Can Unity Survive?

Unity is a fantastic game development engine designed for use by indie developers and teams alike, while the tool itself is well designed the company surrounding the product is failing. Towards the end of last year, Unity announced major changes to its pricing policy and terms of service. These changes were without consideration of many situations such as piracy, bad actors, and customers with multiple devices. While they have walked back some of the changes made to their new pricing policy, many still remain in place. Will Unity survive this bad management? I give my thoughts on the situation and whether or not I believe Unity will weather the storm. Share this video to get the message out and help expose the greed and failure of this corporation.

[@JoshChristiane]

For those who think I hate the engine, I want to clarify that I used Unity on and off for multiple projects for something nearing 12 years. I love the software itself and most of its capabilities. While I have my complaints about the engine, overall the software is still quite good by industry standards. My primary issue is with the company that runs it, not the software itself. Myself (like many others) switched my indie-game company over to UE5 and ported all current projects into it.

[@DevJeremi]

I hate this Engine is a pice of garbage, if you think other wise just try Godot.

[@simonak9699]

​@@DevJeremi by all means, Jeremi, don't hesitate to show us your extensive work experience in the industry and why you think that Unity - a game engine with almost 20 years of development (and available to you for f*cking FREE) is a "piece of garbage".

[@smthngsmthngsmthngdarkside]

​@@simonak9699 sure thing sir. Here: (Picture of your face) This one was wishlisted by at least 5 weiboos. Can anyone really ever say onto as far in even wanting as more like seriously?

[@s3nju279]

​@@DevJeremigodot has far less 3d optimization than unity. That being said. Godots 2d is really well done. Unity has some other issues with pixel snapping and not to mention the dumpster fire of a company that runs it.

[@Proud_Knight]

@@smthngsmthngsmthngdarkside ... ... What?

[@Saltience]

Fun note on the "Frog in the boiling pot" saying: Much like the idea of an Alpha Wolf, it stems from flawed science. The Frog in the boiling pot had large chunks of their brains removed before being put in the pot, which may have hampered their ability to notice that it was boiling. A real frog will simply leave the pot once they're too uncomfortable, and we saw that with Unity.

[@JoshChristiane]

I actually did not know that, thanks for sharing that interesting little tidbit of info. Kinda quirky and informative, but I love facts like that. Thanks for watching and commenting! :)

[@BitwiseMobile]

Oh, gaslighting - love it. Engine fanbois are the worst. I've been in this business for 30+ years. I've seen it all, and the engine will outlast the naysayers.

[@boyblue3270]

Yeah ae also so the people who are missing brain cells double down. Very good points you pointed out lol.

[@schonkigplavuis8850]

You're like that uncle that shares completely morbid information no one asks for but they got interesting points.

[@Deksingburi]

🤣 Switching to Unreal doesn't make sense. Unity is more cost-effective at every revenue level. He's still angry despite Unity's efforts to address concerns through leadership and policy changes. He's insisting on using free resources from a company that consistently incurs massive annual losses, simply because they're free to the community.

[@user-qr4jf4tv2x]

i'm not going back to unity

[@Handlebrake2]

I am

[@rizla8602]

From what?

[@rustymustard7798]

Lol who is besides that one guy? It's like trying to get back on the Titanic because the cocktail service on the lifeboat sucks.

[@kerduslegend2644]

You will never actually make a game regardless

[@Boxing_Gamer]

​@@kerduslegend2644I'm making a game and I'm not using Unity. Editor first engines is such a 00ties way of thinking. To organize your code around how an editor is working is actively insanity. It should be code first, then adjust an editor to that. We are coders not drag and droppers, everything remotely complicated will have to be solved in code anyway.

[@Armadous]

I can't exit Unity quickly, but I will exit eventually. The biggest disappointment for me is how promising Unity's ECS implementation has been, yet it has languished as a side project for so long. It has never truly gained traction, and now it's unlikely to extend beyond a few niche games. I am genuinely disheartened that this runtime fee nonsense is sending ECS in a direction I can no longer follow. At least FLECS looks viable.

[@JoshChristiane]

Completely agree with you. My team had the same dilemma, but we decided to just ditch Unity up front and eat the 2 month migration cost. In the end its already saving us a lot of development time though, so it turned out to be well worth it. FLECS looks really cool, haven't used it yet.

[@ConcerninglyWiseAlligator]

Quite sad to see Mike Acton's talent get wasted in a wonderful project, but for a worthless company.

[@HickoryDickory86]

Bevy is a new game engine built with and for the Rust language, and is engineered from the ground-up on the ECS model. And it's completely free and open source under both the Apache-2.0 and MIT licenses. Word of warning, though: It's still heavy in development (latest release is 0.13) and doesn't have an editor yet, but it is on the list of most requested features and I believe is in the works. Just wanted to bring that to your attention if you weren't already aware. 🙂👍

[@dadlord689]

I have tried unity dots, unreal mass entities and Bevy Engine (it has ecs by default), as well as few other ecs frameworks. So far Bevy is the only one that made sense me and actually felt like prototyping and not fighting orks. And even prototyping gave a very good structure to the code. But it utilizes Rust language, that has nothing to do with familiar psychopathy of c++ I have adjust to. But C# is yet feels superior, yet less meaningful in context of ecs.

[@seansopata5121]

Well that's the problem. Everything is a side project in unity

[@DanielNistrean]

What matters in the end is that you make enough money to start the second and better project. Pick the engine that would allow you to make your project faster and consider potential fees.

[@JoshChristiane]

That's a good way to look at it.

[@mahkhardy8588]

The Road to Vostok, 100% ported from Unity to Godot. Amazing. Hold these companies accountable, looking at you Epic, don't slip up.

[@JoshChristiane]

I need to play that, I should look into it. Thanks for the comment!

[@tymondabrowski12]

​@@JoshChristiane I think it's not released yet but the whole process is on youtube and there were at least two demos released. The project is really impressive and I like the atmosphere he made. Shame I don't like shooters.

[@adiveler]

With the recent acquisition of Disney, I would be worried about the future of Unreal!

[@JoshChristiane]

Yeah I have my concerns about the Disney investment. They don't outright own it, or even a majority share luckily.

[@DigitalProphet_]

Same - was switching to Unreal then saw that. Now 100% learning Godot. I’ll see if i switch over completely but so far it’s been good. I get that companies need to make money and have no problem paying when they have reasonable terms like Unreal and to be fair Unity now again has. This Unity fiasco really made me nervous about investing years into developing a game and if they can just switch it up like that. It’s fine if it’s a tool you can just drop and switch. However as an engine you invest years of learning and assets etc into it.

[@adanjsuarez]

Second video, second success for me! I really like your approach and knowledge. I cannot wait for the next one. Now is time for me to review your old ones.

[@JoshChristiane]

Thanks so much, that's a comment that made my day :) Hope you stick around for future videos every week.

[@TheAurgelmir]

This is the same thing we saw with Wizards of the Coast as well. They tried to change the game to squeeze more money out of the Dungeons & Dragons market - in the end it created a mass exodus as people used it as an excuse to not play D&D anymore. (There are tons of alternatives, many of which are a lot better suited for the types of games many people played in D&D - D&D was just the main thing)

[@havencat9337]

on top, WC, they started using AI in their art....Yuuuk!

[@johnq.public3302]

Switched to Godot 3 months ago for my small hobby project. It's been super fun and it's nice to be able to start the dev app with the project in about 5 seconds compared to 30-45 seconds for Unity. Also auto save is great! Got burned by that in Unity tons of times.

[@JoshChristiane]

Yeah it's amazing how light and fast Godot is. It has gone through good and bad patch cycles, but at least the system as a whole still remains light. My hope is that they continue the product in the same vein of Blender. If they just focus on modularity, improving foundational feature sets and not over-extending the engine into unnecessary features, then I think Godot has a real chance to be a major player one day. We also need internal console support, as I think that could be another really important deciding factor for many. Godot should think about partnering with Nintendo or Sony in some small ways for that exact reason.

[@johnq.public3302]

@@JoshChristiane Well said! Great channel and great content. New Sub here!😀

[@provolarantpro1914]

so seems like now onwards all your project will be hobby projects. :D

[@ultimateownsz]

Not only that godot is opensource, so this means everyone can contribute to it to make it even better than it is

[@leegaul2161]

@@JoshChristiane That's what Godot is about. It's not supposed to be the entire grocery store. It's just a cart, and you only put in what you want via plugins. Your project should only have the features it requires keeping it as efficient as possible. This is why Unity is so heavy. It's loading literally the entire store regardless what your project is.

[@killkiss]

2 and a half years ago, I hesitated between Unity and UE. I finally chose UE because there are a lot of free and freely usable resources even in a commercial game. (free assets on the market place, quixel megascans etc...). The first weeks were difficult but since then it has been nothing but happiness. I love its very professional graphics out of the box.

[@JoshChristiane]

UE's integration with megascans is actually amazing, I'm surprised more people don't know about that and take advantage of it.

