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Comment by intelVISA | Hacker News Reader

The Unreal thing is that Unity has/had ~8,000 employees last year. Sounds like an awful lot for a mobile game engine.

Not not it's an everything engine it's the most popular engine on steam by far from a quick search, although it does leans towards indie. https://infogram.com/1d560b7e-21a1-437a-91f4-198309bf3e25 https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/game-engines-on-steam...

I’d probably bet that the majority of games on steam have less than 1000 sales, so being a popular game on Steam probably doesn’t mean much compared to being a popular game by daily active users viewing unity ads.

Someone dug into this recently, it's over 50% of steam games haven't made $1k in sales. The vast majority of steam by game count is complete trash.

The methodology on the site only includes games with a minimum popularity, so the long tail of tiny indie games isn't included. By the way, since steam has a fee to be included, aren't most of those tiny indie games over at itch.io anyway?

> Unless stated otherwise, we filtered out unreleased games, free games, those that launched with less than a $4.99 price point, and those that have fewer than 50 reviews.

That seems quite a lot. Compared to game development teams with their own engines which they have kept modern while releasing games...

To be fair, the difference here is that Unity is doing more than just an engine for a specific type of game. Rather, they are building lots of different tools for lots of different games.

For example, Larian (BG3) and Wube (Factorio) each have their own engine. They are specially built specifically for the games they are making.

Also, you say "have been kept modern" but even that is questionable. "Modern?" What does that really mean? It's "modern" enough for the game. Starfield was just released, and it was released without ray tracing.

And we are just talking about games. Unity and Unreal do more than just working on the engine for games. So yes, while it's a lot, it's not fair to compare the bespoke engine use by game companies and engines like Unity and Unreal.

How many such game development companies actually are there? I see a lot of aging engines out there, and companies that jumped to unreal, but I have by no means broad knowledge

>aging engines

Gaming companies get a lot of crap for this - it seems unfair. The OS I'm using to write this is a relative newcomer at only 30 years old. Obviously, it has changed a lot in that time, but so have the engines. Most software doesn't get rewritten, it evolves.

Certainly not an expert but top studios like Bethesda and CDPR maintain their own engines with an order of magnitude less employees. They make games too.

CDPR seems to be switching to Unreal.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/03/the-witcher-will-retu...

They also produce games that are very similar to their other games, with similar mechanics, while Unity has to support a far more diverse set of games (basically anything 2d or 3d), and presumably has to continually offer a wider set of cutting-edge features.

Given the state of Creation Engine, I wouldn't say that Bethesda maintains their engine well. CDPR is switching to Unreal. CP2077 launch issues were mainly due to their engine not being capable of handling such large games.

I know the devs of Hades have a custom engine and they are by no means a large studio

That's a 2D single-player game— it gets way harder if you're trying to emulate the feature set of Unreal/Unity

Source: game dev using unreal

Off the top of my head, there's Larian Studios (bg3), and Haemimont Games (ja3).

id Tech is pretty solid

It's not just a mobile game engine, it's an everything game engine. They support (nearly?) every platform. That does take some work.

Even so, 8000 employees does sound a lot. And if they're losing a billion per year, it sounds like they have no revenue at all.

Epic Games only had about 2,000 in 2020 and they also develop games, store front (although really slowly), so it's at least a 4x more than they need.

But also their previous monetization seems to try charge per professional developer which is a limited audience compared to consumers, especially if you want to maintain a AAA engine (which it seems Unreal is favoured still) given it seems fast pace techniques & improvements. Maybe by selling cloud servers for networking, which I think maybe they were too expensive compared to alternatives.

Between Unity’s headcount and acquisitions it’s hard to not be reminded of the dril candle tweet.

Mentioning a tweet without quoting it is kinda annoying. It isn't like it could be that long.

It's not difficult to search for it. "dril candles tweet" first result on Google.

>...for a mobile game engine.

May I ask you if you ever heard of Rust? The game, not the programming language. Online survive game, which has thousands of active players every single day since like a decade already, full 3D and quite awesome graphics I'd say. It's written in Unity.

It's wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_(video_game)

A gameplay of a rather popular youtuber that does daily uploads: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSXCI0rLvHg

Man, Rust is infamous for being reeeeaaaallly badly optimized

I would have picked a different game.

I remember the minutes of loading of a new world..

While I don't know the Rust code, this isn't necessarily solely a Unity problem. Unity's C# API provides a lot of footguns that game developers tend to not think about in the near term. Lots of code bases I've seen in Unity don't do a good job of caching component instances, or just never opened the profiler to see their GC is off the charts. Unity can run really well if the proper thought and care is put into it.

Loading into a new world takes a long time, but once I'm in there, I get great performance.

That said I'm in the "dozens of hours" bracket and not the "thousands of hours" one, so maybe I just haven't hit that yet.

That's not their focus at all. They're trying to be an all-things-entertainment company, currently, they are focusing on movie animation and digital character creation.

Where did you read that Unity is just a mobile game engine?

Unity supports basically all gaming platforms. Windows, Linux, Mac, PS5, Switch, XBox, etc.

There are AAA desktop games that use Unity.

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