> Without retreading old ground too much, the backlash was so severe – from alleged threats to big names announcing intent to jump ship – that last week Unity rolled back much of the new policy.
Companies of this size don't do things like this willy-nilly. They do them after extensive data collection, analysis, research, etc.
Both internally and externally corporations routinely deploy a policy change that is severe, and then to look good, "roll back" the policy...but not all the way. The result is a roll forward, but yet even fairly savvy press like The Reg call it "rolling back much of the new policy."
The whole point is to advance a policy while looking like you "listened" to your employees/customers...while getting nearly or exactly what you originally planned.
Raise your hand if you've ever worked somewhere the health insurance coverage became more expensive or vacation policy was strongly curtailed, and then a couple days later there was a "we listened" email announcing something between the old and new policy.
> The whole point is to advance a policy while looking like you "listened" to your employees/customers...while getting nearly or exactly what you originally planned.
Pretty much everyone who uses Unity is aware of this and not falling for it. The only people I've seen give the "they listened, everything is good again" take have been youtubers who make Unity tutorial content.
Usually the dumber thing is the true thing, I doubt this was some three dimensional company strategy (and it doesn't make sense for that to even be the case if you think it through).
I wouldn't be surprised if the CEO gets fired for this given how strategically misguided it was and the fallout it caused, that's the kind of change probably required given the error to help claw back any amount of lost trust they can.
Apple is probably annoyed they became friendlier to Unity (in order to punish Epic), looks like not a great choice in hindsight.
I wonder how much deals and business relationships like the one they have with Apple might have contributed to Unity’s confidence in the ability to make the ludicrous policy changes stick.
Given Unity’s 3d performance is “good enough” but not good enough that most AAA Unity games don’t wind up basically rewriting more than half the engine to get acceptable performance for their particular game… I really was shocked by the big Unity hype with the whole Vision OS apps part of that Apple announcement… particularly since the worst offenders for “under optimised” giving phone warning levels of CPU burn and battery consumption have been pretty 2.5D Unity apps where the only 3D effect is some parallax scrolling and using the built in Z index to control which sprites will wind up in front of others as they move around in an otherwise completely 2D fashion… some absolutely surprising moments over the years as I’ll start playing a “visually good and polished game” only to notice at the end of 5-10 minutes bus or train ride, my phones gotten very warm and my battery is now 10-25% lower…
I learned how shitty Unity can be before I got any experience developing with it and the experiences I have had developing with it and the experiences shared with me by others who develop with it … It feels like a major disconnect has grown over the years between management running the company, project management setting goals for the development/engineering staff, and the multiple classes of end users of the engine, with my suspicion being that it’s hard for them to avoid getting drowned in feedback from novices who easily achieve their goals with the tools in Unity, leveraging their store, some vendor plugins maybe and don’t do much more than build 2D, 2.5D or very basic 3D games… The next tiers above that of intermediate and advanced Unity users being progressively more silent about their problems as they have learned to rely less and less on what Unity provides with the end outcome being some experienced Unity developers I’ve met being pretty honest that they basically only use Unity because it’s a C# game engine and there’s a lot of benefit in using C# like a big developer pool, performant backend systems in the same programming language, etc… and they are throwing away >90% of the engine and either they or their team are doing everything themselves because what Unity gives them is completely useless, or unsuitable, or not just simply not performant enough.
When your “experts” are “throwing away” your product and just “using the box it comes in” because it’s a convenient shape… something is very very wrong and your product’s days are numbered. Their recent attempted policy’s change seems completely ignorant of the current state of their product’s “sticking power”. The users who make it look like anything is possible in Unity and who are effectively creating marketing material for Unity by crediting them as the game engine they used regardless of how much of the engine they throw away in order to get any particular AAA game completed… these critical users who are helping pull in new users are also very close to not using the product at all. Doing anything that alienates them is the marketing equivalent of a massive act of self sabotage, and I don’t think they are going to survive this. For me the writing was on the wall from the merger with the malware pile of an “ad tech” company a while back and the boneheaded comments about monetisation that were made back then… it’s just been a question of how long till it fails… and boy has the policy change and backlash accelerated things…
+1 - I actively avoid games using the unity engine in favor of ones using unreal. It’s a noticeably worse experience for end users of the product (not just the devs, but also the players).