[@exoZelia]

I was getting moving with Unity when all this went down. I was floored, like what an aggressively bad and greedy idea. Now I'm even gun shy about going with UE. I'm using Godot now and at least I didn't get too far with Unity before they did this. Open source is always better when it's a usable alternative and it sure seems to be one now. I don't want my game to be locked to some corporations policies. And yea Adobe ruined everything with that move to SaaS, now even basic apps for making white noise to help me sleep have subscriptions, uhg

[@JoshChristiane]

Yeah same issue here. We were in the middle of a project when it happened and had to migrate all assets to another engine which took months. Very frustrating experience, I'm done with Unity after this. I hope the company can turn around for the industry sake though, because it is really good software, just needs good stewards.

[@exoZelia]

@@JoshChristianeFully agreed, I was liking using it. I can't imagine that migration at a company scale, I had to migrate barely anything and it was still a hassle. Firing the CEO was a good start but I agree with your point here, they should've cleaned house. Hoping they can learn from their mistakes, but I'm sticking with Godot now.

[@jcdentonunatco]

A lot of people sleep on Unigine. It’s a fantastic engine, which supports C# and C++. It’s missing a lot of the features that Unreal has, but it’s adding them fast and the graphical quality out of the box is incredible. Also their ocean/water simulation is second to none. Anyone moving away from Unity should definitely consider Unigine

[@ImperialMarque]

You're lucky I spent 10 years of my career using unity. What they did was unforgivable and I've dropped it all together

[@Disthron]

So, Unity being designed for indies, that might have been a thing, but I think what makes it somewhat unique is that it was designed from the ground up to be an all purpose engine. Unlike Unreal or Source witch had primarily been designed as first person engines.

[@JoshChristiane]

Yeah you make a good point. I still love the engine tech itself, just needs better leadership.

[@Disthron]

​@@JoshChristiane Absolutely agree, also, those other engines aren't bad, or hard to work with. They just have some quirks of how they do things, left over from when they were primarily first person engines.

[@litjellyfish]

@@JoshChristianetech or do you mean the functionality/ ease of use? I mean pure performance wise Unity is ok (and was pretty shit) - what made it stand out was the easy of use and more “normal software” look and feel and above all they copied Apple and had the asset store.

[@kkiimm009]

In your private life, you might live with some craziness from some of the companies you use, but in business, you have to cut off any business you depend on that acts irrationally and unpredictably in your disfavor. Your livelihood depends on it, so you can never trust a business that has acted too crazy one time unless all the decision-makers get fired. The best option is to immediately start planning to extract yourself from that business.

[@subbiaharun]

Great to hear an actual paying user perspective on how the company and stock might perform. Thanks for the video!

[@Kinos141]

Honestly, more game engines should make a game with their engine. It's the one thing I like about UE, the devs made a game with it, multiple games. IMO, if the engine is so good, why not make a game with it. I don't care if the story is crappy, as long as the gameplay is good. That means the engine works.

[@JoshChristiane]

That's a good point I never really thought about. Epic builds their own games in it, so they see the issues first hand.

[@DarioCorno]

On paper it sounds like a good idea. Just on paper.

[@anDREas17gr]

One thing I dont hear enough people talk about is the commitment that comes with learning a game engine. I was a good example for this, I am a 3D artist and I was just starting to learn how to make games. At first everything is wrong everything is against you and you have to stop your process to go look for information because theres a problem that you have to solve. Its not fun. I imagine it would take years for me to start having fun creating games and make a living out of them. So when this happened with Unity I immediately dropped this dream, and even after they went back to try and salvage this situation, I didnt return bc they still are the ones who were willing to do this. Theres is no doubt in my mind that if they survive the backlash this time there will be another and many more. So I am not going to invest the colossal amount of time to train with their software, no matter what, it doesnt inspire trust in me to give the years of my life to learn Unity when I know they are constantly looking for sneaky ways to fk me over. For the time being I completely lost my excitement for game dev. I'll check back with Godot when my life is more stable... But those shady fks that dare to look at peoples dreams like potatoes in a shop, wont even see bronze out of me!

[@JoshChristiane]

So true, it can take hundreds of hours (if not more) to just get comfortable in an engine. These are complex tools with complex frameworks, and the sunken cost requirement is very high.

[@anDREas17gr]

@@JoshChristiane true theres a lot of cost for the developer besides time. Like so many plug ins that are so useful that you almost need to buy, all that ecosystem of creators work lost its value without any compensation (the ones who made the plug ins and those who use them alike)

[@Sick_Pencil]

that's exactly me.

[@koleka3233]

I am exactly in your position. It sucks because Unity seems to have the best crowd support by far with tutorials and help. As a former 3D artist also, I am really lost right now. UE5 seems to be a hell of a lot more difficult and Godot still lacks community support in 3D gaming.

[@electronsauce]

You might want to try and learn English before programming. Trying to understand what the fuck you said is harder than learning Unity or any game engine.

[@Programming-Is-Easy]

Their primary "user" now is government customers and contractors. There is an entire industry that has solidified around using Unity for DoD training contracts. Flight sims, equipment sims, process training, etc. A large portion of these folks use Unity currently. And Unity can "keep" these customers because the company doesn't pay. They just add this pricing to the contract bid and pass it on to the government. Essentially, Unity is getting US taxpayers to pay these fees. And the entire reason they became so entrenched in this market is because Unity was a "free" engine. It was easy to put together a development studio to support government contract work and hire people with Unity experience. Companies that built sims using other engines lost contracts because Unity was "free" and didn't cost anything extra, so studios bidding on jobs with CryEngine or Unreal had to bid higher prices. But I think you're completely correct. I think we'll see a shift towards Godot for most of this, at least over the next few years. Unity pricing for government and Serious Games is kind of insane as well. As soon as contractors realize that they can undercut their competition and win bids with Godot, we'll start seeing that happen.

[@Spartan322]

Godot (specifically Godot 4) also has numerous advantages to Unity, especially for independent studios: 1. MIT license is super permissive alongside being free 2. You are not required to use a GC language for development, Unity's requirement for C# means it needs a GC runtime, which is responsible for bloated memory and hitches caused by GC freeing, if you wish to avoid that, GDScript has no GC, so even if it is less CPU performant then C# (for now) it will have lower memory usage and no GC hitches 3. Godot can natively support any language via GDExtensions to nearly the same degree as GDScript, and there are many well supported community language extensions including Java, Lua, Rust, and C and C++ can be used out of the box. 4. GDExtensions also allow you to extend the engine without needing to recompile the engine which means you can integrate external APIs into Godot pretty easily 5. GDExtensions are closely related with Godot modules and some modules already can be interchanged between GDExtension and modules if you wished 6. Godot is already very small, only 108 megs, and can be shrunk further by stripping out modules and even core nodes you don't need at compile time, and it makes it easy to set a profile to strip this out even from the engine 7. Godot's UI and input controls are probably one if not the best, especially for a game engine, and they are adaptable to your needs 8. Godot's many pipelines and even platform support is very modular speeding the process of pipeline and platform development (like the Render and Physics pipelines are already fairly abstracted, and they're only becoming more modular as Godot develops) and is on track to get "official" support for the latest consoles soon via W4. 9. Godot is already fairly easy to build 10. Godot is entirely capable of being designed and achieving the performance of even AAA studios with its modular and FOSS nature, its just a matter of someone adding the necessary details, either by forking the engine (in which they get an editor for free by doing so) or by adding on the existing engine and messing with it in all sorts of ways. Its not been updated of late, but there was even an ECS version of the engine called Godex and it mostly followed Godot 4's development quite closely before Godot 4's release.

[@JoshChristiane]

Extremely well detailed list, thank you for all of this! 100% agreed.

[@Spartan322]

@@user-dw1kn5zt2k You don't have to use Godot's inbuilt editor for scripts, Unity's editor is almost as bad.

[@MW_1535]

The company has been laying off a large number of people to return focus to the core of their business… the engine. There are a lot of talented people still employed there who are passionate about gaming. Old CEO is out so that the company can get a fresh start. I don’t think they are dying. I think they are being reborn.

[@JoshChristiane]

I hope you're right! That's my wish for Unity.

[@mbg4681]

The company has been laying off a large number of people to return focus to the core of their business… profitability.

[@MW_1535]

@@mbg4681 Yes, of course. This is the primary purpose of most businesses; like every single company that is publicly traded. Think of companies YOU support or have bought anything from. If any of them are publicly traded, then you are supporting a company that has a very strong desire to be profitable... both for their shareholders and themselves. And to pay salaries for all of their employees so they can put food on their tables and clothes on their backs. Why do most people work? Because they are insanely passionate about what they do and they'd do it for free given the choice? No, because they need a paycheck. There are thousands of employees at Unity. Even if the primary goal of a few high level executives is to make money, thousands of other people working there are pouring their lives into making a great product and supporting customers who use it.

[@youtubechannel548]

@@mbg4681 Lol, like that's not every company's primary objective...

[@mbg4681]

@@youtubechannel548 The difference is that unethical business practices enrich the guys currently at the top at the expense of long-term profitability. Unethical political practices take a bite out of that too, but that rapidly becomes a different discussion.

[@Boolai]

I was very hesitant and lazy to move on to unreal. 5. Mostly I felt I invested so much time learning Unity. That I did not want to move over. But given that Unity spent most of their time in predatory tactics rather than investing their time in trying to make the rendering competitive with unreal 5. I am now learning it. I am doing it by watching vids reading books but mostly I am translating my old projects to ur 5.

