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Comment by Jare | Hacker News Reader

> 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)

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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.

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.

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.

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'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.

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.

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.

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/

> - 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 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.

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.

>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.

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

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.

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

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