Hacker News Reader

Comment by torginus | Hacker News Reader

I'm kinda confused why Unity keeps doing this - they keep putting out high-end demo after high-end demo, but that's not where there core userbase is. Their main users are people who build games for phones and indies, with basically zero usage in the AAA space. And Unity's performance/stability is still not that great afaik.

It seems to me that they are trying to prove that they are a serious 'AAA' engine, but these demos aren't that convincing to me - AAA is a lot more than putting fancy shaders on high-poly models, it's about handling huge amounts of objects in a dynamics situation, displaying large worlds via streaming, having a workflow that accommodates every creative professional, and offering great performance and visuals even on very complex scenes.

I've hear that even these highly impressive demos are fake - they built a ton of custom code for each one they rebuild core Unity features, meaning if you wanted to replicate this for yourself, you'd be in for a ton of development.

Comparatively UE5's Nanite demo showed off a tech that's ready to go for production.

View on HN

> Their main users are people who build games for phones and indies, with basically zero usage in the AAA space

They don't need to convince their already huge and already convinced core users, so there's not much point in building big tech demos that apply in that space. The aspirational AAA stuff that Unity puts out does 3 things I think:

- convince current indies with big dreams that their investment in unity has long legs if they grow larger and more ambitious.

- open up to non-gaming gfx tech sectors: broadcast, movies, simulation, etc.

- push their engine to its limits so they know where it hurts the most in places that actual users are not pushing. (it has many known rough edges and areas, but Unity users already report these)

These core users (indie developers) aren't "convinced" anymore, they're starting to be skeptical of Unity's management of their engine. Since Unity has failed to fix so many bugs and left too many half-faked features abandoned, they are starting to think Unreal is a much more stable choice in the long term. Gamedevs value engine stability and workflow improvements far more than just shiny graphics and new features, because at the end of the day the most important thing is how you can actually ship a game without problems, not how it would look good in trailers.

Also, Unreal has enough money to burn (from Fortnite) to venture off into new spaces. Unity is taking far more of a risk here, since these indie gamedevs are still the main revenue flow (especially considering that Unity sells their engine in a monthly seat-based system rather than a revenue sharing model like Unreal). If these core users move away and investors become skeptical that Unity's going to make money (they're still burning tons of investor money every year without significant revenue), what we're going to see is a total disaster.

I don't know why you are getting down voted, I don't necessarily agree with everything you said, but I thought It least it contributed to the discussion.

I'm a full time Unity dev, but have many years of Unreal experience, and we occasionally look at what Unreal is doing now. To be honest, I just don't want to code in Blueprints or go back to C++.

If I were building a multiplayer game, or a big open world game, then I might be convinced to give up C#, and go back to Unreal.

With regard to management of the engine, I think there have been some less than optimal decisions, (URP vs HDRP, Multplayer, DOTS) but its really a huge project I hate to criticize because I'm not sure I would have done anything differently.

"Coding" in Unity and UE4 simply isn't fun. UE4's C++ macro abomination is bad but I find that 90% of the value in amateur game development is in the art content. Since I'm not an artist, I've simply given up game dev as a hobby.

I believe Unity's management is correct here. To venture into new territory is crucial.

The revenue from mobile apps is quickly drying up now that we are getting stronger anti-gambling laws. Because let's be honest, mobile games make money by hooking rich gambling addicts. That's why the industry calls them "Chinese Whales" and the "99.9%-ers" who are allowed to play for free so that the actual customers have enemies to crush with their pay-to-win items.

That said, I have a very low expectation of Unity-the-company to pull this off successfully.

> The revenue from mobile apps is quickly drying up now that we are getting stronger anti-gambling laws

Care to elaborate? As in, what sort of legislation is coming up widespread across countries that would harm the revenues of, say, Candy Crush?

"Gaming loot boxes: What happened when Belgium banned them?"

https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-49674333

"Loot boxes 'link to problem gambling'"

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-46295317

"Number of child gamblers quadruples in just two years"

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-46286945

"Could Candy Crush Saga be a gateway to gambling?"

https://www.smh.com.au/technology/could-candy-crush-saga-be-...