[@JoshChristiane]

Yeah same here. I was hesitant at first as well, but ultimately I'm happy that I moved over. I still prefer programming in C#, and I prefer the component system in Unity, but once you can get past that I think UE5 just offers so much more.

[@ImperialMarque]

I'm in the same boat. 10 years down the drain... sucks but meh

[@andreasoberg2021]

I have been a game dev a long time. 10 yeara ago I thought Unity had many limitations. Sadly those limitations have not been fixed now. Almost every feature that I want to use is worse implemented than in other engines I work in. I doubt those features will be implemented in 10 years from now.

[@JoshChristiane]

My issue was that they kept adding features that were niche that most people don't use, and it just kept breaking the engine and causing major engine bugs. And instead of fixing those issues they just kept adding more to try to compete with Unreal, and it felt like an experimental mess. The engine at its core never needed to compete with Unreal, they should have designed an engine that's simpler, easier to develop in, with good graphics and great performance. That's it. They overcomplicated its development and now we basically ended up with where it is now. They kept trying to get that corporate money, but what they failed to realize was the bird in their hand. Indie dev market collectively is worth MORE than all of the big companies combined. There are millions of indie devs, that's potentially many billions in revenue, and instead of focusing on that they tried to capture a different market that didn't belong to them. Then we got an engine that was no longer that good for simple stuff, but also didn't do the complex realistic stuff as well as Unreal. No man's land.

[@matten_zero]

Open source is the only way to go

[@VectorDev]

you mean godot ?

[@JoshChristiane]

There are others as well he could have meant. Like Cocos, Gdevelop, Monogame and XNA,

[@realmarsastro]

I fucking love open source

[@VectorDev]

@@realmarsastro same bro

[@greenheart5334]

@@JoshChristiane do not forget libGDX, holy grail of Java gamedev! I use it and it is great!

[@KalinovGames]

Exactly what you said “There really is no reason to use Unity anymore”. I am actually very happy with what Unity has done, because this had me tackling other engines and made me realise that Unity has been falling behind for yeas, not only with their business decisions, but also technologically… The editor itself is so clogged with slow executing code you get frustrated you have to wait 2 minutes on each build you test. And if you are building something big, like open world game you are doomed to be waiting for life… I also realised that they have strategically monetised their Render Pipelines. They market the URP and HDRP like it is something pretty cool and scalable and other engines do not have it so we are the best. But in reality it’s just Unity trying to clear out their technical debt that they have been piling up for years. At the end for me it was either pay the nonsense taxes to Unity and continue using their slow engine or implement IK in Godot and just migrate the project. And when I did migrate to Godot I realised yet another thing that Unity was slacking about - their multiplayer libraries are just amateur man. They are broken and not working as expected and you will always have to work around your way this abomination of code, which also has a crap documentation… In Godot that just works, the documentation works, the multiplayer libraries work, the implementation is straight forward and guess what - benchmarking both multiplayer solutions Unity is just a mediocre half-solution… Use third party libraries in Unity, they say, for multiplayer. But why? Why would I pay somebody else ANOTHER subscription just to have a multiplayer working in a game engines where it you have to pay for services?

[@JoshChristiane]

Sounds like you had a similar situation to the one I was in. I'm glad to be gone from it. I left Adobe suite software years ago for basically the same reason and haven't missed it since. I still love Unity as a software and I miss the modular workflow and how scripts work, but hopefully with time other engines adapt to ECS.

[@OverbiteGames]

What multiplayer resources could you recommend? I could only find a single and pretty incomplete page covering some High Level basics - looking at UE5 and Fishnet w/ Unity for reference - I'd love to use Godot but the multiplayer felt very underbaked and I couldn't find resources for anything that made me feel comfortable expecting it to work with 60+ moving and spellcasting npcs and 4 players. Just "magic" components and RPCs. I was struggling to figure out how to test client authoritative third person movement with server authoritative NPC movement and interpolation for all, as well as a sync'd world clock for latency mitigation.

[@KalinovGames]

@@OverbiteGames The “High Level Multiplayer” section in the documentation serves as its name suggests - to give you an overview of how things work in Godot multiplayer. There is a documentation for all things related to the multiplayer API - MultiplayerSpawner, MultiplayerShnchronizer, Rpc calls, etc. It is pretty straightforward and does not need a dedicated topic in the engine documentation on how to call an rpc explicitly to the server and then make the server do the calculations and broadcast the results to the peers with another rpc call. It seems to me what you are searching for is an article on how to do multiplayer instead of how to do it specifically in Godot. Edit: Fishnet is a third party multiplayer framework. It has nothing to do with Unity other than it was written for it. Unity did not develop it.

[@KalinovGames]

@@OverbiteGames One of my ongoing projects is to make a multiplayer plugin called Multinet that makes it easier for developers who don’t fully understand how multiplayer works and they honestly don’t have to. I will post a video on my channel when it’s done. 👍🏻

[@jeremyallen9624]

It's also the indie devs making Unity look bad. They release school projects on Steam as legitimate games so everybody sees that and thinks Unity is garbage.

[@BTDiLmarinen]

Pretty rare to see a dev on KZbin who knows what they're talking about (based on previous videos I've seen)

[@JoshChristiane]

Wow thanks for saying that. I've been using Unity for a long time, and worked a few good places so it's just experience that comes with time and open eyes.

[@BTDiLmarinen]

@@JoshChristiane it's not only that. I saw the video about the "best paying" programming languages, excellent analysis. The tech industry collapse as well. They show a serious software professional that has actual work experience, not youtuber programmer

[@rommelstrafe]

Nice insight! Do you think when it comes to XR development, Unity is still the way to go? Should I switch to other engines? Is godot capable now for XR development or even in the future?

[@JoshChristiane]

Great questions. Unity is still pretty much top dog for XR, especially when it comes to fast development features. Unreal continues to add more and more support for the same, but it's harder to develop for it in my limited experience with XR. Godot definitely isn't there yet, but I'm sure it will develop the same features eventually, just don't anticipate on it for a few years.

[@anthonyobryan3485]

@@JoshChristiane I've been using Godot for VR programming for about five years now, and it seems capable enough to me in Godot 3.x (as long as you don't switch the renderer) I've written a few small VR games in the 3.x series, and things were fine. The XR subsystem in 4.x is still in progress, and does have some show-stopping bugs (initial camera rotation seems semi-random around the Y axis, for one). But it's quite usable already.

[@KonaiNobi]

Great video, very good, easy to understand explanation on the Unity debacle. I moved my indie studio from Unity to UE5 three or four months ago, and now I'm heavily pushing for my day-job studio to make the switch as well. I'm in absolute awe over how comprehensive, performant, and easy to use Unreal Engine is, and I can't help but facepalm myself for not starting there in the first place.

[@JoshChristiane]

Thanks for your comment, same situation here. Moved my studio to UE5 and I've loved working in it. I had already been using all of the engines for separate projects and contracting work, but now actually switching my team to it full time has been amazing.

[@balp]

I also see the Bevy engine as an interesting ground between Godot and an own inhouse engine, making even smaller market space left for Unity. It still needs some time developing but gives a really efficient ECS system for free (Open Source) to either just be used or edited by the team. At the moment a lack of editor might give a to high start point for many studios and indies.

[@JoshChristiane]

I'll have to look into that engine, thanks!

[@KeitrenGraves]

I was actually learning how to do game development on Unity a few months before that big fiasco. I now use Godot will not look back.

[@JoshChristiane]

I'm glad to hear you're trying something new. I hope it works for you!

[@ickyconcrete5370]

Unity will be absolutely fine long term, too many pipelines/processes built around it in studios that are turning over billions in revenue. People have forgotten/are unaware of how it was in the years up to about the mid 2000s when everyone had to write a custom engine for their game as it was mandatory to get decent performance on hardware at the time (part of me misses the low level magic that was mandatory as part of that process, but the tooling.. oh god the tooling).

[@JoshChristiane]

I do agree with you, at least in some way or another. The engine won't disappear. I think the company needs to shift their policies fast to avoid losing any more indie-developers though, since it's really built on the back of their projects. There is a real possibility the company ends up have to majorly restructure due to bad business decisions.

[@ickyconcrete5370]

Indies aren't the money maker for Unity anymore (originally for sure though). Unity will keep dropping staff until it reaches profitability or it gets bought out to ensure essential tech / wreck the opposition.

[@JoshChristiane]

I completely agree with you. I would not be surprised to see a buyout. Microsoft is sucking up everything else in the game dev industry anyways, lol.

[@aarush.paul__]

​​@@JoshChristiane well if Microsoft buys unity, my best guess is unity will be turned into a full pay-as-you-go software, like Adobe. Or something similar to what happened to the video editing platform, clipchamp. At that point, indie devs will completely drift away from unity.

[@pretzelboi64]

Plenty of old game engines went bust in the early 2000's and Unity is just an engine that will suffer the same fate. Like, who's still using Gamebryo in 2024?

