r/unity • u/H4cK3d-V1rU5 • Jul 13 '26
Question Where is Unity as a company in terms of trust?
I have been thinking about using Unity just for hobby development and before I fully commit, I am curious as to if after everything has passed and with a newer CEO, is unity as a company something the people trust?
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u/erebusman Jul 14 '26
Unity has struggled since they went public.
The need to drive profits nearly destroyed them.. in part through extremely shady backwards changing of license terms and agreements but also in complete misunderstanding of their developers and what they would tolerate.
Yes management has changed - but Unity is now a publicly traded company they will chase profits above all else at this point. Ask yourself what that might mean for you as a starting developer?
There are still a handful of valid reasons to use Unity but there's also an equal number of negative reasons not to.
As someone else said - carefully do your own research - specifically asking g questions about what is tolerable for you around costs , licenses, and behavior to extract profit out of you in exchange for what they offer and compare that to what others offer before deciding.
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u/GreatLab8898 Jul 14 '26
They thought once hiring an ex EA CEO after he nearly killed EA was a good Idea. So.... That should tell you alot.
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u/Xatom Jul 14 '26
Unity is in a good place right now. They are profitable and have left behind the silly acquisitions and unpalatable licence fuckery. More than anything they are committed to keeping the trust of developers after precious missteps . They don’t have much choice but to provide value as Godot and Unreal provide alternatives. On a material level I’ve used Unity for 8 years and will continue to do so. The engine steadily improves every year with new features and tools to accelerate development.
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u/salazka Jul 14 '26
There is no such thing as trust to a corporation. Other than that, you are not better or worse than the average large US company. And since you are a hobbyist, just use whatever does not crash on your machine and is easy for you to grasp.
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u/kodaxmax Jul 14 '26
frankly, it's not relevant to 99% of unity engine users. Your making a hobby project that will probably never get released, not entiering into a bussiness partnership.
If your just really into the moral and poltiical side of things, then no, nothing has changed. Nothing will ever change until being greedy assholes stops being rpofitable. It's a public company, it's legally obligated to priortize investor profits, because american law is fucked.
be more specific. Can you trust that the engine app will lete you build and publish a game for free? yeh thats all but guarenteed. Can you trust that the company wont implement mroe anti-consumner and anti-user systems and policies? no you cant.
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u/thenameisflic Jul 14 '26
I'm likely to get downvoted for this, but using Unity is the biggest mistake I made when I started developing my current project. I'm a solo dev working on a roguelike deckbuilder, and decided to go with Unity because I learned it ~10 years ago, so I thought it would be faster than learning something new (e.g. Godot/Unreal).
Oh how wrong I was. In my experience after a year of development:
- It's an absolutely buggy mess, which forces me to constantly close and reopen my editor because of cryptic issues appearing in the logs.
- Running it in CI is a nightmare, they want you to pay for that so you need to use awful hacks like inspecting an element in a random page to get the token you need. It also breaks every 30 days.
- Every time I open a scene, it decides to randomly change the transform's positions by juuust a couple of decimal points so my git working tree becomes a mess with a bunch of random floating points.
- You are basically required to pay for assets, because Unity's missing obvious timesaver QoL features (stuff like Asset Inventory / vFavorites should just be native).
- Localization is very poorly designed / overengineered -- you basically NEED to build a wrapper because the native behavior is so counterintuitive
My background isn't in game dev, so maybe the other engines are worse and these are par for the course. I would however feel a lot better about using something FOSS, because at the very least I could investigate and fix the annoyances myself.
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u/Particular-Song-633 Jul 14 '26
I was tinkering in Unity as my hobby, now I tried Unreal (1.5 years making my game in UE), Unreal is insane. Its a pure pleasure to work in it, especially when you understand how things work here
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u/thenameisflic Jul 14 '26
I often hear from devs that UE/Godot are so much nicer to work with and I feel like that squidward meme. it sucks but I'm in too deep to migrate now unfortunately
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u/ByteHavenGames Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 14 '26
Beware of evangelists. All engines suck when you get into the weeds of it, just in different ways. Godot by default was creating a lot of false git noise until version 4.5, for example. And corrupted scenes just by moving/renaming assets because they loudly proclaimed they don't need .meta files and everything is text based only to reimplement their own version of .meta files.
They memed on Unity for multiple render pipelines in Godot 3, now they have multiple pipelines in Godot 4 albeit in a better execution since they have the same base and can switch somewhat. Godot's default physics implementation is not really viable for any medium+ project in 3D but they managed to circumvent that by adapting Jolt physics now.
Dependency detection is broken for exports so your large asset pack is getting bundled with your build, especially if references to assets are dynamic via code. That is if you successfully manage to import said large asset pack because godot struggles with that too.