It’s unfortunate because it’d be good to have some real competition in the space, and there’s basically none.
> +1 - I actively avoid games using the unity engine in favor of ones using unreal. It’s a noticeably worse experience for end users of the product (not just the devs, but also the players).
I often wonder how common this view point is. From a player perspective, I don’t think about game engines. If there’s a game that I’d like to play, I play it regardless of the engine.
If you were to see a video for a video game — say Hollow Knight or Cuphead, for example — and think that it might be fun to play but then see that they use Unity, what do you do instead? Do you search for a close analogue made in Unreal engine? Or do you just play something completely different?
From a hobbyist game dev perspective, I definitely think about engine — of course. But usually when I work with other people they want to use Unity. I’m guessing that might change now, though.
I doubt it’s common - almost certainly most users don’t think of it or even know what an engine is.
I just notice it - if I see something is unity I’m less likely to give it a try vs. something unreal. Usually I’m just scrolling Xbox gamepass options that look appealing.
If it was some specific game I wanted to try, unity wouldn’t stop me - but I have a bias against it. Unity games generally feel crappier imo.
It's common enough that it used to be a meme (often pushed by Jim Sterling and other online influencers) that Unity was only useful for incompetent developers to make garbage cash-in games and asset flips. That was when it was much easier to publish to Steam, though.
I definitely remember some people throwing shade in my direction in a couple of game playing friend face to face conversations for my opinions about Unity in this time period… despite the fact my criticism was entirely based on my own subjective personal experiences as someone playing games on multiple platforms combined with my experience as a cross platform software developer…
It was seen as fashionable to hate Unity and there was some pushback from fans of games built with Unity… which since it corresponds to my first developer experiences with unity, was actually about the same time I started to ask Unity developers how much of their games used the Unity provided components for various things as opposed to writing replacements…
I learned a few tricks about arguing with gamers but for the most part stopped mentioning my dislike for Unity in any face to face contexts until someone else mentioned a dislike first… I didn’t care enough to argue over it… I have opinions but I’m not trying to change anyone’s mind, it’s not like there’s financial benefits steering people away from Unity … I’ve got no short positions on Unity stock or stock in Epic, etc…
Doesn’t mean I won’t bitch in the appropriate professional context… like this thread. ;-)
I've seen this referred to as a 'cock-thumb' proposal. As in, you ask for the greater sacrifice (cutting off the first) and hope they answer proposing the smaller sacrifice (to cut off the second) instead;
> Companies of this size don't do things like this willy-nilly. They do them after extensive data collection, analysis, research, etc.
Yes, and there was huge amounts of internal pushback about the pricing model, people inside the company saw it was 100% bonkers. They released it anyway without any hints given to their biggest clients beforehand, everyone learned it from the press release.
The customer reps the big companies have were caught off guard and had to spend a week apologising and saying "I don't know" and "I'll get back to you" a _lot_. Those weren't fun meetings for either side of the table. Source: first hand spoke to two people who had to have these meetings with Unity.
Unity did walk back on the changes yes, but there still aren't any promises they won't try something like this again. Switching engines and toolchains has a cost and now even medium to big companies are evaluating whether it's worth the risk to keep trusting that Unity doesn't alter the deal further vs. switching to a new engine or building their own.
Right now, Godot seems to be experiencing a bit of backlash against the hype. I'm seeing numerous anti-Godot posts on social media from people upset about the way various things work, or lack of features, etc. The recent row over allocation in C# is one example, but a lot of people complain about the UI, 3D support, performance, etc. Of course a lot of that is just Unity shills and people riding the hate train but it does suggest there is a lot to be improved about Godot.
It's inevitable that Godot isn't going to retain a lot of new users from this - most Unity devs will go back to Unity simply due to opportunity cost, they'll bite the bullet at least until they can afford to switch, and most will switch to Unreal, not Godot.
And this is the reality of the position Godot finds themselves in. They aren't competing against Unity, because that isn't possible yet, they're competing against Unreal Engine for the title of "best Unity alternative." Godot doesn't need more hype, it needs hands on deck making pull requests and improving the engine so that when the second wave of Unity quitters come in six months or a year, they no longer look as much like the quirky toy engine compared to Unreal.