[@mettaursp309]

The thing that the CEO & some comment bootlickers didn't understand was that Unity's customers aren't game consumers. They're doing business with developers who have their own vested interest in making their own development processes as painless and cost effective as possible. You're not going to be able to pull the wool over these peoples' eyes the same way you can do so with a consumer. Developers as customers are far more informed than what that EA CEO seemed to have been used to, having previously worked for a company that focused on the end users. Unity's technology has also been stagnating for a while. Last time I tried to use it I was using it for something graphics programming oriented and they didn't support basic features that can be implemented by hands with a bare graphics API fairly simply. I wanted to do a bindless approach to materials, but it couldn't even do that much. The render pipeline split was also a complete mess and I felt like my needs weren't being met, with a pile of messy slop that was several competing render pipelines with mixed levels of support & documentation. Even the editor was trying to fight me when I was trying to make editor tools for it. It reached a point where I felt I was better off just going custom engine.

[@JoshChristiane]

Perfect comment. You hit the nail right on the head, and I couldn't agree more. Very well informed.

[@Lovuschka]

To be fair, EA used to charge 10 dollars per installation. Remember the DRM for Spore, for example, where you had five installs and that was it? They always were scum.

[@JoshChristiane]

I forgot about that, haha. I did actually play Spore when it first released, and I loved it... But you're right that DRM was garbage.

[@yvesgingras1475]

Im an indie game dev, and I approove this message. Were building our ecosystem around godot and gdscript right now. I always hated the black box that its unity. Godot on the other hand is soooooooooooooooooooooo much more fun to work with, everything is in plain sight you dont have to fight with the engine or nothing. As good old Todd Haward said "Its just work"

[@JoshChristiane]

I had a similar experience, and I found Godot much easier to use for beginners as well. Things are more "obvious" in a way. Unity sometimes has an issue with having many submenus related to the same or similar things buried in random places around the interface.

[@yvesgingras1475]

@@JoshChristiane Unity also rerely clean their obsolete system. Theirs decade of stuff that no one should used, still burry in the engine. From my experience, godot team is way better at keeping their engine clean.

[@thedlkr]

I briefly met Unity Co-Founder David Helgason once. Nice guy. Excellent video. Please consider adding timestamps.

[@JoshChristiane]

Thank you for the tip, I'll have to get right on that. :)

[@oddlytimbotwillison6296]

Things were very different under Helgason.

[@USNTM2]

As a person who's used Godot since the 3.1 release, there are already a couple of engines that use Godot as their base. RPG in a box is one of the main ones

[@tymondabrowski12]

Have you seen that video made by Upper Echelon titled roughly: "Unity Disaster Gets WORSE! IromSource" about how two guys from IronSource were also in the board of directors of Unity and they sold all of their Unity stocks just before the announcement? I haven't checked the evidence yet or made sense of it yet, but might be interesting if you haven't heard of that.

[@JoshChristiane]

I didn't see that particular video, but I did hear about this situation. It's certainly a question for the SEC to look into answering... though I doubt they will. Insider trading is illegal, but it rarely goes punished.

[@Proud_Knight]

That's some of the most blatant insider trading I've seen and no one with the authority to do anything will even bat an eye. I love the world we live in

[@MiguelDebruyne]

What a coincidence. I lost my channel and yesterday i was thinking about his channel but just couldn't come up with the name anymore. Thanks!

[@TheIronicRaven]

I was one of those developers that abandoned Unity immediately after they released that new pricing structure. Went to Godot. Never looking back. The only way I would have come back is if they did fire the entire executive staff, and the new replacement staff could fix all the problems. Entire new blank slate. But that never happened, and I've been happy with Godot. I nearly have my project back to where I had it before I left, which is pretty awesome! Some stuff is better than it was in Unity, some stuff harder, its a give and take.

[@JoshChristiane]

I'm loving Godot as well, it's such a great system to work in. I miss the component system and native C# in Unity, but beyond that everything else is actually much easier for my team.

[@TheIronicRaven]

@JoshChristiane for me it's animations. I bought some asset packs that I am very fond of over in Unity, but bringing them to Godot hasn't been smooth. Bringing characters and animations is rough at best haha. But the rest has been a really good experience! Actually surprised how easy it is to worm with Godot, since I'm doing a 3D game

[@JoshChristiane]

I like how Unreal handles animations the most, but it's more sophisticated. I do miss the animation system and setup in Unity, it's clear and easy to use for me.

[@rustymustard7798]

Even if they did start blank slate, you still can't trust them owning your means of production. This goes for any company with closed source software. You know what would get people to trust Unity? Open source the engine and IDE and sell services like support, AI coding bots, templates, assets and plugins, monetization implementation and even marketing/promotion of Unity made games.

[@CERAC...]

These issues that you bring up certainly raise questions about Unity's ability to navigate a competitive market and regain developer trust. With such a model of greed, at this point, it's not looking good for them....down the road who knows, maybe a shovel will be needed to bury that corpse.......

[@JoshChristiane]

Thanks for the comment, guess we'll see what happens. Time reveals all truths.

[@ziek3012]

I'm getting into game dev and I want my first game to be a platformer with a 2d 3d mix. I picked ue and not unity. The pricing is more predatory and less sustainable for game devs and it seems to be lacking in many capabilities. It looks like it's lagging behind the competition.

[@JoshChristiane]

Yeah I have to agree with you on that one. I hope whatever engine you end up in ultimately will have been the right choice and favour your game's design.

[@HuangShengHong]

Used Unity once, and left it forever, it's a hell mess. The very thing I remembered in Unity is when I get() a material, instead of returning the reference of it, it returns a copy, very confusing, and wasted me an hour to debug.

[@ivailoburov1295]

Very accurate analysis. When I first tried Unity their font size was too small. When asked if they would make corrections in future versions, they said it was not on their roadmap. Then I decided that it was not appropriate to work on a game project with a magnifying glass and came across Godot, which already had a built-in system for scaling and resizing fonts. With Unity it came much later, but first impressions are the most lasting and I have not gone back.

[@JoshChristiane]

When I very first switched to a 4k display I had that same issue with so much software, but I do recall Unity being an issue for a while as well. While it is fixed now, it took them way too long to adapt to changing standards. I could say the same about many companies. I'm glad you found something that works for you, and wish you luck in your game dev journey!

[@kpm25]

is it easy to make multi-player games in Unreal? I haven't looked into it. cheers for the info ..

[@JoshChristiane]

Harder than Unity in some ways, but easier in others. Just like with everything else. I think the networking aspects of Unreal are harder to understand (for me at least), I just had a harder time with it. But I had an easier time implementing all of the classes and structures for multiplayer, and a much easier time with interface stuff and split screen. I think the interface builder in Unreal is amazingly well designed. Ultimately many thousands of multiplayers games are built every year in both engines, so obviously it's totally doable either way.

[@nolosidney]

tbh I never figured out how to setup multiplayer in unity ever no matter how many times I tried, but with unreal engine I got a working host and join game test over the steam subsystem in minutes

[@kpm25]

Thanks so much, I have only done the basics in Unreal but definitely think its a good skill to try and master, please make more videos on it and I'll watch!

[@johnathonvought7407]

@@JoshChristiane Yes, in my experience it's the tools in Unreal that are why you switch. Obviously they have the networking handled with Online FPS games being basically being almost their whole business model. Fortnite, etc.

[@Berndr]

Everything is harder In Unreal, Unity is a much more straightforward engine to learn and use but these are hard choices you have to make, on the other hand Unreal does have better graphics if that's what you are looking for, I actually did the opposite I switched from Unreal to Unity, because Unity has C# under its hood and it's much faster and easier to make anything!

[@jemmrich]

When your pricing is more complicated than switching to another platform or you alienate your user base to the point they no longer have confidence, you are doing it wrong lol Honestly I think it makes sense to drop Unity completely going forward and move somewhere else. The thing that always amazes me is that restrictions and challenges can actually make games more creative and interesting. So if you feel that a game engine is too restricted or not advanced enough for what you need, take inspiration from the game developers of the past and think outside the box, utilize novel solutions or simplify your game in a way that makes it more concise and fun. There are so so many examples of this.

[@pden]

I liked the idea behind Unity, the democratization of game development etc. But I sense that Unity was not sufficiently profitable for its internal expenses and, even if lots of employees have been laid off and more complicated ways of licensing have been introduced, it's still not profitable. Unity may not make profit in many years to come.

[@MTonik]

I liked overall direction and the points of the video. However, the first half was a bit confusing. May be it’s a small thing but details could be important. John Riccitiello indeed was the CEO of EA. And although his tenure was questionable, he only said that he WISHED he could charge 1 USD for the reload - not really planned to do it. It’s assinine even talking about it, but at least not senile. Also the mentioned “Limbo” and “Stardew Valley” are used as good examples of the creators Unity was aimed at, but I think it would have worth mentioning that they used other engines (Box2D and XNA respectively) so Unity didn’t exist in a complete vacuum.

[@JoshChristiane]

Agreed. With Riccitiello I think it's hard to find any redeeming values when it comes to his ambitions at the game companies he has led. He was the guy you hire to increase stock values whatever the cost, including gouging customers. You're right that both Limbo and Stardew were not built in Unity, but rather in a framework and their own respective custom engine, but those were only meant to be examples of the "type" of genres often made in Unity by indie developers due to being household names. Certainly there are thousands of other examples one could mention (Cuphead, Among Us, Monument Valley, Goose Game, Rust, etc.). Thanks for your detailed comment, I appreciate you watching the video and letting me know your opinion.

