Unity the game engine wasn’t profitable or Unity the company? I cannot believe that Unity the company wasn’t raking in tons of money from their asset store.
this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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It was raking in tons of money, especially since 2020 (772 million for that year), but they somehow were spending way more than they were earning for most of their existence. Beats me how/where that money was being spent. https://investors.unity.com/financials/quarterly-results/default.aspx
It seems Unreal that unity is in the red. They create a software platform and asset store, right? That should effectively print money; it's not like there's a manufacturing cost and profit margin to selling more copies.
If you assume the average employee makes $100,000, which is almost certainly an undershot given that they're a tech company with a lot of very talented engineers, then their labor costs in salary alone are around $770,000,000, without factoring in things like infrastructure costs, land, health care, etc etc. Sure, they don't have direct manufacturing costs after engineering, but that's a lot of revenue needed just to cover direct labor costs.
From just a little perusing, it seems like they're investing heavily into R&D, and they also have quite a lot of debt. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, or at least not misaligned with their goals. Especially in tech, the aim often isn't to become directly profitable as quickly as possible, but rather to invest every last penny you can get your hands on in order to grow as much as you can, and then when you hit ceiling, pivot to stable profitability, which will be at a much higher level than if you'd been forced to instead focus on slower growth and immediate profit.
That's not to say that this is a good thing or that it doesn't have negative consequences, only that Unity probably doesn't care about being in the red; they care about lots and lots of people using their engine.
If you assume the average employee makes $100,000, ... then their labor costs in salary alone are around $770,000,000
How in the name of fuck does Unity have 7700 employees?!
That would be 7k developers.
How can that many developers work on a single product? AFAIK, they can't.
Why shouldn't it? It's not only a game engine, Unity is also trying to place their technology in the movie industry and in the manufacturing industry. And they are also operating an ad service, which is also requiring sales people.
The same person who made the decision to charge for installs or force an ad service into games is running the company. Sound decisions have never been their strong suit.
It seems absurd to me that even the game engine isn't profitable.
The end of the free money is making quite a lot of incompetence very public.
So basically if you want to make an actual game and not a billboard/shitty money siphon then get fucked.
Well the CEO has open disdain for devs who don't enshittify their game so I guess I'm not surprised.
And yes I'm salty that I have to remake my project in a new engine.
But now you can make it EVEN BETTER!
Then you can make it again
And again
And again
Also, if you want to see how people feel on the forums: https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates.1482750/
tl;dr: they're quite displeased to the tune of 100+ forum pages.
Unreal is better than unity? I know it's a loaded question, but in general how do they compare?
On the surface level Unreal has it beat for features. However, Unity is generally considered more lightweight plus being easier and less clunky to code for.
Over the years that's been changing though. With more half-finished bloat being added plus PR disaster's like this, open-source alternatives like Godot are becoming more popular for those who still don't want to use Unreal for whatever reason.
Thanks for the substantive reply!
Unreal has 3D features that no other (public) engine has, e.g. Lumen (relatively cheap global illumination) and Nanite (dynamic LOD system) and is miles ahead of unity in this area.
It's also miles behind in development ease. Unreal as an environment is much more difficult and there's a reason most indie games aren't on Unreal.
Yes, unreal has crazy tech, but it comes at a price. Unity basically gave up competing with them because they're basically totally different markets.
Very few AAA titles are made with Unity. Many are made with Unreal. I guess Unity never really made it into that market.
Unity started off by appealing to hobbyist and indie developers, and that's remained their core audience. It's only been more recently that they've seen some larger studios embrace them.
Then again, the AAA market never really made it into the mobile landscape. That's where you'll find the vast majority of Unity releases
A lot of those AAA unreal games are plagued woth performance issues and shader stutter on PC. Unreal has a lpt of good in there, but it's not all good. Nanite will only contribute in making games even larger than they already are.
Not to mention the assest store is huge for unreal - I see so many new title demo's and it's a game of "spot the store asset". Sure, it may look good to an average gamer, but it's super low effort. Unity gives back what you put into it - but Unreal can be a real slog.
I expect Unity's asset store to be the main thing holding back a significant portion of developers. Now that Godot can open one, I expect a lot of non-exclusive stuff to show up once they open theirs.
What could you do opening the camera? Stream video to your servers?
Measure your eye ball focus while playing.
Audio capture, video was way too expensive (and not useful)
But, was it sent to your servers?
I am asking in case I need to buy an old nokia
We probably all need to buy an old Nokia
The impression is “this decision came from very high up in Unity” from an exec who “had no idea how bad of an idea it was”
Said exec is a crystal-clear case of the Peter Principle: being promoted to the point of incompetence.
Truly, a person who totally deserves their pay /s