And I say that as someone who uses Godot exclusively and wants to see it succeed.
> It's inevitable that Godot isn't going to retain a lot of new users from this
I disagree. It's my opinion all the recent attention is going to be a net positive for the project including the C# binding post.
I think they will retain a sizable by number of users, particularly hobbyists, from this AND, importantly, a lot of people capable of contributing to the engine itself.
That was the most subversive comment I've ever read. I was certain you were going to enumerate all your actions and then conclude that Godot was terrible. Well done I guess?
yeah, I did similar stuff and simply concluded that
1) the performance for my kind of game isn't there yet (expected but manageable. I'm willing to contribute to help here)
2) The core development is focusing more on feature parity than addressing #1 (which again, expected by manageable. I know a lot of people value an asset store and proper console support). BUT:
3) much of community PRs seemed blocked by leadership, which has a strong ideaological skew towards convenience over performance.
3 is the big dealbreaker for me. Reminds me oh too much of Blender's community pre 2.8 because the dev was so adamant on their particular control scheme (which was the biggest crticism of Blender pre-2.8).
And to be frank, I don't like the attitude of the leader when replying to feedback. I can disagree with someone and respect their views, but they seem very set out to to respond to so much feedback with "you don't understand what you're doing, you don't understand my vision". The former is almost never accetable, but the latter is all on Godot. If you want people to understand your vision, don't have a 3 year outdated roadmap.
As in your link, I noticed that recently links of YouTube videos from the "share" button on the site are adding the unnecessary tracking parameter "?si=[number]" at the end of the link. I guess they sacrifice simplicity over tracking proposes.
> Without retreading old ground too much, the backlash was so severe – from alleged threats to big names announcing intent to jump ship – that last week Unity rolled back much of the new policy.
This sentence is bad.
There was one credible death threat (singular), and it came from an employee within the company, so the phrasing 'from x to y' is a weird way to connect strife from one employee to the actions of several companies. There were threats (plural) when you include those from companies to move engines such as MegaCrit, but come on, there was a link to the story about the death threat.
It's poor phrasing that will make people think there were multiple threats, which Unity themselves have never said, yet many stories about this do while quoting the Unity source that uses the singular. Richard Currie could have prevented furthering the game of telephone going regarding the quantity of death threats by simply checking the article he linked.
This will come off like a minor nitpick but these types of not-quite-full-errors can and do lead to the story getting distorted years down the road.
This doesn't strike me as a minor nitpick, it reads as a legitimate and serious criticism.
I think superficially similar observations to yours get blown off because they frequently resort to speculation and conspiratorial thinking. I appreciate that you have pointed out the mistake clearly and why it is important.
Godot vs Unity is gonna be another OBS vs XSplit situation, the dominant proprietary solution is going to fade into obscurity. Things are still far from the inflection point and engines are inherently long-lived, but if you're starting a new gamedev project today, are you gonna use Unity? I'd be looking for every possible way to avoid it.
But is it "good enough" to convince some people to use it instead?
For the moment the best it can do is to provide an (ever improving) basic alternative to Unity that forces them (and the market in General) to not be greedy and careless.
This is probably good for the game engine market as a whole.
- Unity still performs circles around Godot's 3d projects, even without taking into account DOTS. They fix a lot of their c# scripting performance issues with IL2CPP, so you essentially get the best of both world in terms of c++ performance with C# scripting. That's not something any other engine would be able to easily replicate.
- The renderers are fundamentally different. Godot has advertised their rendering to not be as flexible while Unity throw you some weird shader language that lets you do whatever you want. There's a lot of jank in Unity's renderers but they are still more mature than Godot.
- Physics is a huge weakness of Godot and Unity has options to either use their much more mature built-in physics or Havok (IIRC).
to name a few technical comparisions. Godot still has a way to go before being comparable with Unity in regards to 3D.
Yes, as a grey-beard in Unity (using since version 1 - certified expert etc.) - I picked up Godot 2 weeks ago for a new project (2D). I was instantly productive, and within 24 hours I was well on my way and had a rough prototype of the idea. I started in C# but within a few hours embraced GD script - because bindings between scene elements and code are smoother in GD. So far I haven't been disappointed at all - I'm using version 3.6 - and God-willing I'm done with unity.
