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Comment by PedroBatista | Hacker News Reader

It's the end of the road for Unity. ( at least what most of us think Unity still is, but it's not )

The technology was always more or less "fine". Unreal Engine didn't "kill" Unity and it will not in the future.

For the better part of a decade, Unity tried to become not-sure-what but way more than "just a game engine", and that's the problem, I don't know exactly what and neither do they.

To be clear, Unity is not "dead" and will not be dead for a while, but the writing is on the wall with this "merger".

I'm not sure how is Boeing and who is McDonnell Douglas but I already wrote the off my mind.

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> Unity tried to become not-sure-what but way more than "just a game engine", and that's the problem

IIRC most of their revenue comes from Unity Ads, so they'd be dead if it wasn't for this weird pivot. From the business POV, not being "just a game engine" probably saved them.

Unity is arguably the most popular game engine and has a large market place for plugins/extensions. It is almost unbelievable that there isn't a viable strategy to expand and refine the core product. My intuition here is that the product was taken over by people who wanted fast, huge financial growth, so they invested in what they saw as an opportunity to do just that, while weakening the core product and their image.

I think the key problem is that most game developers are broke and most games are unsuccessful if they even ship.

The "picks and shovels" business model where you build tools for customers who use them in their own enterprises can be very successful. But it does require those customers to be successful in their enterprises. (Or you can rely on customers to be willing to pay out of pocket at a loss because it's a hobby, as with music instruments.)

Without some kind of other monetization, Unity is essentially selling picks and shovels to miners on a mountain with almost no gold in it.

To be clear, I don't think this justifies what Unity is doing. But they are clearly trying to be a $$$$ business in a $ market, and are willing to sell their souls to get the extra $$$.

What? The video games is nearly a $200 billion dollar industry[0] and Unity is one if the most popular engines, if not the most. How is that a “mountain with no gold”?

[0] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2022-05-05-video-game...

There's a lot of money in games, yes, but much of that flows into large game studios using their own engines and the production costs are also high.

Unity is primarily used by smaller game developers and there is much less money available there.

That may be true, but you just need to look at Unity's financials to see what fraction of the games market flows to them. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/U/key-statistics?p=U

It's not _terrible_ but it's not great.

Just like in any kind of arts, it might be worth millions, but only for a selected few.

There are plenty of street performers that can hardly play the rent.

However most users of Unity don’t make very much money if any at all. So unless they switch to a revenue share based model (instead of fixed license pricing) $200 billion is not that meaningful.

There's lots of money, but it doesn't go to developers. The big profits go to publishers. If you're selling tools to developers, you'd better hope they're able to pass the cost along to the publisher. If they can't, they're not going to be able to pay anything significant for your tools.

They could have hired less people and tried fewer risky non-core investments. Plenty of tools-only companies survive well indefinitely.

They got greedy. The grow into a unicorn or die trying mentally is cancer to good technology.

> From the business POV, not being "just a game engine" probably saved them.

I agree, but if they were a "game engine and everything around games" instead of spreading focus and recourses all over what they have been trying to do, my guess is they would be in a very good position now.

>> IIRC most of their revenue comes from Unity Ads

This was and is a really interesting business for them and I still think it is a great way for them to grow.

Unity is so entrenched in the game business that if they were seriously worried about profitability they could just raise their prices and curtail investment and they would have a solid business. Like many unicorns they have been favoring growth. But at their core they have a solid product that people who make a lot of money depend on. Yes, 99% of game developer make zero or less, but its a huge industry and some very profitable developers / publishers use Unity extensively.

I don't think Unity will die until another Game engine adopts something similar to C#.

A lot of indie teams don't want to write c++.

C# is really nice but I think Unity's mobile story is probably what keeps devs there over something like Unreal.

Unity's been killing itself with it's own fragmentation. Instead of upgrading existing systems, they've been replacing entire systems but never reaching a point of being able to deprecate/remove an old system.

So now there's 3 render pipelines, 3 UI systems, 3 physics systems, 2 input systems, and so on.

This makes it harder for new developers to get started, and it breaks a lot of the content on the Asset Store.

Just the HDRP/URP split alone is such a mess, with URP feeling like the second-class system and missing important features (while being the one designed to work on a wider range of hardware). But HDRP is the render pipeline used for shiny tech demos...

Yep, that's it. The engine used to be developer friendly, now it's downright hostile due to fragmentation. Half of it is deprecated, the other half is experimental and feels second class. They keep piling stuff up, and information is scattered. A modern project will have three of four different ways of adding libraries or third-party stuff. And the worst part: I might be totally wrong, because they might have completely changed everything since the last time I touched it.

Godot uses C#, and supports some other languages too I think

Godot uses both C# and Python-like GDScript. And majority of addons likely gonna be in GDScript.

GDScript is really really good, for what it’s worth. Or, it integrates with the scene model nicely.

Which is a bummer, given that since the XNA story, Microsoft has decided to outsource to Unity the whole "how to do 3D in .NET" story.

Given that the DirectX team is quite anti anything but C++, as shown by all attempts that eventually were killed (Managed Direct X, XNA), Unity's death would mean most shops would just move into C++.

While C++20 is quite nice, it would be a pity if such scenario would take place.

I'm kinda the opposite. I don't like to write C#.

Unreal Engine's build system is also based on C# as I remember.

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