> The problem is that Unity always has 2 or 3 ways of doing things for each feature, and the "proper" way that's actively maintained (and recommended by the community) is always the one that's still in Beta and missing features, so you're kinda cornered into updating.

First part of this sure, Unity likes to have different ways to do stuff and I do wish they'd focus more. The roadmap approach they're taking shows that they are committed to working on it, and I'd say they've done well tackling that.

But the second part? About getting cornered into updating by new features, not buying that for a second.

If the feature is done enough to use it in a game with a large scope trying to follow a real development schedule, it's not disappearing. If it's not, don't use it.

LTS releases are getting 3+ years of updates, before that we were going 5+ years with the same unity version, so when you say "actively maintained" when you mean is they're not getting changed anymore. Which is a good thing.

Unity 5, from 5 years ago, is still getting security updates.

Where you get cornered is trying to pull in beta features into a game that has a hard schedule then getting screwed when the beta feature takes advantage of has breaking changes during a major release... which is kind of the point of a beta.

Unity has a huge community with a wide range of expertise and scope in their projects, if you're just blindly following what people in the forum are talking about, you'll follow some people working on small projects with small lifecycles.

Unity has never been for rug pulling, if something works well enough for your game today, it's going to work well enough tomorrow, they're not going to yank it just because it's not the new hotness. Even Unityscript ended up getting a smooth path into the sunset with a converter tool despite being used heavily in under 4% of projects (and being used exclusively by <1% at the time)

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> Also, the whole upgrade process itself could be improved if they put time on it. There's nothing inherent to game engines that forces Unity to have so many breaking changes all the time.

Again, where are these breaking features "all the time"? Unity 4 => 5 was half a decade?

Now they have their date-based versioning, but LTS releases still get at least 3 years of support, and the next LTS is the next year, not the old 5+ year cadence, so you get an incremental upgrade path with 3 whole years of smoothing.

Outside of major releases I've only ever seen a tiny handful of breaking changes per release, the majority of which where back when we were going 5 years between major revisions so they'd hold everyone's hand with a detailed guide and "pay once, cry once": https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/UpgradeGuides.html

Note how now only LTS versions need these...

I mean, someone brought up Monogame here, apparently not aware that XDA 4 which it targets was a major breaking event from XDA 3. Game engines have breaking changes on major revisions.

Software, often has breaking changes on major revisions.

Don't build your software, on other software, hoping to blindly chase every major release painlessly, it's just not going to happen once you get to a certain level of complexity. These companies are not abandoning previous releases instantly, they still get maintained

I could Ctrl+R Unity for Unreal in this comment and nothing would change, it just comes with being a swiss army knife of this sort