solution I think works is to have the developers do support , you have your regular support handle the first contact but then have support forward non trivial stuff to developers and have them respond to customers. After a dev has to tackle same weird issue over and over again with support he will have the idea on how to make the thing more intuitive or less buggy.

Epic vs Apple is not about developers getting upset on an engine maker.

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