"How ‘Near-misses’ in Candy Crush Increase Frustration, and the Urge to Continue Gameplay"

[..] "some players can, and do spend more than they can afford on these games (Lloyd 2016)."

[..] "Tellingly, Candy Crush players often specifically liken Candy Crush to slot machine play to convey its appeal"

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5445157/

I'm not a game dev and wanted to have a look at Unity so take my opinion for what it is but when I installed Unity the first thing I wanted was to change the size of the tiny fonts of the IDE in my 4k monitor. Well, it seems you cannot change the fonts. My mind exploded.

Since 2019.3 (at least) under Edit > Preferences > UI Scaling exists to let you adjust icon/text scaling. It defaults to using your desktop scaling settings.

on linux:

GDK_SCALE=2 GDK_DPI_SCALE=0.5 ~/Unity/Hub/Editor/2020.3.25f1/Editor/Unity

Nice, it works! I knew you could configure scaling system wide but I didn't know you could configure per-application through environment variables.

It's been my opinion for a while that the $150/mo seat fee, from not all of their users, isn't covering their burn rate, and that they are loosing market share in money marking projects to Unreal. Ideally they would like proper percentages, but since they lack a compelling advantage, they must price lower relative to Unreal. Feel free to prove me wrong with actual numbers (but: 1800 employees in SF ...) @ av, 200k/employee, I make that 360m/yr just on salary :) So, anyhow, I completely agree with this post. And, looking for cashflow and better rendering tech, they buy Weta .... maybe they will pull this off .. but maybe not, also.

Their financials are accessible now that they're a publicly traded company. https://investors.unity.com/news/news-details/2022/Unity-Ann...

> The 2021 full-year GAAP results were impacted by […] a charge of $49.8 million related to the termination of a lease agreement.

oof

I don’t disagree with your post, but it’s worth noting that most of Unity’s revenue comes from Unity Ads and their other services. Software licenses/subscriptions is only a quarter of their revenue.

The are really going in on all peripherals. Ads, Analytics, Assets, Multiplayer, even Source Control, Build Machines etc etc.

It's all terrible right now but they will get there.

> - open up to non-gaming gfx tech sectors: broadcast, movies, simulation, etc.

This is a big one, and I guess will be true in the near future if not already. If their tech is easy / common enough, some sites will benefit greatly from this, such as virtual museum / zoo, better google street view interface, virtual space exploration and physics demonstration for educational purpose, etc.

They have explicitly stated in earnings calls and their strategy documents that their focus is not only on gaming, but also owning the toolsets of the metaverse

They compete with UE, so whatever UE does, they must also, for at least the appearance of parroty.

But make no mistake: Unity is the reason Unreal suddenly got cheaper and open source a few years back. Both companies read The Innovator's Dilemma and both know WTF they are doing.

BTW Will Epic's ludocrisly, mission-distortingly successful Fortnite, like Wrigleys, cause them to become The Fortnite Company? (similarly will Rockstar become the GTAV Company?)

They will always be the Unreal Tournament company to me. Unreal and Return to Na Pali are still two of my favorite games to this day. Honestly wish someone would make games like those again.

Unreal is a game company which also sell their engine. Unity is just in the business of selling their Engine.

The difference is Unreal is eating their own dog food.

Unreal getting paid only when a user makes money [1] also compounds the dog-fooding. I believe that is how a company should be run - align your interests directly with the users'.

With Unity, the price per seat means only people who leave will send a signal, which will be too late. They are not incentivized to make day-to-day work efficient, which is why there are a million small bugs.

[1] - https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/faq - "This license is free to use and incurs 5% royalties when you monetize your game or other interactive off-the-shelf product and your lifetime gross revenues from that product exceed $1,000,000 USD."

Licensing their engine is just a side business for Epic and I’d bet on average their not getting anything even close to 5% (all their bigger clients should have custom agreements). But that’s fine for them since they’re making loads of money from Fortnite with much less effort (than you would need to make anything similar from just a game engine).

I’m not sure how the overall quality compares, but I’d expect Unity’s users to be way more critical even if it had more bugs just because of all the indie/small developers who’d fall below the 1mil threshold for Unreal but have to pay for Unity.

I agree $40 per month for Plus (<$200,000 pa sales) seems steep for someone just trying out selling something, discouraging all those young hopefuls.

