Unity is no longer a games engine company, it is an ad company. It is taking surprisingly long for people to see it this way.
It was really sad to me, because (possibly naively) I saw joining Unity as a potential opportunity to pivot more closely to game engine programming (from web), but that was an uphill battle given that the resource allocation was massively in the opposite direction.
0: https://blog.unity.com/games/introducing-unitys-latest-sampl...
1: https://80.lv/articles/unity-stopped-the-production-of-its-s...
>Unity is no longer a games engine company, it is an ad company. It is taking surprisingly long for people to see it this way.
to be honest, I wasn't aware half of unity's revenues were ads until I worked there. Online gaming discourse has such tunnel vision for AAA console games that it is very easy to miss how over half of gaming revenue is mobile, which is where Unity rules in terms of market share.
On a lot of those, the engine is more of a bare-bones renderer: only one Scene is really used, all entity instantiation and level loading is done by a user-land script. Some physics/collision was very custom too. Editors were also almost always custom, on larger games you write custom tooling, mid-sized ones preferred packages from the asset store.
Perhaps things are different now. Character movement was 100% offloaded to packages, but now there are more capable systems (I haven't kept up). But I still see a lot of chatter about how to do this kind of thing in forums, etc. Anyway, that's what I remember seeing, so: IME and YMMV, of course.
hehe, no. Things are pretty much the same. Source: I'm working with Unity daily.
that's correct. As the saying goes, it's easier to start making a game in Unity, but it's easier to finish it in Unreal. Most games in Unity are pretty small, or unfinished.
By that reasoning, aren't these games the majority of the market and therefore the engine is a good fit for it - starting and working on arguably smaller indie projects and such, as opposed to some hypothetical huge game, of which there are decidedly few? I think that's why Godot is also a pretty good engine, even aside from it being open source, even if the features aren't all that mature - it's easy to iterate in it, even faster than in Unity.
I found some stats: https://steamdb.info/tech/
Unity has 42160 games.
Unreal has 11701 games.
GameMaker has 4498 games.
RPGMaker has 2939 games.
PyGame has 2273 games.
RenPy has 2213 games.
Godot has 1170 games.
All the other engines together have around 6000 games.it's the Pareto principle, I suppose. There are tons, tons, tons more small games than large ones, but the large ones take the lion's share of the revenue. So it depends on how you approach games.
It doesn't mean it's a good example of how to design a programming language.