Things I like:
- builds for web, works on mobile
- crazy fast build times compared to unity
- animation timeline feels better than unity, calling code triggers etc. I remember it took me a while to learn Mechanim - with Godot I could instantly understand how it worked.
- GD script is surprisingly fun to code in, yet has features I wouldn't expect (i.e. calling a function by it's function name - stored within a string)
- everything just seems to work - I've only had two minor issues, one with calling code from the animation timeline within the editor (which doesn't work) and also some issues with muting master audio bus
- the two problems I've had were pretty easy to solve, unlike with unity - right from the beginning in version 1.0 I always seemed to be the guy sending strange tech support stuff and finding new bugs that required insane work-arounds to solve. Just unlucky I guess.
- I love the fact that it's open source
However... just for balance here are my two concerns:
- v4.0 seems to be a rewrite, and this scares me - because Unity went down this track and at the end when starting a new project one had to choose between many different versions of unity. Choosing the right version depended on what features you needed vs. stability and compatibility with previous assets that might be in your library
- no... really that's it.
So... my experience with Godot has been a lifesaver! My new projects kicks-ass and turned out much better than it would in Unity - and it's been a pleasure to learn and develop in .... maybe I just needed a change?
43 comments
[ 6.1 ms ] story [ 351 ms ] threadCompanies of this size don't do things like this willy-nilly. They do them after extensive data collection, analysis, research, etc.
Both internally and externally corporations routinely deploy a policy change that is severe, and then to look good, "roll back" the policy...but not all the way. The result is a roll forward, but yet even fairly savvy press like The Reg call it "rolling back much of the new policy."
The whole point is to advance a policy while looking like you "listened" to your employees/customers...while getting nearly or exactly what you originally planned.
Raise your hand if you've ever worked somewhere the health insurance coverage became more expensive or vacation policy was strongly curtailed, and then a couple days later there was a "we listened" email announcing something between the old and new policy.
Pretty much everyone who uses Unity is aware of this and not falling for it. The only people I've seen give the "they listened, everything is good again" take have been youtubers who make Unity tutorial content.
Twitt...er, X would like to have a 140 chars with you
I wouldn't be surprised if the CEO gets fired for this given how strategically misguided it was and the fallout it caused, that's the kind of change probably required given the error to help claw back any amount of lost trust they can.
Apple is probably annoyed they became friendlier to Unity (in order to punish Epic), looks like not a great choice in hindsight.
Given Unity’s 3d performance is “good enough” but not good enough that most AAA Unity games don’t wind up basically rewriting more than half the engine to get acceptable performance for their particular game… I really was shocked by the big Unity hype with the whole Vision OS apps part of that Apple announcement… particularly since the worst offenders for “under optimised” giving phone warning levels of CPU burn and battery consumption have been pretty 2.5D Unity apps where the only 3D effect is some parallax scrolling and using the built in Z index to control which sprites will wind up in front of others as they move around in an otherwise completely 2D fashion… some absolutely surprising moments over the years as I’ll start playing a “visually good and polished game” only to notice at the end of 5-10 minutes bus or train ride, my phones gotten very warm and my battery is now 10-25% lower…
I learned how shitty Unity can be before I got any experience developing with it and the experiences I have had developing with it and the experiences shared with me by others who develop with it … It feels like a major disconnect has grown over the years between management running the company, project management setting goals for the development/engineering staff, and the multiple classes of end users of the engine, with my suspicion being that it’s hard for them to avoid getting drowned in feedback from novices who easily achieve their goals with the tools in Unity, leveraging their store, some vendor plugins maybe and don’t do much more than build 2D, 2.5D or very basic 3D games… The next tiers above that of intermediate and advanced Unity users being progressively more silent about their problems as they have learned to rely less and less on what Unity provides with the end outcome being some experienced Unity developers I’ve met being pretty honest that they basically only use Unity because it’s a C# game engine and there’s a lot of benefit in using C# like a big developer pool, performant backend systems in the same programming language, etc… and they are throwing away >90% of the engine and either they or their team are doing everything themselves because what Unity gives them is completely useless, or unsuitable, or not just simply not performant enough.
