An Interview with Unity CEO Matthew Bromberg About Turnarounds | Hacker News Reader

An Interview with Unity CEO Matthew Bromberg About Turnarounds

stratechery.com

37 pointsfeross38 comments

> What’s so fascinating is you mentioned Knights of the Old Republic, and I think anyone who knows about that game thinks about it as one of the great successes in gaming, and it’s like that whole first period where it’s a total failure is just totally gone from memory.

I think the interviewer has mixed up knights of the old republic (KOTOR - the single player RPG) and Star Wars the old republic (SWTOR - the mmorpg in the same setting). SWTOR was “saved” in the sense that it went from a giant failure to a break even MMO. Which is not to diminish the work the interviewee and others put in to get there, but I’m not sure I’d call SWTOR “one of the great successes in gaming” (that would be KOTOR)

Yeah these were my thoughts exactly.

No mention of Godot? It seems to be slowly starting to eat their lunch. No mention of the fragmented rendering backends? Oh, but they do talk about basketball. Why would a CEO care about the little things… Unity is going to be fine.

As an ex-Unity dev, it's clear Unreal crushes Unity on the "AAA" vibe side, and Godot marches forward on the "indie" vibe side. The writing was on the wall - I personally switched to Godot and couldn't be happier. Tools have new versions before being deprecated, bugs get fixed (and fast!), and there's no looming threat of Unity coming down and squeezing more money out of our products

Unity is absolutely being squeezed between the two. I can't really see how it can compete with Godot at the low end; it's hard to compete with free, and most of the goodness in low end games is the gameplay logic, not graphics or animation. And Godot can only get better; look at how Blender ate the CGI tools market. This leaves Unity having to either compete with Unreal at the high end - a very high bar - or somehow finding a new business model. The switcheroo they tried to pull on their customer base can best be viewed in that light.

Yep it seems to be end of the line for Unity tbh.

Can you list even a single widely popular Godot game? Meanwhile, like half of the steam top 50, 100, 200, etc is unity.

Cruelty Squad. Also the other assertion seems rather hyperbolic. Steam top50/100 is either unreal or proprietary engines...

Maybe a bit of an exaggeration. But I think at least 30%. Unreal is popular too. Unity seems to be more popular for indie/coop/single player/certain art styles. There seems to be many more unity games overall, but a lot of them are very small.

I don’t know if I could list something that matches say Cuphead or Silksong, but I do think that Godot is currently on a Clayton Christiansen-style worse-is-better ascent right now.

It's a bit of a weird edge-case, but the very popular Battlefield 6 is partially a Godot game. It's an odd hybrid of a proprietary in-house engine with Godot grafted onto it, which serves as a public-facing SDK for players to build their own content. I know that's not exactly what you meant but it is an interesting application in a major AAA title.

https://gamefromscratch.com/battlefield-6-using-godot-game-e...

Battlefield 6 of all things includes Godot as core of the Portal map-building. Casette Beasts is what Pokemon wishes it was. Upcoming Planetenverteidigungskanonenkommandant looks gorgeous from the previews.

I don't really think Nintendo is particularly concerned about Casette Beasts. And BF6 using it for their map builder is IMO a bit of a stretch.

Planetenverteidigungskanonenkommandant looks neat though.

Brotato: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brotato

You can actually pull that from SteamDB

https://steamdb.info/tech/Engine/Godot/?sort=followers_desc

Battlefield 6 also uses Godot for its modding tools

Not now, but ask me that question in 5 years.

Godot isn't quite free if you want to release on consoles since those platforms are only supported by commercial forks, but I'm sure going down that route is still a hell of a lot cheaper than licensing Unity.

Yes the pricing for W4 consoles is below paying for Unity Pro.

There's also a free, MIT licensed Switch exporter, but it's in the Nintendo developer forums because of the NDAs.

You probably violated a Nintendo NDA by even mentioning that the exporter exists on the forums.

A much better C# experience across all devices where people expect to buy games.

I don't like Godot that much either - Imo what an engine needs is a clear and easy to use high-level API for grunt work, and good low level access so you can program your features just the way you want to.

If you understand how engines and rendering works in general you have an idea on how to implement something - but then you either run into A: a tool that can't quite do what you want but almost, B: an incredibly overengineered API that's somehow way more byzantine than OpenGL C: Some obscure quirk or bug of an existing feature that either works in a strange way, isn't documented, or is buggy.

In all these cases, doing the feature yourself is much easier than relying on the engine.

Particle systems are a good example for this.

You can bring your own particle system in Godot, you don't have to use the default one

Godot still has a lot to catch up, especially when considering the folks that rather target consoles and VR headsets with C#.

Also they aren't still there with being first partner with many industry places, that always release a Unity SDK for their products.

Currently working on a new game and it was hard for me to decide between unity and Godot.. I ended up going with Unity cus..

* I have 10+ years experience with it.

* C# integration in Godot is not great

* Cant build to webGL with C# in latest version of Godot

* gdscript is not a serious option imo (stupid whitespace language..They need to drop it and focus on C# like Unity did years back with UnityScript.. Seriously XNA and then Unity have cemented C# as the other language of game devs alongside C++. Even KSA's custom new engine is C# for example)

* With Unity I have access to the asset store, which has a massive amount of content, some very high quality stuff also that's much better then Unity's built in features (eg. Rewired)

I feel dirty using Unity vs Godot, but I primarily want to get my game done, and it will be faster with a better result using Unity, its just superior from an engineering point of view right now imo.