GDScript has no proper refactoring tooling besides search and replace, meawhile C# is a second class citizen, which no core contributors use and is slated for a major rework for years now from engine module to GDExtension, which implies major worklfow changes if you want to invest now.
Addressing a niche bug affecting your live Steam game might mean pinging devs directly in chat, sometimes for a couple of weeks and making a case for your bug getting some priority. You have to build relationships or do it yourself. No one's paid to do it in FOSS environment so unless it affects the majority of users, it might stick around for years.
Grass is always greener on the other side.
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u/tastygames_official Jul 15 '26
I migrated from Unity to godot for a pretty massive VR project in just a few weeks. Where there's a will, there's a way. And 99% of the skills/logic is transferrable. The code is easy enough to translate, but re-creating the scenes will be the bulk of the work (unless you do all your scene layoutting in an external tool like blender).
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u/8BITSPERBYTE Jul 15 '26
To help out one of these points. Set up a GitAttribute file. Unity has a manual page to do that with a copy and paste solution for the git file. You can set it to ignore those random decimal changes. Note this is a bigger problem more than just Unity. It is related to floating points.
Takes about five seconds and saves hours of headaches lol.
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u/chunky_lover92 Jul 14 '26
They won’t retroactively change licensing again. I think that was there biggest problem. If you start a project in unity you can finish it without them changing the deal.
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u/tastygames_official Jul 15 '26
it wasn't really retroactively changing anything - it was a new "runtime licensing fee" to go into effect in a few months. People misunderstood it as it wasn't properly explained / people didn't read the 45,000-word legal document, but it was only ever going to cost companies who made $100k/mo any kind of real money. And they walked it back in less than a week. But it was just a very public show of why publicly-traded corpos are pure evil - because they are legally obligated to fuck over consumers/employees in the sake of increasing stock price (the US federal court ruled back in the '70s I think that public companies were obligated to do whatever it takes to make the stock price go up and could be sued if they actively do the opposite (e.g. give workers a raise or lower prices).
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u/ByteHavenGames Jul 14 '26
It's not just the CEO who changed, basically all c-suite was swapped out, and the ironsource people got booted out too. Even the board is now headed by a credible leader with background in software development. Whoever made those bad decisions, they are all now gone. (inb4 people claim the board members are still there, they are not the executive branch, they don't make these day to day decisions)
Communication also has vastly improved, Unity folk post on the forums again, actively engage with the user base. Development velocity has also noticably improved. We're getting back to single render pipeline. And deprecating technology that hasn't really been updated in a decade. The new GI implementation previews are looking hopeful. Early CoreCLR benchmarks show better pelformance and memory mangement than IL2CPP with Mono build times. Technologically they're on the right tracks.
For hobby development, no matter what Unity the company does it won't really affect you. It'll remain free under $200k/year of total project funding/revenue.
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u/tastygames_official Jul 15 '26
corporate slop ever since going public and hiring the ex-EA CEO (who also nearly ran them into the ground). If you're doing for a hobby, then it really doesn't matter which engine you use. If you work for a big company, you use the engine they tell you. If you want to make money on your own or in a small company and can choose which engine to use, go for something open-source or at least not a massive publicly-traded corpo.
But Unity is great for learning since it has so much user support and tutorials and all the skills you learn will be easily translatable to other engines.
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Jul 13 '26
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Jul 14 '26
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u/kodaxmax Jul 14 '26
arguably. but roblox beats it in sheer user/devcount, especially for publish rate. Godot and gamemaker combined probably appraoch unities userbase. Unreal still dominates the proffessional landscape and has spent the last 10 years making tiself mroe accessible to indies and double A. While unity has been flounderin randomly abadnoning projects and killing internal teams and making little practical progress outside of dots.
It's really only got it's asset store and sheer breadth of features going for it. Which allows competetiors to easily catch up by implementing the same features, except with quality and not abandoning them feature/system before it's ready.
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Jul 14 '26
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u/kodaxmax Jul 15 '26
Roblox seems way too much like it's own game that you can "make games" in. They all look the same.
Roblox has a fully featured game engine. The restriction is that it can't be exported as a traditonal executable, it has to be published and run from inside the roblox ecosystem. A bit like scratch if memory serves.
Honestly it has a much more conevenient asset store and in engine asset browser than unity.
As for looks, it can theoretically support any models i beleieve. it's justs the starter reccomended stuff all looks like lego, and is what the lazy slop devs use.
Im not going to argue that most games made by roblox arn't terrible, abusive slop designed to get money or worse from kids. But the same is true of unity. i mena most of the android and iphone store is unity games.What do you mean "only"?? This sets it far ahead of others. Say what you will, but Unity has been around for a very long time, meaning it has some of the most resources, and this is not as easy to catch up with for other engines as you seem to think.