When your “experts” are “throwing away” your product and just “using the box it comes in” because it’s a convenient shape… something is very very wrong and your product’s days are numbered. Their recent attempted policy’s change seems completely ignorant of the current state of their product’s “sticking power”. The users who make it look like anything is possible in Unity and who are effectively creating marketing material for Unity by crediting them as the game engine they used regardless of how much of the engine they throw away in order to get any particular AAA game completed… these critical users who are helping pull in new users are also very close to not using the product at all. Doing anything that alienates them is the marketing equivalent of a massive act of self sabotage, and I don’t think they are going to survive this. For me the writing was on the wall from the merger with the malware pile of an “ad tech” company a while back and the boneheaded comments about monetisation that were made back then… it’s just been a question of how long till it fails… and boy has the policy change and backlash accelerated things…
It’s unfortunate because it’d be good to have some real competition in the space, and there’s basically none.
I often wonder how common this view point is. From a player perspective, I don’t think about game engines. If there’s a game that I’d like to play, I play it regardless of the engine.
If you were to see a video for a video game — say Hollow Knight or Cuphead, for example — and think that it might be fun to play but then see that they use Unity, what do you do instead? Do you search for a close analogue made in Unreal engine? Or do you just play something completely different?
From a hobbyist game dev perspective, I definitely think about engine — of course. But usually when I work with other people they want to use Unity. I’m guessing that might change now, though.
I just notice it - if I see something is unity I’m less likely to give it a try vs. something unreal. Usually I’m just scrolling Xbox gamepass options that look appealing.
If it was some specific game I wanted to try, unity wouldn’t stop me - but I have a bias against it. Unity games generally feel crappier imo.
It was seen as fashionable to hate Unity and there was some pushback from fans of games built with Unity… which since it corresponds to my first developer experiences with unity, was actually about the same time I started to ask Unity developers how much of their games used the Unity provided components for various things as opposed to writing replacements…
I learned a few tricks about arguing with gamers but for the most part stopped mentioning my dislike for Unity in any face to face contexts until someone else mentioned a dislike first… I didn’t care enough to argue over it… I have opinions but I’m not trying to change anyone’s mind, it’s not like there’s financial benefits steering people away from Unity … I’ve got no short positions on Unity stock or stock in Epic, etc…
Doesn’t mean I won’t bitch in the appropriate professional context… like this thread. ;-)
which is what you wanted in the first place.
And yet they sometimes make mistakes and die. There are countless examples of this.
Yes, and there was huge amounts of internal pushback about the pricing model, people inside the company saw it was 100% bonkers. They released it anyway without any hints given to their biggest clients beforehand, everyone learned it from the press release.
The customer reps the big companies have were caught off guard and had to spend a week apologising and saying "I don't know" and "I'll get back to you" a _lot_. Those weren't fun meetings for either side of the table. Source: first hand spoke to two people who had to have these meetings with Unity.
Unity did walk back on the changes yes, but there still aren't any promises they won't try something like this again. Switching engines and toolchains has a cost and now even medium to big companies are evaluating whether it's worth the risk to keep trusting that Unity doesn't alter the deal further vs. switching to a new engine or building their own.
Anything that keeps open source software in the spotlight is worth at least the 40c it’ll cost to get this game on Steam.
It's inevitable that Godot isn't going to retain a lot of new users from this - most Unity devs will go back to Unity simply due to opportunity cost, they'll bite the bullet at least until they can afford to switch, and most will switch to Unreal, not Godot.
And this is the reality of the position Godot finds themselves in. They aren't competing against Unity, because that isn't possible yet, they're competing against Unreal Engine for the title of "best Unity alternative." Godot doesn't need more hype, it needs hands on deck making pull requests and improving the engine so that when the second wave of Unity quitters come in six months or a year, they no longer look as much like the quirky toy engine compared to Unreal.
And I say that as someone who uses Godot exclusively and wants to see it succeed.
I disagree. It's my opinion all the recent attention is going to be a net positive for the project including the C# binding post.
I think they will retain a sizable by number of users, particularly hobbyists, from this AND, importantly, a lot of people capable of contributing to the engine itself.
Followed EVERYTHING to do with the C# bindings across Reddit, dev chat, Twitter, and GitHub.