They are more or less the Fortnite company. The Fortnite money printer churns out cash directly into the maw of the Epic Store money incinerator. This might turn out to be a great strategy in the long run but either way, they wouldn't be able to pursue it on this scale without Fortnite.

Epic games states that Fortnite has 350 million accounts and 2.5 billion friend connections. It seems like this is the next step of social networking and I'm sure the connections are much more authentic than Facebook's.

>It seems like this is the next step of social networking

Many years ago I was playing Runescape and a friend quipped that MMOs are basically Myspace with a game attached to it. And I think he was right. MMOs live and die by the network effect. Runescape had 150 million user accounts something like a decade ago, if not even before that. I'm sure World of Warcraft, Lineage 2, and League of Legends had at least comparable numbers.

I think if this were the next step of social networking, then it would have already happened. Perhaps it already did? We just call them gaming communities. If that's the case, then video games have created competing social networks that exist at the same time and aren't just being eaten by the biggest one.

The "metaverse" is already here - and has very little to do with VR.

You'll find it on Steam and Epic and other gaming platforms.

I’d assume most connections for most people on FB are with people they actually know in real life. Surely they must be more ‘authentic’ on average?

Friend of a friend versus person I play games with a couple hours a week?

Easy choice as to which is more authentic.

I would still expect that most people on FB have a higher number of ‘authentic’ relations there on average than someone who plays Fortnite has in-game. Unless all of your friends/family play it all the time as well.

I guess it depends where do you live, though. Where I’m from Messenger is still the most popular messaging platform so most people (unless they have very strong feelings about FB) have an account.

Location/demographic probably does have a rather large impact.

There are very few close relationships that I have on Facebook. I have it because I needed an account for a while, and haven't deleted it so that it can function as a placeholder should anyone try to impersonate me.

Meanwhile, almost all of my friends have a presence on Steam - including some who I rarely if ever do or have seen in person.

The great thing about this is that all the code / features they dogfood in Fortnite gets major improvements. Network play for example got a lot better simply because Fortnite ironed out lots of small, latency and scalability issues.

*parity. "Equality, as in amount, status, or value." https://www.thefreedictionary.com/parity

Looked like an intentional wordplay

  parity: Equality, as in amount, status, or value.
  parrot: One who imitates the words or actions of another, especially without understanding them.

Which fits in with the rest of their comment

This.

I'm just starting to play with Unity, but I am playing with it at all because I can essentially learn along the way with them since they are still releasing things that I just don't quite need yet. This may not make sense to some people, but no offense to them... their opinions don't matter. We are the ones using this, not them.

> They don't need to convince their already huge and already convinced core users

I actually disagree with this on a much broader level: I think that every company should continue to convince their core users.

1. Their core users are always considering alternatives

2. The people using their competitor’s products will see how well you treat your core users and may look at their current company and see the lack of it. It’s like when a company chases new customers by giving discount after discount but never once offering a discount to great long-term customers. It leaves a bad taste in the mouth of the people who’ve carried your company.

We're currently using Unity as part of an epidemic simulator.

Get them while they’re young

In my sphere (of ~90%/10% unity/unreal devs), a lot of Unreal's recent releases have been extremely tempting reasons to start migrating from Unity to getting more familiar with Unreal. They're inspiring and make a lot of upper-end Unity tech feel outdated by comparison. Demos like this are a nice reassurance that Unity's capable of whatever we need to wrangle it to do, even if we're not building hyper-realistic experiences like this now. It's nice to not feel like my preferred stack is falling behind the curve.

Unreal seems to be making these things easier to achieve through tooling for games, where I feel Unity is just trying to point out that you could still reach this level of fidelity if you wanted to, like you said.

I think if I were to start a high fidelity project with a big team, I'd start seriously considering the art pipeline benefits you're getting from Unreal. It looks like they're trying pretty hard to take some of the tedious work out of lighting and setting up LODs, which could be a big time savings.

Even small teams have great use of unreals tools. Hard to grasp it all but extremely useful.

I always have this quote from Garry Newman of GMod & Rust (a Unity Project) fame at the back of my mind when hearing any news about Unity's new demos.