[@MTonik]

@@JoshChristiane funny but I worked with EA for some time in the past - joining shortly after Riccietello had departed. The overall opinion was that he wasn’t that bad, at least not at the beginning of his tenure. But it seems that he later took a hands off approach - which rhymes with your previous video - thus leading to a mid-level management bloat and subsequent downturn for the company.

[@krissythecatboi]

I think Riccitiello's quote is actually available verbatim in a video here on KZbin: "EA CEO John Riccitiello On Gaming Microtransactions" (look it up) It went like this: "When you are 6 hours into playing Battlefield and you run out of ammo in your clip and we ask you for a dollar to reload, you're really not price sensitive at that point in time." For all the hate he gets, I think he's _right_ here: that's more or less how repair costs in War Thunder work, or the various "energy" or "revive" systems in any free 2 play game that has taken inspiration from what mobile games have been doing for years. It's a way to extract money from the players when they want to keep going and might not care for a micro transaction that much. Is it exploitative? Sure, but it also works and is what the industry has been doing for years. That's not being out of touch, that's talking in a (now leaked) call with shareholders who see gamers as walking wallets. I think what people need to understand that while some developers might be passionate about the games they make, those companies are very much still run as businesses and profit and monetization matter, a lot. Gamers, on the other hand, have completely different motives and just want to enjoy the games, so it's a balancing act of how much money they can coax out of them in exchange for the gameplay experience.

[@l3rvn0]

Yeah, the first half of the video didn't do a good job of contextualizing the situation at the time. A lot of small studios or teams working on low-budget project used XNA, Renderware or Phyreengine. As Unity improved its multiplatform support and render capabilities, it managed to win over this audience.

[@charg1nmalaz0r51]

Its not really that asinine to talk about, when someones in charge with that mind set it bleeds into what they are actually doing, for example trying to trap creators into a shit monetary scheme lol.

[@alphaweeb5195]

Hey Josh, how did you move from Unity to Unreal? I'm not sure where to start.

[@JoshChristiane]

Well I had already used Unreal on several projects so the migration in terms of the programming itself was very easy. The hard part was migrating assets. The way Unreal imports colliders in my opinion is awful because of the whole convex situation, Unity is a lot more free in that regard. ALL of our game assets had to be updated and reimported with all new colliders which took a month, along with all new shaders, all new materials, etc. But that month was well worth it in my opinion, because the game looks better, and even performs better than ever before. I'd recommend you just learn to play with blueprints and get comfortable with that first, then learn the shader/material system. Unreal in a lot of ways is actually much easier than Unity, the only caveat being how C++ works if you need to write code. C++ works like C# script attachments except backwards. In Unity you attach a script to an object that's populated in the scene, in Unreal the script IS the object and you attach meshes or whatever to that. It's the same exact idea you just go about it differently. In terms of education I recommend the course on Udemy for Unreal Engine 5 made by Ben Tristem and Gamedev.tv. I think their course on learning how to use Unreal is the best. The hardest part for you will be migrating assets and figuring out how to setup animations and program movement, as that's just VERY different from Unity, but beyond that they share a lot of similarities.

[@soalersystem123]

@@JoshChristianegreat response, which engine do you feel has less bugs. I find unreal hierarchy system likes to break a lot. Be careful moving/renaming folders.

[@JoshChristiane]

@@soalersystem123 Both have a lot, but I found Unity was always throwing engine bugs that are impossible to diagnose or fix. Every Unity project I have ever worked in had at least 2 or 3 engine bugs that are not fixable. When I'd report them to Unity they'd just never fix them. Unreal I've found fixes engine bugs a LOT faster, and their reporting system is so much better. So both have issues, no engine will ever be perfect, but I have found Unreal to be a little better in that regard.

[@oultrox8275]

Do you believe then than most Unity games can run faster with Unreal instead of Unity? I'm curious to know the reason of the performance increase @@JoshChristiane

[@JoshChristiane]

I think that will depend on the exact game and what libraries it's using more than any engine specifically. As a whole most equal projects do perform better at runtime in Unreal as the engine is extremely well optimized for speed of execution. Assuming you go all c++ and manage memory very carefully then I believe Unreal will be more performant in most cases.

[@kitrodriguez992]

Been awhile since I've seen you. Randomly just got your notification today. :P

[@JoshChristiane]

Well thanks for clicking and watching! :D

[@KidLudens]

I used Unity for about 4 years, and the day that they announced the Run Time fee is when I just bit the bullet and uninstalled it cold turkey. I started learning Unreal and C++ the same day. It's been about 6 or 7 months now, and I'm completely comfortable with C++, Blueprints, and the UE workflow. That was the worst thing Unity did to itself because up until that point I had no idea how much better Unreal was. If Unity never made that update, I would still be using it today, and I wouldn't be able to take advantage of all the insane amount of things that Unreal offers. Like you said, Godot also uses C# and C++, so Unity isn't even a backup option at this point. In my opinion, the only people using Unity now are the people who have created projects which have committed them to the engine for a set amount of development time, or people who just don't want to make the effort to transition to something else - which is fair enough, learning a new engine can be a real pain, so I get it - each to their own. I just don't personally see any reason to use Unity at this point given how severely they betrayed their development community, and especially given how good the alternative Engines are in comparison.

[@JoshChristiane]

Completely agree with you. I've learned Unreal better as a result of this mess and I'm loving it.

[@Sovreighn7]

100%, Ive used Unity since 05 ish, finally made the switch to UE around 8 days ago and I am blown away by the shear amount of things I dont have to do myself that I would if I was using Unity. The UE tech in almost all regards is miles ahead of Unity, their pricing is better, their networking is better, and so far its been SUPER intuitive. As many have said the hardest part is using UE c++ vs c# and really just getting comfortable in the workflows and APIs available to you.

[@capitaljay1]

I’m new and have started on Unity. Should I put my efforts into learning a different engine. Or is this something I shouldn’t worry about since I’m not in it professionally

[@JoshChristiane]

If you never plan on using it professionally then you shouldn't worry about it at all. It's still a fantastic engine despite the company that runs it doing their best to turn people away. The only times you should consider a different engine is if you're doing something that requires the graphic fidelity beyond Unity's ability (Unreal), or if you're making a commercial indie game and you want to keep more of the profit for yourself in the case of a grand success. For educational purposes Unity is still probably the best engine. I will say that Godot has improved a lot, and is also excellent for hobbyists.

[@DietChugg]

I'd say even if you are not currently doing it professionally you may end up doing professional work. Nip it in the butt now and learn something viable in case you ever do want to do commercial work. Unity is not to be trusted.

[@provolarantpro1914]

@@JoshChristiane yeah godot is only good for hobby and jam projects. It is still is very far from unity for many reasons.

[@mbg4681]

​@@provolarantpro1914 That might have been true two years ago.

[@EURIPODES]

As a complete neophyte I tried Game Maker many years ago and learned a lot. I like how I could peek inside other people's games and see their code. I'd change a value and start up the game to see what it does. I hope Godot is easy to learn as well.

[@Omnifarious0]

Linux, Android, and iOS are pretty important for Unity as well. The latter two are a bit more important of course, though Android is just a special case of Linux. Also, this really highlights why Open Source is extremely important.

[@JoshChristiane]

Luckily Godot and many other engines are able to release for mobile now as well. I'm excited to see what S&box does.

[@dibaterman]

Thanks for the history, it is annoying that they didn't go the most correct path but rather the greediest path. The best way for Unity to have gone while being honest is keep it as a purchase after 200k and then you pay for any updates. The free version of Unity would always be 3 years behind any paid version. This would be in effect the most client friendly way. To be honest what stopped me from paying even a penny for Unity was that I wouldn't own Unity, I'd have to pay each year, so how many potential customers were lost because of that?

[@Sick_Pencil]

I started with Unity in mid April last year and spent a whole month learning it. I am a software engineer with 12 years of experience so I had no trouble coding but learning the ins and outs of Unity and game dev. Working on RTS game for a 5 months until Unity announced this mindless installation fee. Look, I am not gonna say my game project would be a hit and sell that much, but it is not about that. It showed Unity is sinking and, reading the news, engineers are leaving left and right on lifeboats. Unity, with all its bugs and issues was somewhat bearable and could be fixed by third-party software, but when you see the engineers abandoning Unity, it is definitely not a good investment to stick and work on this engine. So, I had to stop my project altogether and look at Unreal. Again, I may have no problem with coding and while C++ can be a nightmare, my learning curve is the UI, objects, animation and the sorts, and starting over is a bit hectic and currently I am too busy with my Masters and personal life.

[@JoshChristiane]

I can't blame you. You have to do what's right for you. At least Unity dropped (most) of the install fee charges, and it shouldn't be an issue anymore for most developments. If you're comfortable in the engine and you trust the company enough to continue working in it, then more power to you. I wish you much great success as a developer with your future projects!! :)

[@Sick_Pencil]

@JoshChristiane thanks Josh and hope you a great future as well!