Built the engine. Dove into the source. Checked out the C# integration, bindings, and source generation.
Reviewed a lot of past and present proposals including Jolt and Box2d(c) integration.
I'm VERY impressed with the project and it's current trajectory.
1) the performance for my kind of game isn't there yet (expected but manageable. I'm willing to contribute to help here)
2) The core development is focusing more on feature parity than addressing #1 (which again, expected by manageable. I know a lot of people value an asset store and proper console support). BUT:
3) much of community PRs seemed blocked by leadership, which has a strong ideaological skew towards convenience over performance.
3 is the big dealbreaker for me. Reminds me oh too much of Blender's community pre 2.8 because the dev was so adamant on their particular control scheme (which was the biggest crticism of Blender pre-2.8).
And to be frank, I don't like the attitude of the leader when replying to feedback. I can disagree with someone and respect their views, but they seem very set out to to respond to so much feedback with "you don't understand what you're doing, you don't understand my vision". The former is almost never accetable, but the latter is all on Godot. If you want people to understand your vision, don't have a 3 year outdated roadmap.
The only even slightly annoying part is the instructor's _very_ Australian way of pronouncing Godot like [Gɶdɶu] =)
[0] https://www.humblebundle.com/software/everything-you-need-to...
This sentence is bad.
There was one credible death threat (singular), and it came from an employee within the company, so the phrasing 'from x to y' is a weird way to connect strife from one employee to the actions of several companies. There were threats (plural) when you include those from companies to move engines such as MegaCrit, but come on, there was a link to the story about the death threat.
It's poor phrasing that will make people think there were multiple threats, which Unity themselves have never said, yet many stories about this do while quoting the Unity source that uses the singular. Richard Currie could have prevented furthering the game of telephone going regarding the quantity of death threats by simply checking the article he linked.
This will come off like a minor nitpick but these types of not-quite-full-errors can and do lead to the story getting distorted years down the road.
I think superficially similar observations to yours get blown off because they frequently resort to speculation and conspiratorial thinking. I appreciate that you have pointed out the mistake clearly and why it is important.
Because that's exactly what it is.
But is it "good enough" to convince some people to use it instead?
For the moment the best it can do is to provide an (ever improving) basic alternative to Unity that forces them (and the market in General) to not be greedy and careless.
This is probably good for the game engine market as a whole.
- The renderers are fundamentally different. Godot has advertised their rendering to not be as flexible while Unity throw you some weird shader language that lets you do whatever you want. There's a lot of jank in Unity's renderers but they are still more mature than Godot.
- Physics is a huge weakness of Godot and Unity has options to either use their much more mature built-in physics or Havok (IIRC).
to name a few technical comparisions. Godot still has a way to go before being comparable with Unity in regards to 3D.
Things I like: - builds for web, works on mobile
- crazy fast build times compared to unity
- animation timeline feels better than unity, calling code triggers etc. I remember it took me a while to learn Mechanim - with Godot I could instantly understand how it worked.
- GD script is surprisingly fun to code in, yet has features I wouldn't expect (i.e. calling a function by it's function name - stored within a string)
- everything just seems to work - I've only had two minor issues, one with calling code from the animation timeline within the editor (which doesn't work) and also some issues with muting master audio bus
- the two problems I've had were pretty easy to solve, unlike with unity - right from the beginning in version 1.0 I always seemed to be the guy sending strange tech support stuff and finding new bugs that required insane work-arounds to solve. Just unlucky I guess.
- I love the fact that it's open source
However... just for balance here are my two concerns:
- v4.0 seems to be a rewrite, and this scares me - because Unity went down this track and at the end when starting a new project one had to choose between many different versions of unity. Choosing the right version depended on what features you needed vs. stability and compatibility with previous assets that might be in your library
- no... really that's it.
So... my experience with Godot has been a lifesaver! My new projects kicks-ass and turned out much better than it would in Unity - and it's been a pleasure to learn and develop in .... maybe I just needed a change?
It’s vital we support these open source project to protect ourselves from greedy C-Suites enshittifying products we grew to love and rely on.
Great example of a successful open source tool - Blender.
Apple should embrace Godot for their VR stuff.
Anywhere we can try out your games?