> The short movie demos aren't impressive. It's embarassing when half your keynote is a group of artists explaining how they spent 6 months re-writing half the engine to render something that they could made in Maya in a week.

- https://garry.tv/unity-2020

Really wish Unity stopped being recommended as a great first choice for hobbyists with a bit of programming experience in general. In my experience I've found it a lot harder to get going with it, and requires dealing with a lot of systems which are in various stages of deprecation or early access compared to UE.

I'm just a hobby game dev but I'm super glad I chose to stick with Godot. It has always felt very intuitive and the alpha for version 4 is looking super great too. I don't know if Unity cares about 2d games but to me it seems like Godot is a way better free choice for 2d and unreal is a way better choice for 3d

I always assumed the Unity demos are interesting because they are being done in real time.

It makes more sense if you read the next line :

> Show me a 100 player PUBG type game running at solid 60fps on a current gen console or mobile. We already know you can render a GTA3 cutscene.

So, as I understand, he complains that the demo team spends more time trying to make demos that looks like movies instead of making demos that are more focus on the game parts.

The linked video wasn't rendered in real time.

I've been using Unity professionally for large indie/AA development for a few years now. Before that I did five years of AAA with Frostbite. I've also used a bunch of other engines, including Unreal, in my spare time.

Unity is definitely a very stable engine with a lot of features and very nice and simple to work with. I know several developers who see Unity as a better alternative than Unreal for any scale because the development process is so smooth. As a graphics programmer I feel liberated by how easy it is to set things up.

I've also looked into performance quite a lot and it's not bad. There are issues, especially on certain platforms, and a lot of gotchas. But their analysis tools are really mature and help solve a lot of issues without having to load up external tools. It's definitely possible to make beautiful and performant Unity games.

This is the view they want to promote. What they don't want you to know is that the engine keeps churning out half baked features which never get fully fleshed out or documented properly. A lot of indie developers also complain about support but at least with their enterprise support you often get swift and helpful answers.

What I feel really hurts whenever I use UE is iteration time. Everything takes too long. E.g. compilation (code, shaders), but there are lots of other examples.

Probably going for this market

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/02/the-mandalorian-was-s...

That was my thought too, that the target of these demos wasn’t just game devs. I always saw these high-end demos as a way to move into more traditional storytelling, like movies and TV. I think of these high-end demos as a kind of skating to where the puck is going to be as opposed to where the puck is. (Or where you want the market to move).

Just to add to what everyone else is saying, they could simply believe that showing these demos is what attracts the smaller devs.

People who are just getting started will see this and see that Unity must surely be capable of everything they need, and it may even be trivial there, if it can also handle this.

It's also a piece of aspirational marketing. It doesn't make sense to show the reality of the mobile game space as that won't get anyone excited. It's what you could do, not what you will do.

This is my thinking as well. Unity needs to show that it possesses the prestige features that attract novice developers who aren't yet thinking about things like ease of use and production workflow.

They want to compete in the AAA space. The reason Unity has little usage in the AAA space is because in the past Unity hasn't been good enough performancewise. They need to show to developers and convince publishers that Unity is a safe and viable choice for console development. If they fail at accomplishing this they're ceding a huge amount of marketshare to their competition.

Agree, I figure this is a significant factor.

An anecdote from my studio: My studio is work for hire with mostly Unity devs. The "big ticket" contracts are in Unreal, so the studio is starting to push for devs to learn Unreal, so we can start landing those contracts. In this case, the publisher perception of Unity/Unreal is creating a business need in our company to move away from Unity and into Unreal.

100% I have seen the same thing. Big publicly traded publisher. If your pitch has "Unity" in it their interest sinks.

> I've hear that even these highly impressive demos are fake - they built a ton of custom code for each one they rebuild core Unity features, meaning if you wanted to replicate this for yourself, you'd be in for a ton of development.

It's sadly even worse. To replicate most of this, you need access to the C++ part of the engine source code. If you're small (e.g. less than $10 mio annual revenue), they won't even discuss pricing with you.

> I'm kinda confused why Unity keeps doing this - they keep putting out high-end demo after high-end demo, but that's not where there core userbase is.