[@famnyblom6321]

I was surprised by how good Godot is nowadays. A very good engine for indie games indeed

[@JoshChristiane]

Godot has improved SO much. I think people are still judging it based on impressions from years ago. As of Godot 4 it rapidly started improving graphically and otherwise.

[@famnyblom6321]

@@user-dw1kn5zt2k I get syntax check if I specify the types in gdscript, but I have not tested C# yet. Maybe try an external editor?

[@SzaboB33]

I did not use Unity at the time but I was watching the news closely and I remember that there was 2 weeks of media silence from Unity and then some random team lead/manager who probably did not have anything to do with the decision came forward to represent Unity and I think weeks later the CEO was replaced. I was actually happy about it because I did not like Unity at all and it was a good opportunity for Godot to have a bigger community and it did.

[@JoshChristiane]

Yeah it'll ultimately be good for the competition, so I'm fine with that aspect, giving a much needed boost to better run companies.

[@BlackJar72]

I see a lot of experience Unity users sticking with the engine for existing projects. But now I see new devs starting out by learning Godot (or in some cases Unreal Engine), whereas a year ago they were mostly learning Unity.

[@JoshChristiane]

Yeah I've noticed basically the same thing. I'm not really surprised. Controversy is never a good thing for a product that requires such a commitment. We need stability.

[@bificommander7472]

One big sore point was that the pay-per-install model would be applied retroactively to games that were already out. Some devs announced they'd pull their succesful games from stores when the change went live, since they didn't want to be on the hook for surprise fees. All my experience is in Unity, I have been reluctant to transfer my hobby projects to a new engine I have to learn... But I might.

[@JoshChristiane]

Yup. Which many argue is illegal, and I'd have to agree. Retroactively changing a policy for people who never agreed to that policy is not legal in most states (if any). It would have likely destroyed the company immediately if they had followed through with that. Their only saving grace here is walking some of those ideas back. It's hard to switch engines, takes a huge amount of effort and time, I can't blame people for not wanting to. If you do then I wish you much luck!

[@blackdoc6320]

Say what you want about unreal but I've always been a big fan of how they charge for the engine. A flat percentage is just so much easier than software as a service.

[@JoshChristiane]

Yeah, same here. Greatly prefer that pricing model.

[@matten_zero]

Never blame on malice what you can explain with incompetence

[@atmatey]

That absolutely does not apply to big companies. What Unity is doing is just greed and malice, nothing more.

[@mbg4681]

Unless it's actually malice.

[@sean7221]

It was greedy malice.

[@littledreamergames]

The industry has changed. In the past it's been large businesses who sue large businesses for breaking commerce laws, but in this new age it's small indie developers who can't afford to sue companies for breaking laws. It doesn't matter if you're an indie developer, or a multi million dollar company, you are protected under the law. All in all, it's sad that Unity took that step in the wrong direction. Personally, I am hopeful they learned from their mistake, and that they will be fair from here on out.

[@stevenray8737]

Well said. Coming in from the days when writing a game from scratch in C/C++(Direct X6, Win32 etc), Unity was a joy to use for making Oculus demos. But now I would only consider Unreal and Godot. It speaks volumes that instead of dishing out license headaches, Epic has been awarding grants to quite a few software projects - including Godot.

[@JoshChristiane]

Yeah I've seen that Unreal has done a good job supporting independent and open source software like Blender and Godot. To me that's a sign of a company that's not afraid of being replaced, but understands that there is space in the market for both of them to coexist.

[@thatJackBidenTalksAbout]

Like a lot of people I used to advocate for Unity. Now, like a lot of people, I don't. The drive to keep growing, becoming more and more profitable, destroyed the company.

[@JoshChristiane]

Yeah I really loved Unity, and in terms of software still do. But moves like these show that management isn't necessarily on board with their users. I hope to see them shift their attitude towards favouring indie's and give us an unchanging TOS.

[@nikolannn]

I believe that it is just a matter of time untill some company creates their own "pro" version of godot, targeting medium size studios with professional tech support, console support and custom features. Witch can be a good thing.

[@JoshChristiane]

Yeah that's my expectation too. I think it'd be a great thing, personally.

[@nikolannn]

@@JoshChristiane Yea I agree. W4 is going in that direction, but the more the merrier, and the fact that godot is open source will keep such company from trying to pull a "unity" 😂

[@litjellyfish]

About the tech support. That this has not happened yet is for me proof that godot yet is not used by studios that actually land money. It’s still used by zero budget people (with exceptions) and this is a big egg and hen blocker for bigger studios to use it. A bit like it was and still is with Blender. So for me I think the product roadmap of Godot will continue to advance faster and faster but the customer roadmap so to speak will take a bit longer to really kick off.

[@neurotrollium253]

I made a bunch of modules in C# to reutilize them in several games that I want to make, after what Ricchitello did, I just separated the logic that was in the unity classes, and just used primitive data on interfaces to communicate the with the IDE. Now, when this is done, I will migrate everything to Godot.

[@SergioLeRoux]

They actually did answer these questions, about piracy, multiple reinstalls, or free games. They said something like "yeah, you'll be charged each time. Even pirated copies. Sorry about that".

[@JoshChristiane]

I see your point, but I meant in an official and legally binding matter. It wasn't in the TOS, and there it's all "bendable" rules and obligations. Either way that is MADNESS. The entire thing is just a twilight zone of logic. It's hard to believe a company that big even let an idea like that get past the first person who heard it.

[@Rivershield]

Ok, Godot is good. But what about Unreal? Why should i pick Godot instead of Unreal if i want to make a 3d game with graphics similar to Genshin Impact? Legit question. I'm just started making my assets (which i intended to use in Unity) but i still don't know which Engine to use

[@JoshChristiane]

Just depends on your needs. My team is in Unreal. I would recommend Godot if you're working on a lighter game with less demanding needs (2D or simple 3D). But if you feel you need the graphical power ue5 offers then obviously you should choose that. I have found Godot extremely fast to develop in for indie games as a whole.

[@sean7221]

Godot is fine for 3D. See "Road to Vostok" as an example

[@tomiczdarko]

Unity is dead. I started making tutorials for Unity, but I will remove Unity from my marketing. I don't think they can recover from pricing they changed. Big mobile game developers will leave Unity because of it and Unity will lose all the money they made on ads from these devs. Godot is the future for indie devs and I say this as someone who really likes Unity engine.

[@JoshChristiane]

I loved Unity too. It's still a good engine and my hope is that another company will buy them out and completely revitalize it. But until then I just don't see why anybody would choose it for a new project. Even huge companies with tooling and everything already setup for Unity are migrating their assets and employees to other engines. It's a bygone era at this point.

[@tomiczdarko]

@@JoshChristiane Agree. I don't think anyone is going to save Unity now. It's just a life cycle of open traded companies. We just have to be careful and try out other engines to stay employable.

[@JoshChristiane]

That's what I'm doing as well. Good luck! :)

[@SnakeEngine]

@@JoshChristiane I haven't heard of a single big or notable Studio leaving Unity, only little indie devs and bedroom developers.

[@JoshChristiane]

I'll name a few then. Neutronized, Landfall, Aggro Crab, Massive Monster, Feverdream Softworks, Frogteam Games, Innersloth (Among Us), Mega Crit, Sand Castle, Devolver Digital, and hundreds more of smaller studios all announced on Twitter/X they're leaving Unity. These companies aren't HUGE companies for the most part, but collectively they're worth several billion dollars. But most huge companies don't use Unity anyways so I guess it's a moot point. Those "bedroom developers" you speak of make up the great majority of Unity's revenue. Over 70% of their revenue is subscriptions last I read. A bird in the hand is worth more than two in the bush, and Unity forgot that those indie devs dreams fund their company.

[@LukeAvedon]

Interesting thoughts Mr. Josh! Never used Unit myself but I find other C# developers started in C# because of it. Seems like a possible symptom caused by less free investor money to ride off of.

[@JoshChristiane]

I originally got into programming because I was building electronics that required embedded software, but as I moved out of hardware I learned C# as my first high-level language specifically for the purpose of programming in Unity. It's a staple in industries even beyond just gaming. I wish the company would revert policies quickly, and give their customers what they're asking for. I don't see that on the horizon sadly, because the company seems to have the idea that giving customers what they want is somehow giving into the mob of public pressure. Their view on customers is just totally distorted. Not to mention they publicly said indie-developers don't matter, despite that being the majority of their customers. No company that greedy and careless should go without a boycott or some form of consequence.

[@FencerDevLog]

Unity is a good game engine and has many advantages. Nevertheless, I'm glad I decided to go with Godot a year ago.

[@regys9521]

I have a question, what games have you worked on?

[@JoshChristiane]

Thanks for asking. A mobile cat game for checking the weather called Poncho. An indie game called Elix and Elena in Unity that got cancelled (5 years of my life later) and my first indie release at my own company that I'm currently working on (working title). I've also done a bunch of random contract work on other releases, but those were just small snippets of problem solving here and there. I mostly model in Blender, but I also have extensive modeling experience with Modo, Maya, and C4D. I've worked in every game engine at a point or another and am comfortable with all of them. My current project I'm working on is 100% Unreal after my team decided to ditch Unity. I built an unreleased and unfinished project in Godot as well last year, perhaps I'll release that some day on mobile or a Nintendo console. Games are really hard to make, and they're extremely hard and expensive to finish, it's a real problem in the industry with how many projects get cancelled.

