I wonder how much deals and business relationships like the one they have with Apple might have contributed to Unity’s confidence in the ability to make the ludicrous policy changes stick.

Given Unity’s 3d performance is “good enough” but not good enough that most AAA Unity games don’t wind up basically rewriting more than half the engine to get acceptable performance for their particular game… I really was shocked by the big Unity hype with the whole Vision OS apps part of that Apple announcement… particularly since the worst offenders for “under optimised” giving phone warning levels of CPU burn and battery consumption have been pretty 2.5D Unity apps where the only 3D effect is some parallax scrolling and using the built in Z index to control which sprites will wind up in front of others as they move around in an otherwise completely 2D fashion… some absolutely surprising moments over the years as I’ll start playing a “visually good and polished game” only to notice at the end of 5-10 minutes bus or train ride, my phones gotten very warm and my battery is now 10-25% lower…

I learned how shitty Unity can be before I got any experience developing with it and the experiences I have had developing with it and the experiences shared with me by others who develop with it … It feels like a major disconnect has grown over the years between management running the company, project management setting goals for the development/engineering staff, and the multiple classes of end users of the engine, with my suspicion being that it’s hard for them to avoid getting drowned in feedback from novices who easily achieve their goals with the tools in Unity, leveraging their store, some vendor plugins maybe and don’t do much more than build 2D, 2.5D or very basic 3D games… The next tiers above that of intermediate and advanced Unity users being progressively more silent about their problems as they have learned to rely less and less on what Unity provides with the end outcome being some experienced Unity developers I’ve met being pretty honest that they basically only use Unity because it’s a C# game engine and there’s a lot of benefit in using C# like a big developer pool, performant backend systems in the same programming language, etc… and they are throwing away >90% of the engine and either they or their team are doing everything themselves because what Unity gives them is completely useless, or unsuitable, or not just simply not performant enough.

When your “experts” are “throwing away” your product and just “using the box it comes in” because it’s a convenient shape… something is very very wrong and your product’s days are numbered. Their recent attempted policy’s change seems completely ignorant of the current state of their product’s “sticking power”. The users who make it look like anything is possible in Unity and who are effectively creating marketing material for Unity by crediting them as the game engine they used regardless of how much of the engine they throw away in order to get any particular AAA game completed… these critical users who are helping pull in new users are also very close to not using the product at all. Doing anything that alienates them is the marketing equivalent of a massive act of self sabotage, and I don’t think they are going to survive this. For me the writing was on the wall from the merger with the malware pile of an “ad tech” company a while back and the boneheaded comments about monetisation that were made back then… it’s just been a question of how long till it fails… and boy has the policy change and backlash accelerated things…