I fully agree. One of the top voted comments on the YouTube demo video even captures this pretty good in a humorous way:

> Can't wait to use this to make another low poly game

Check out Rust and Escape from Tarkov, they are a big step above your typical Unity games. So even if its not their core userbase they certainly have such titles already, and it seems that they want more.

If anything Escape From Tarkov proves why Unity is not a robust game engine. I’m a huge Tarkov player, but that game is riddled with issues.

As someone who bought it 4+ years ago in alpha it's a game that has come a long long way, same with rust really. Its not without it's issues, hard to say which are engine problems or just bad decisions made by the devs, which is hard to blame them for as their situation is a bit different compared to many other game companies.

Tarkov feels very Unity in how everything just has this layer of jank to it

Don't forget Apex Legends.

Apex uses the source engine, AFAIK.

https://unity.com/case-study/apex

If you actually read the case study, there are 0 mentions of Unity. This PDF is about Multiplay (acquired by Unity in 2017) and the backend; the game is on a highly modified Source engine.

Interesting. Thanks for the heads up!

yet I got several hours of downtime over the last 6 months, where sometimes server stutters to an unplayable frame rate

Pretty sure they want to break out of the core userbase. I once interviewed there and they really stressed that they were a 3D platform and not just a game engine.

In that context it would make sense to make demos for the capabilities that people don't know that you have.

I think you miss the point entirely, Unity is reaching different space outside of mobile game, think about 3d, movies, vfx, ads etc ...

It has been a while since Unity is not just a mobile engine.

AAA definition for other lay-readers confused by the jargon:

games produced and distributed by a mid-sized or major publisher, which typically have higher development and marketing budgets than other tiers of games.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/AAA_(video_game_industry)

In my opinion, it mainly stands for low-risk productions where you recycle a proven core game mechanic with amazing and new graphics. For example, the Assassin's Creed series where each game looks unique and great, but they all play very similar.

That’s a little backwards, AAA games are expensive which makes them inherently risky. This is why most successful companies try to minimize risks by using proven franchises and gameplay.

However, you do see plenty of exceptions like the original Dark Souls which took serious risks. Which was then followed by two lower risk sequels.

I don't work in the industry, but as an outsider your question seems to answer itself. I would wager that Unity wants to take the step from the hobbyist space to the professional space — because surely that's where the bigger sums are made. Even if they're not there right now, consistently putting out content that indicates that you're working on it is a great way to captivate your audience over time and shift the perception of what your brand is about. In the startup space, this would be similar to building in the open — it helps you signal your brand, build a reputation and, hopefully, build a customer base that matches your sell.

Although you mean well, this sounds a lot like "why does<X poor country> launch satellites or do science when their population is starving". Doing one doesn't contradict the other.

Can't afford to just keep narrowing down on existing customer base. They need to keep expanding and competing, for e.g. with Unreal https://youtu.be/bErPsq5kPzE

Unity has been courting the VFX community for years for building prerendered scenes. Unreal is doing much better in that area than they are. Gaining more ground here was why they acquired WETA Digital. If Unity can gain a foothold, then they don't need a lot of users...just a few really big ones.

UE is gaining traction in the film space. Unity wants those people to know they're also an option.

I was going to comment similarly. Unless Unity has a competitive answer to Lumen + Nanite, they're fucked out of the hyper realistic pipeline. They need to come up with an answer to those or double down on their actual strengths for indie development.

Something else I haven't seen mentioned in the replies: demos are shiny promotion-bait (both of the internal title-promotion style, and also the company itself hungry for any kind of engagement).

source: work in marketing

They are probably still hoping to compete with Epic in the RealTime cinema engine market. Although it seems that Unreal has pretty much become the standard now for big film productions.

They do it maybe for similar reasons some car manufacturers are involved in Formula 1: prestige, pushing their engineering competence, application of research that benefits their products, etc.

There's clearly some bad compositing taking place in this one demo so yes this isn't a pure demo of their engine's capabilities.

In his last keynote, John Carmack mentioned the possibility of the Metaverse being something like a Unity Plugin that federated platforms could tie into.

When people compare game engines they often look for the upper limit of what the engine can do. Even if subconsciously.

Its cheaper to make a demo than to do solid rewrites / bug fixes of a huge incumbent codebase.

Let’s hack this!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com