[@John_Henry83]

Good to hear. I stopped using Unity 4 years ago. NOT because of the Unity engine per se. But because as the engine advanced I did not have the hardware to develop with it.

[@JoshChristiane]

I could see that being an issue for many people around the world. It used to be a very small and light editor that opened right away. Then over the years it became massive and bloated, now it's almost as bad as Unreal. I love these engines but I do prefer a lighter, simpler software approach.

[@John_Henry83]

@@JoshChristianeI am a retiree on a budget. I "code" for three reason. # I just like to do it. I have been writing bits of code since 1979 when I started with SBASIC on a VAX/VMS system in college. #2 Coding and computers just make sense to me. Much more sense than 70% of the people that I meet :( #3 I have had one computer or another since I brought my first Commodore 64 in 1984. That being said when I first heard about Unity 3D in the mid 2010 s I was really excited. Here was a full fledged game/3d engine for free!!! One that would make executable programs WITHOUT the use have to download something else in order to run your project. The only thing you had to deal with was that "Made with UNITY" pop up screen at the start. I had no objections to that since the engine and the licensing were so good. Not that I was going to make anything with it that was worth selling or that anyone would pay for. But I just liked the idea that I could if I wanted to . But with every new release of the engine my hardware was struggling to keep up. So I just stopped since I could not afford to buy new hardware just t run Unity.

[@RMDragon3]

I think one of the main issues was the fact that Unity announced the new terms of service, which were very ambiguous and predatory. Then, they didn't fully clarify how things would work for about a month. I believe that they were trying to weather the storm, but people don't tend to forget when you threaten their livelihood. I think that the new terms, while way worse, are not unworkable. However, I don't believe their line of "this is what we always intended, we just worded it badly the first time", because ToS need to be worded very carefully, especially when it comes to money. And that's the problem, trust is gone so why would I commit to using Unity?

[@dino56ac49]

I think Godot is gonna grow in the next decade and give the final blow to Unity. From my experience as a web programmer you can see how open-source projects pushed innovation. Web frameworks, libraries, server technology, databases, etc. The web development community has always supported open-source/free tools and paid back by improving it or creating new alternative version of it. I can see people using godot and building their own plugins/systems/improvements for their games, then sharing them for free instead of trying to sell them for cents in "Asset stores", because godot is free. Take Inventory systems for example, that's something that we all use one way or another. If instead of creating our own inventory system over and over again for every game we all contributed to a very robust and optimal system then everyone would benefit. And instead of spending your time making yet another inventory system you can work on what makes your game different. Same goes for dialogue systems, save systems and many many more

[@JoshChristiane]

You're absolutely right. The node based system in Godot is really innovative, and in some ways I prefer it over the basic component system of Unity. Though I still miss ECS. I think Godot is the future, I've seen it improve so much in the last 2 years.

[@mezohx]

Great video! Tbh, I was once a Godot evangelist when I used it; it was a pretty good engine. I've started a rather big project; I realised how big of an unoptimized mess Godot is, and then the controversies I've seen just solidified the idea of leaving Godot. And now I've switched entirely to Unity for this project, and it actually has more performance than the Godot version. Do I think open-source will be the future? Absolutely, no doubt about it. Will I use Godot in the future? No, I'll either continue using Unity or just create an entire game engine from scratch (as I have done multiple times in the past). But yeah, everything you said is true, and it's pretty agreeable!

[@JoshChristiane]

Thanks for your perspective and sharing your experience. I worked on a medium sized project with Godot and it was slightly less performant than Unity at the time (this was V3), but the biggest issue for me wasn't performance, it's GDscript. I really passionately hate GDscript, partly because I hate Python to begin with, and GD is literally worse than Python in every measurable way. I found it slow, limited, and incomplete. BUT, with that said I found C# to be great in Godot. The integration of C# into Unity is far superior, for now... But with time I hope Godot just drops GDscript and moves towards C# being their stable primary language. It's too confusing having more than one language available in an engine because it spreads out learning resources, which is why Unity over time dropped Boo and JS.

[@mezohx]

@@JoshChristiane Absolutely, I wasn't a fan of Python or GDScript as well. I can seriously agree with everything you said!

[@mbg4681]

>> how big of an unoptimized mess Godot is, Godot 4 C# outperforms base Unity (esp w/ .NET 8) >> and then the controversies "Controversies" plural? There was the Godot Foundation donation confusion. What else?

[@mezohx]

What I was implying is the renderer, rather than the programming side of things. So, yeah, it's still unoptimized... Though, you wouldn't notice much of anything regarding performance (probably) if your project is small to a certain extent. Regarding the "Controversies:" kzbin.info/www/bejne/h4TKeWt4fdmBjacsi=rvFX10MiQOg-rGug Just a small tiny thing to add upon what I said, I've had a few instances (and like, quite literally "a few") where I just get trash-talked by random people that uses Godot for giving an honest opinion. The toxicity is sky-high.

[@mbg4681]

@@mezohx >> So, yeah, it's still unoptimized... Superior performance = unoptimised. Gotcha. >> Regarding the "Controversies:" So, one specific contributor was a racist troll and Linietsky protected him. That's a fair criticism-although the video you linked contains a LOT of sloppy logic. Anyway, fortunately Godot is FLOSS so that it can just be ported if these or other antisocial mindsets someday somehow pollute the codebase. Good luck doing the same with a commercial game engine.

[@Sphyxx]

I remember when Unity was like the goto beginner game engine for ages

[@JoshChristiane]

Yeah I miss that Unity.

[@jcdentonunatco]

A lot of people sleep on Unigine. It’s a fantastic engine, which supports C# and C++. It’s missing a lot of the features that Unreal has, but it’s adding them fast and the graphical quality out of the box is incredible. Also their ocean/water simulation is second to none. Anyone moving away from Unity should definitely consider Unigine, in addition to the usual Unreal, Godot, Lumberyard etc

[@JoshChristiane]

I've never used it, but I have heard about it. I'm going to look more into it now that you mention it, pretty cool looking software.

[@CrusaderGabriel]

Wait it’s dying? And I have been relearning it since January to retake my game development dreams 😢😢😢 (at least as my 2d engine of choice, for 3d I do know how to use unreal, I made a 2d demo once in unreal and said never again…) Well time to go back to focus on doing 3d art exclusively (because also I don’t feel like going back to the software development industry, I’m just not happy there)

[@JoshChristiane]

I'm not sure dying in the sense of disappearing forever, but the trend is definitely downwards and will only continue to get worse as the company tries to recover from so many missteps in a row. I hope you continue to follow your dreams and work hard towards your goals in life regardless of the state of the economic outlook. You can succeed in any industry if you work hard and make a good product. There are always exceptions to every rule, so just focus on being exceptional.

[@CrusaderGabriel]

@@JoshChristiane thank you for your comment, really encourages me to continue! Regarding game development: I’ve been making some mini games in Unity, but been considering giving Godot a try as well, at least I got experience using Unity so can never be wrong. About succeeding in any industry you’re entirely right, my 3D art skills aren’t basic anymore (but I don’t consider myself good at it yet, last year all I did was hyper realistic characters and practiced likeness sculpting), probably will see if I can hire a mentor after I finish my current unity demo. In both cases I’ll keep working hard (and smart)

[@JamesArndt]

I’d say stick with it. The company isn’t just recovering, they are fully resetting, with a new CEO at the helm. I’m excited about the future of not just the engine, but the company too. I might be biased as I do work at Unity.

[@jammingend3781]

I'm working on a project in unity as well, its still a good engine with an immeasurable amount of documentation (tutorials etc). ​@CrusaderGabriel

[@Grand_Alchemist]

Unity is a garbage fire at this point. Invest your time elsewhere.

[@scotmcpherson]

Yeah I was on Unity, abandoned my 2 year long project and am rebuilding it in Godot. I spent 2/3 months learning Godot, and started working on my project again in November. I have to be honest,, I am further in development now on Godot than I was in Unity after 2 years of development. Godot is such a better development experience.

[@JoshChristiane]

That's the same story for many developers. Godot is fast and snappy. The lightness of a program is very underrated. Being able to download and install so fast, plus every time you open or close the software everything is just immediate. Not to mention game compile times are so much faster.

[@NukeThemAllGame]

I'm using Construct 3 to make my RTS and pretty happy with it

[@JoshChristiane]

I've never used Construct, but that's awesome you're using a browser based tool to build games, it shows how far technology has come. Good luck on your future RTS, I wish it much success!

[@ysiadpir1423]

Maybe Unity can hire a DEI officer and then double down on their payment policy plus push equity and inclusion and claim victimhood while they file for bankruptcy. Just saying.