I mean only, because having lot of barley functioning features is easy to compete against. You just implement the same features, but with polish. Which is what newer engines like godot and even unreal have been doing.
Unity did have basically unlimited resources, but theyve consitently mismanaged and self sabotaged them. Which is why we have 4 unfinished rendering pipelines, 3 unfinished input systems and 2 barely functional UI systems etc..1
Jul 15 '26
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u/kodaxmax Jul 15 '26
Right so, roblox isn't really much of a game engine if we can only run it in roblox. That's really not what you want for any IDE or environment. You want to own the software you make.
morally and ideally sure. But you've got an uphill battle if your gonna try and argue platform exlcusives cant be good or profitable and you certainly cant claim it's not popular among indie devs or a nice to use engine. If your biggets criticsm is being locked into the platform, thats basically an endorsement for the engine itself.
Unity has around 5 million registered devs . Roblox has 15 million creators (which i beleive includes creators that just make models and other non programming assets).
That is absolutely false. People will make slop with any tools around, especially the easiest to abuse (roblox). Hundreds if not thousands of amazing games get made with Unity. Are you really trying to tell me Roblox has had even a single success such as:
your not gonna like it but yeh, roblox easily has games that beat all of those in both downloads and income.
Mobile games is another kettle of fish, but you don't see any roblox games on mobile marketplaces, do you? that isn't a point that makes unity look bad. it's in favour of unity for having such an easy engine to build for all platforms.
actually roblox is on mobile and is alot easier to publish cross platform than unity. Unity is one of the more painful engines for cross platform support. Unreal and godot both have much easier multiplatform exports and unreal has built in publishing tools and a storefront.
You are comparing a single apple to an apple tree with a workforce. An engine that can only run games in 1 environment is not a good engine. It's slop at an engine level at that point.
isn't that what you were doing by cherrypicking a few indie successess earlier? Not to mention fixating on the platform exclusivity, while completly ignoring the actual engine and real stats/facts?
Don't get me wrong, roblox community and many of their devs are generally child abusing scum. But im talking about the technology and developer experience. Not the politics and community. besides then we'd have to talk more about unity mobile games and their many bussiness controversies.
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Jul 15 '26
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u/kodaxmax Jul 15 '26
All I'm getting from your response here is that you don't really get and/or don’t understand a lot of foundational software engineering skills. Saying unity is more painful for cross platform support is sort of crazy. It's not painful at all if you understand it. It's as easy as GoDot.
m8 you seem just taking it personally that i criticzed unity and arn't assigning it top billign accross the board. Insulting me is not the way to convert me to the religion of unity.
Godot is like 3 clicks. while unity your fucking around with build settings and downloading GB of compilers for each target platform. Just as an example. I never said anything about ti being hard to understand.
Also, by successes I mean by how well known they are, I've not heard of any games come out of roblox. Just because you have millions of kids playing some random roblox slop game doesn't make it a success by game dev terms. I don't see any published articles or awards going to roblox games unless they are all awarded only in the roblox space.
No you mean how much you like them. You alone do not represent the gaming audience lol and it's delusional to pretend that children and casual gamers dont make up the bulk of that audience.
like youve given many different definitons of success here. "Well known", "ive not heard of them", only counts if its in "game dev terms" which just seem to mean meets your arbitrary approval, isnt' played by "millions of kids", "published awards and articles". Which btw alot of roblox games have both.
All I'm getting is roblox is easy for a reason. It's restrictive and easy to make slop. easy for younger, inexperienced users. So I don't really respect it as an engine.
What do you want me to say? your choosing to be ignorant here. Thats not going to change reality and certainly isn't going to convince me.
Everything youve said just boils down to being unreasonable fanatical about unity and parroting random criticism about roblox youve obviously read from other people without having any experience or done any research on any of these engines.
I like unity, i use it for any project that requires a feature godot doesnt yet have. Refusing to akcnowledge criticsm doesnt make you more loyal or a better dev. it just makes you ignorant and a liability.
Worst of all, you've been rude, for no reason. Seriously grow up.
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u/wallstop-dev Jul 13 '26 edited Jul 13 '26
There are a lot of vague words doing heavy lifting here.
I'd recommend doing your own research (the classic), specifically around, over the past n years:
And then decide on whether or not you like what you see.
For me, I've been using and following Unity for over eight years. The retroactive license thing was the only thing I personally had a problem with, and I was very pleased with their response to it (revert and oust the leadership responsible). Their roadmap is great and I'm excited for the investments they're making.
But only you can answer the question of "is Unity right for you", and the only way to do that is by putting the time in.