Random Thoughts about Unity

Unity has become an unfocused, poorly optimized, half-baked mess. This WAS bad for the independent and small developer market that actually uses their engine for final builds, but they've begun a mass exodus to Godot, which happened to go from "ok" to "great" JUST as Unity ruined their platform with their short lived "20 cents per install" policy.

Someday soon, we will see Godot eclipse Unity in the same fashion that so many other proprietary juggernauts were slowly cannibalized by laser-focused open source projects over the years:

In 2022, the split among GMTK participants was 16% Godot to 61% Unity. In 2023, it was 22% Godot to 49% Unity. This year, it was a whopping 37% Godot to 43% Unity: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GVfo5-0WQAAIMAQ?format=jpg

This is major, because Godot has just had another round of home run improvements that brought in even more developers. I think 2025 is the year that Godot effectively replaces Unity for new developers.

Unity is still a pretty good tool overall but just like the author states they are going in too many directions at once and it's hurting usability. And of course there's the problem with Unity Technologies not making enough income to be sustainable long term and trying to capture more value from its users.

I know a lot of people are very excited about Godot replacing Unity but I honestly hope that the 3D engine market becomes more diverse. I'd argue a lot of engine tech and ways of creating games hasn't innovated as much as it could have if there was more competition in the space.

There's a lot of awesome 3D frameworks and engines out there and they should get some attention too.

And their moronic new licensing. We’re testing a product. Going with unreal because it lets us test for free with better features.

I can’t see myself ever using unity for anything. Either unreal or Godot. There is no good use case for unity anymore

My final straw for unity was when they locked my org due to fraud. I appealed the case thinking it was a false positive by some automated system and they would correct the error.

It took them 3 months to finally unlock, but by that point I just moved on to Unreal and never looked back.

> For example, in the old Unity’s built-in render pipeline, you had a choice between say “deferred lighting” and “per-vertex lighting”, and while these two target extremely different hardware capabilities, result in different rendering and support different graphics features, they work on the same data. Which means the choice between them is “just a setting” somewhere, and not an up-front decision that you have to make before even starting your project.

That's untrue. I've worked on a project that used forward lighting. Converting it to deferred was not an easy task, we had to remove and work around so many transparent objects.

By trade I'm a C#/.NET dev. Unity made it easy to dabble with gamedev on the side. But I've since moved to Godot. Their approach makes a lot more sense. Unfortunately, the C# experience isn't quite there.

GDScript is just barely OK. You really start to miss a lot of advanced features on bigger projects. Generics, Typed Dictionaries, Extension Methods, etc.

Godot adoption will skyrocket further once they add proper C# Web Export. Unfortunately, they claim to be blocked by this .NET team issue.

https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/70796#issuecomme...

https://godotengine.org/article/platform-state-in-csharp-for...

I recently started looking at Unity again - not for gaming, but as a way to deliver cross platform B2B products. Primarily leveraging the 2D layout primitives rather than the 3D rendering pipeline, but perhaps taking advantage of things like TextMeshPro instead of traditional techniques. The overall architecture would be client-server, very similar to a typical web app. Unity on the client, some backend written in .NET (so we can share contracts).

If I was forced to do a proper "native" experience on every platform, I may spend a more significant amount of time on this path. The licensing arrangement with Unity isn't perfectly ideal, but in the realm of B2B products it's probably a manageable cost of doing business.

    Yes, the original DOTS idea had a very strong vision and direction. I don’t know what the current DOTS vision is. But to me the original DOTS vision felt a lot like it is trying to be something else than Unity...

What is DOTS?

I have FINALLY made the decision to leave Unity for my hobby games/programs, after about 10 years using it fairly heavily. It is just making my life miserable and I sincerely hate using it, with the latest beta being almost literally unusable on my computer. I do disagree with the author about UIToolkit though - that is one of the only things Unity has done in the last 5 years that is actually useful.

I'm not sure what to move to. I think there is a big vacuum for a code-first, open source framework that basically does what Unity does without the awful editor. I know a lot of people like GDScript in Godot, but to me it looks like the same mistake Unity made with UnityScript, which they eventually got rid of.

Unity is a terribly managed company led by people who know next to nothing about gaming or simulation

Unity is in the “transition into hedge fund” phase of corporate development - but they don’t know how to make the kind of long term revenue that is necessary for that, the same way eg MSFT or Uber does with exceptionally predictable product revenue

JR couldn’t care less about customers, product or anything other than making investors richer - he pushed the whole company whatever direction investor sentiment went (metaverse, ads, Weta failed acquisition etc…) and we see how that went.

MW was a weaker less psychotic version of JR, and couldn’t make a game in Unity if you forced him to.

The new CEO is whatever who cases, just another psychopath trying to pretend he cares about developers. Yawn.

Overall there a lot of people who care about gaming and simulation toiling at Unity and only keep going cause the remnants of a great engine still produce value - however waning. Investors, management however don’t and never did.

Unity sealed their fate going public when they had no long term way to sustain it without destroying it (I’m unaware of a company who didn’t destroy the original products after going public, so, who is surprised)

Unity games always seem to have memory leaks. I'm not sure if it's the engine or the game.

If I use ulimit to set a memory limit, the games behave. Otherwise, they'll keep sucking of memory till my computer crashes.

With all the hype going around Godot in light of Unity failings, I'm hopeful Stride3D will eventually see more light of day as it focuses on high-end rendering and VR, and will eventually integrate Bepuphysics2 to trade blows with big boy engines. Written in pure C#.

> A group of brilliant, top-talent engineers seemed to want to build technology that is the opposite of what Unity is or has been. In their ideal world, everyone would be writing all the code in SIMD assembly and lockless algorithms.

He is talking about you Mike Acton.

Nice one Aras. I can't say I recognize the company anymore, so disfigured from what it once was, but I still love the engine and editor and still use it day to day.

Does anyone think Omniverse can become a viable alternative to Unity?