[@ealdie24]

I hope Unity restarts back to its roots when it was for democratizing game development and creating awesome communities. Since it was taken over by generic corporate businessmen it started its downfall

[@joshbren6413]

Really insightful stuff, I was debating between open source vs unity vs unreal (5% royalty on gross revenue is bold) and honestly stumbling upon this was a gem. I had already thrown unity out when I heard EA was associated then all this, crazy. Great stuff for new businesses starting

[@JoshChristiane]

UE and Godot are both good options. However, there are new players in the game that you might consider too. S&box is releasing soon, which is somehow related to Source 2 from Valve. Then you have Uingine, and about a dozen more popping up. I'd definitely look into all of them. For me and my team UE ended up being the best decision.

[@joshbren6413]

​@@JoshChristiane Ty for the help, it's going to be for a web game so we're walking a thin line. Unreal seems to have no real competition but is heavy for our use case. I see Unity games are what I'm seeing used in the WASM space, I wonder why.

[@jamesclow108]

It's sad what happened to Unity, it had a great community and was a good engine, especially for VR. It seems like it started to go pear shaped with disorganised pipeline changes and ECS, but ultimately greed was the full bag of nails in the coffin for it, and that greed wasn't just from one indivudual. Unreal Engine is my engine of choice now, but I hope Godot continues to improve to the point where Unity becomes a distant memory for Indi devs.

[@club2772]

I threw my c# unity book away. The adobe rental thing burned me in a college design course and I can’t bring myself to use adobe products. It’s just so predatory and I don’t see how people should be ok with being stepped on like that.

[@year1202]

regarding the new policy I have a few questions : - if I make a free unity game using unity personal and publish it on itchio do I have to pay? -if I make money off promoting the game,talking about in events, participate in competitions using the game and such, and perhaps make money off these things do I have to pay them? -if I already make money off other activities I do, will they demand a share of my income? thank you for helping me out, I've been confused lately with the policy

[@JoshChristiane]

1. I don't believe so. This assumes by free you mean completely free and not freemium. Free download but in-app purchases of course would change this, and that revenue is still counted. 2. No. As far as I'm aware you would not be charged on money made outside of the sales of the game as a software itself, as well as revenue generated from ads/purchases within the game. Any type of revenue made by the game directly (not indirectly like talk shows, etc.) is subject to their fees and/or royalties. 3. Not normally. Unless your previous activities are related to the development of said game/software with Unity. For example if I made a game using Unity and it was already making money for me, then the next software project would combine with my previous game for the indie-studio license revenue cap of up to 100k or whatever it is now. This won't normally be an issue for indie devs, so wouldn't worry about it. But if you have a studio making a certain threshold of income you may be contractually required to buy a more expensive version of Unity's yearly license. Hopefully this clears up your questions. Good luck in your ventures!

[@bombmk2590]

You pay according to your game sales revenue. It is not rocket science. But I guess it is easy to be confused about the policy if one has clearly not read it.

[@mbg4681]

>> if I make a free unity game using unity personal and publish it on itchio do I have to pay? Not until Unity retroactively changes their mind again.

[@DasIllu]

Lots of projects are in a long term commitment trap with unity at this point. This is why we will see a continuous stream of Unity games released for another 1-2, maybe 3 years. But once that has dried up, i think it's game over for them. I don't know how much effort there is in the Godot community to create tools to help migrate existing progress, but if there is an considerable effort going on, then that is what Unity should really be worried about.

[@JoshChristiane]

That's precisely correct. People seem to think this problem is over. Unity is going to stay somewhat stable for the next few years until all of those projects finish up, then these devs won't start another project in Unity again knowing how inconsistent the company has been. Most people don't realize once you start a game you can't just bounce to another engine, you have to finish that project first, and that usually takes years. They could very well crash and burn after 2 or 3 years if they don't take this issue seriously right now and make it right.

[@lazykid9167]

Game Dev Over you mean 😎

[@AlmondFlour]

I used to think, until just now, that the assets i bought in unity were stuck there, of course can just export from Unity and import in Godot (or whereever)

[@JoshChristiane]

Yeah they're not necessarily stuck. Most of the asset packages can either export directly or you can manually do the conversion. There are also open source apps to help with that. Godot is making great strides in its development lately.

[@nyeeesss2424]

I was planning on switching to Unity (from Godot) just to see if it really is better. But if making a game in Unity means being at the mercy of the corporate overlord and their greed, then no thank you. I'm happy with my tiny, less powerful game engine.

[@visualwriter]

Sir, so well said. Its all on point at the sharp edge!

[@JoshChristiane]

Thank you very much for saying that, :)

[@user-et6ij1te2f]

i'm not a developer but i enjoyed your video essay. thank you for the insider info.

[@JoshChristiane]

Glad you enjoyed it, thank you very much for leaving a comment and watching it!

[@angelosavioti4627]

I was one of those who dropped Unity for Godot, even having hundreds of dollars spent in tools in the Asset Store, like Rewired, Feel, Animancer, DOTween Pro, Odin Inspector, Bullet Pro...

[@bensaylor9093]

I've started developing with Unity a few months ago and have had great success with it so far. I've learned more from that engine than any course or other platform- to me it's a middle ground of features and complexity, one step up from Godot, one (okay maybe two) steps down from Unreal.

[@JoshChristiane]

I'm glad you're having great success with it. I wish you much more in the future!

[@TrusePkay]

No wonder Slitherine chose Stride, (a C# engine similar to Unity) for its game Distant Worlds 2. We now have tons of C# game engines out there for devs to choose from.

[@JoshChristiane]

Yeah, there are more choices coming out than people realize.

[@LZentertainments]

Thanks for a good video. I will however point out that: A) they didn't wait a month. The whole pricing crisis was backtracked within a week. B) People HAVE NOT mass migrated to Godot. They sure talked it up a lot, but it still holds only a 0.4% market share. C) Outside of John R, the former CEO of ironSource (the whole ads side) along with all his top executives have also been let go.

[@JoshChristiane]

Thanks for the info! Godot is growing much faster than market share would have most people believe. That data is old. Indie devs don't make up much revenue generation from game sales, but they carry Unity through subscriptions. Reports as of a poll done in Berlin at a convention last month show that Godot is quickly catching Unity as indie devs primary choice. At the pace they showed it will only be a couple years before Godot surpasses Unity in users.

[@firewoodlake]

I hear on the news today that unity is doing a 25% layoff of their workers. Do you think that some of those people layed off were some the evil, greedy people that worked there? The model sounds corrupt to developers. It would be better if unity charged people to download their software to download apps and let developers charge what ever they want with no charge. UNITY WAS STARTING TO GET BIG BUT I DONT HEar about them much anymore..

[@JoshChristiane]

Yeah definitely all good points. I think most of the people laid off were likely HR, legal, regular operations managers, etc. I highly doubt they were any of the evil people. I think most of the leadership and people that failed the company are still there, and even if they do ever get fired it'll be with golden parachutes.

[@hongentsai4489]

I use your video as my english listening practice material, very nice

[@JoshChristiane]

Oh that's awesome to hear! I'm encouraged that you're able to understand it, your English is very good I'm sure.

[@ZorMon]

Unity was very simple and intuitive 10 years ago. Now, is too much complex and for AAA games unreal engine gives you more power. The indie industry should be the target of unity.

[@RezzaBuh]

If anyone can save Unity, it's Jim. He is the best CEO you can have, and he understands communities.

[@JoshChristiane]

I've read good things about Jim Whitehurst. I don't know much about him other than his stint at IBM and saving Delta Airlines from bankruptcy, but he's from my state and lives near me so he can't be too bad, hahaha. I really do hope he can turn Unity around, the software deserved better management.

[@tortoisemech2993]

I'm probably wrong but I think the majority of all software will go to the Consumption Expenditure model because it makes more money even though it's less affordable for small businesses or in this case, indie developers. Adobe, Microsoft, or even cloud computing in general works that way. Even in other aspects of life, phones, cars etc are moving in a pay monthly, never own situation. It's sad.

[@JoshChristiane]

"You will own nothing and you will be happy" suddenly rings true, at least in the software world. Well I for one am not happy, I prefer to own my software outright and not have recurring monthly billing statements.

[@Sovreighn7]

I think Unity is not dead persay, but its on life support after suffering major trauma. At this stage there are not only other strong options but UE is just outright better, is battle tested, is constantly getting better in ways devs can appreciate, and is more useful to Indies than Unity. Now with Unity 6 coming up and the removal of Richastealio, the engine might improve and return to being a highly competitive option and thats a good thing if it happens. Then again maybe with AI none of this will matter and people will become more like Prompt Designers spewing out asset flips like never before seen with the occasional mega hit.

[@JoshChristiane]

Totally right. I'm one of the few that's actually excited for better AI tools since I run a small indie startup. The idea that the technology could improve to the point where the technical tools are no longer the bottleneck and instead there is a major focus on the art of creation itself is a grand concept to me. Maybe it'll produce a more competitive environment, and likely a lot more bad games made by people who don't know what they're doing. But for the few of us who love game design and aspire to create great art but don't have massive budgets for hundreds of people on staff... Well that sounds exciting and inspiring to me. We are still years away from AI tools producing good assets though, as of right now it's actually quite poor. But by the time those are available and working well, hopefully the game engine will matter less and we can lean into automation more. I want Unity to continue to improve with its new leadership, it's better for everybody that way.