> I feel dirty using Unity vs Godot

Unity doesn't make me feel dirty at all. Quite the opposite actually. I am not going to apologize for using tools that don't suck. I feel like I am on the bridge of an imperial star destroyer when I am observing others get caught up with this "X is better than Y" bullshit, especially when X is definitely not better than Y.

> its just superior from an engineering point of view right now imo.

If you are building a game, this is the only thing that should matter. Imagine deluding yourself into believing that by picking exactly the right OSS hammer from Home Depot that your woodworking project will magically go better. If you have involved other humans in this effort, playing tooling tribalism simulator is a pretty lame thing to do, especially if those other humans are non-technical artists and otherwise trying to simply contribute to some shared creative vision.

> gdscript is not a serious option imo (stupid whitespace language..They need to drop it and focus on C# like Unity did years back with UnityScript.. Seriously XNA and then Unity have cemented C# as the other language of game devs alongside C++. Even KSA's custom new engine is C# for example)

I'm going to break this down:

> gdscript is not a serious option imo

Subjective, but fair enough. If this is a general argument against "scripting languages" versus more "advanced" languages, I should remind you that Lua and JS are still very popular languages in game development.

> stupid whitespace language

The only other big "whitespace language," Python, is immensely popular and widespread in server, client, AI, etc. applications. This is a question of taste, and has nothing to do with the objective quality of GDScript.

> They need to drop it and focus on C# like Unity did years back with UnityScript

The irony is that JavaScript (real JS, not a JS-like language) is almost certainly very viable in a game engine nowadays.

> Seriously XNA and then Unity have cemented C# as the other language of game devs alongside C++. Even KSA's custom new engine is C# for example

C# is popular for a variety of reasons (fast, mature ecosystem, etc.); however, "just use C# because others are using it" is by itself not a compelling argument.

Syntax and language aren't that big of a deal for professional developers.

I disagree, going from C# with full visual studio (having a compiler with a lot of information about your code), and all of .net available, to gdscript feels like moving to a kids toy language like Scratch.

I could do everything in gdscript, but it would be slower, more error prone and less maintainable.

.. Ive done some js recently, I did a web app. and the difference is shocking..

* you can actually make spelling mistakes

* there no find all references

* You cant rename things

* without types autocomplete does very little

* without compiler autocomplete suggest random things based on spelling, not actually viable fields

I could go on.. All these things add up to make the work go slower, and produce more error prone and less maintainable code. I thought the freedom of no types and less boilerplate would make js really fast to write but I found it the opposite in practice.

I can write 1000's of line of game code in C#. Complicated stuff like procedural level generation and I dont even need to run it, usually its perfect 1st time. I couldn't do that in js, the IDE experience is not the same.

Is it me or is this interview incredibly boring? Lots of words that say very little.

Also: Zynga (and its clones, like Vostu) used to be the cancer of gaming, rightly reviled by people like Jonathan Blow and Ian Bogost. From a predatory business angle maybe it was interesting to discuss, much like one would discuss the life of Jordan Belfort. Is Zynga still alive? That's one company that didn't deserve resuscitation.

The guy in the article is the one that resuscitated it! It's doing pretty well with mobile casino games these days.

Mobile casino games? Interesting, so Zynga just changed the skin of its games, and the basic premise of addictive behavior and "catching whales" remained intact? Yuck.

Zynga was acquired by Take2 in 2022 and is very much alive today.

IMHO the "predatory business" period of Zynga (e.g. the Tiny Tower vs Dream Heights) was prior to the arrival of team who executed the turnaround discussed in the interview.

By predatory I meant addiction driven free 2 play games where players are encouraged to spend money on "coins" or whatever to speed up the game, gain more turns, or skip boring parts, with a lot of grinding. A kind of gameplay that preys on addictive personality and relies on "whales" to spend money they don't have.

Have they changed this? What good games not following this scheme have they done since 2022? A sibling commenter mentioned Zynga now does mobile casino games, which would indicate they continue to be predatory.

I really think videogame companies like Zynga are not worth saving: they deserve to crash and burn.

It's not just you. Was a waste of time.

As a game developer who's primary tool I utilize is Unity I always find outside sentiment about it funny.

There's no doubt that Unity has put its users through the ringer over the last few years or so.

That said I still for the most part enjoy working with it. I think Unity had the right idea in regards to a lot of the toolset but unfortunately it's suffered in regards to stability.

With Unity 6+ though it really feels like we're starting to see the fruits of Unity labor. UI Toolkit, input system, rendering pipeline the package manger and more are finally starting to feel stable.

Additionally the engine itself feels far more rock solid then it had in years.

A rather large piece for me also really just enjoys programming in C#.

I'm actually super pumped that we have a great open source game engine to keep Unity on the straight and narrow. I'm also pumped that we have an amazing tool like Unreal for things more AAA in nature (although that's certainly not all). I personally think Unity is perfectly sandwiched in the middle of those options.

With the right ideas and execution I think it's going to be really exciting to see where it ends up.

I have been using Unity professionally since 2009 and I agree with you. Very stable now. Other competitors are good. Real code good.

I just hope they sort out the render pipeline mess.

I would like a turn around where Unity makes some measurable improvement over where they were a decade ago - not just overcomplicated sidegrades and failed APIs and features.

I wouldn't mind if Unity 2022.3 was the final version of the product. Nothing about Unity 6 is interesting to me. If I want more than what this old build can offer, I'd go find a big cash pile, hire a team and roll my own engine.

The only thing that would make me want to upgrade to a newer version is if they get CoreCLR working. Even then, I don't think there is much value add for the project I am currently on.

You can turn off the Unity splash screen with free version in 6.. Thats something I want in 6 tbh.

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