Ok yeah we were talking past each other initially, I see what you are saying now.

I never really mentioned AAA and the reply I made about Rust was also saying that they said "Not sure I saw a AAA game on the list" which is true in terms of budget/team size but not playtime/playercount for a few games on the list.

The biggest games in Unity are probably Rust and Kerbal Space Program merely in terms of playercount/playtime and they do compete with AAA on those metrics, not team or budget size. Both teams have complaints about Unity, as everything, as long as those are addressed things progress.

That is the problem though, Unity is chasing AAA/more licenses when their main target is mobile/smaller scale games and doing that simply. That is the reason both Rust and Kerbal started using Unity, simplicity.

Garry picked Rust in 2013 for the simplicity as he says

> "Unity was about that when we first started with it. They hid all the hard stuff in c++ so we didn't have to think about it. The more time has gone on, the more bullshit has crept to the forefront. The've gone from hiding the hard stuff to moving more and more stuff into C#."

With Unity Rust is competing at the level of playercount/playtime with AAA. That is literally the thing Unity wants the most and their selling point. Unity you can have smaller developers, able to make games that can compete with less team, with a focus on simplicity and being the engine team that makes transitions easy. It is also ok if they are hard transitions if there are major improvements. Unity is many times asking you to update to a new system that is the same or sometimes less than what you need in terms of benefit, and then only to be half complete and then changed again.

As Garry said

> "So while other engines have been trying to catch Unity up in terms of developer friendliness, Unity has been going the other way by making itself more unfriendly."

They are losing the simplicity selling point.

Unity can make games that compete, they should be taking these critiques to heart strongly as teams/games like Rust and Kerbal are exactly the target they should be going for along with smaller games/mobile games etc.

Unity has so many internal developers now, that requires alot more communication needs, testing needs and maintenance. It also pulls the company in many directions if there is no clear engineering/product lead at the top and it is all management/business/finance pushing feature based development which gets them into version 2 syndrome or the "second-system effect".

> The second-system effect (also known as second-system syndrome) is the tendency of small, elegant, and successful systems to be succeeded by over-engineered, bloated systems, due to inflated expectations and overconfidence.

If the second-system effect doesn't describe Unity I don't know what does.

Get back to simplicity Unity, let the engineers/product people have power to set this back on course. Stop catering to big developers, they make their own engine for this reason, consistency and simplicity of their own process. Dogfood Unity with an actual game, the problems will be clear today. If you aren't doing that, listen to people like Garry who are.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect