Indie developer blames game journalists for widespread Unity Engine hate

[Infinitron]

This Twitter thread has got it all:

 

[Roguey]

I was neutral on the Unity engine until I saw for myself how terrible it could be again and again and again from multiple developers.

 

[Tacgnol]

If they don't want to be called shit all the time, they should make a better engine.

 

[Infinitron]

This guy is being an overbearing academic commissar, but the issue he raises is a real one.

I think that in the era of general purpose middleware, it would be more useful to talk about "codebase" or "technology" (for lack of a better term) rather than engine.

That Pillars of Eternity and Cities: Skylines both use the same engine tells you nothing. That Pillars of Eternity and Tyranny both use the same codebase tells you a lot.

In the past, engine and codebase tended to be practically synonymous, and this is probably the real source of the confusion.

 

[Tacgnol]

There seems to be common issues that plague Unity games (cross genre) though.

Massive loading times for example seems to be a very common issue.

 

[Mynon]

It remains a first choice for most indie devs, and they remain pretty defensive about it. So, from the POV of average developer, it obviously isn't at all bad.

 

[Bester]

"This guy is an oligarch and he comes from Moscow. Therefore all people who live in Moscow are oligarchs". I can't believe so many people fall to this fallacy with Unity.

I was telling you all to stop bashing Unity 3 years ago and everyone was laughing, and we had huge threads and I was called a retard by so many here. And now it starts to dawn on you? Fucking finally.

 

[I ASK INANE QUESTIONS]

I was neutral on the Unity engine until I saw for myself how terrible it could be again and again and again from multiple developers.

Protip: when it works well, you don't notice it's Unity.
Always blame developers, not the engine.

t.developer

 

[RatTower]

He ain't wrong wrt to people not having a clue about the engines or their impact on the end product.
Unless you are really making something grand like Star Citizen (which i believe uses the 64 bit precision of the cryengine to place objects in a vast scene or something along those lines) the technical details most people go on about are rather miniscule at this point.

Unity got its reputation largely because of its availability to people who don't know how to use it properly.

It's a bit like with Blender, when they asked the developers whether you could make a Pixar Studio movie with that tool. And they pretty much answered "Yes, if you give it to Pixar Studio".
It's basically the same with Unity. There are certainly shortcomings to the engine (like with anything ever), but the quality of the concrete end product is mostly determined by the competence of its maker.

 

[Roguey]

Protip: when it works well, you don't notice it's Unity.
Always blame developers, not the engine.

t.developer

Looking at a list of games to see if I've ever played any that didn't have Unity Problems and nope.

 

[Scroo]

Every unity game heats my cpu up like an oven, even if it's just some stupid idle game so I dunno I came to the conclusion that unity is p shit all by myself :D

 

[Bester]

Every unity game heats my cpu up like an oven, even if it's just some stupid idle game so I dunno I came to the conclusion that unity is p shit all by myself :D

If a software is capable of overheating your CPU/GPU, that is problem with your ventilation, not with the software.

 

[felipepepe]

Shit like Wasteland 2 give Unity a bad name... the game looks and plays terribly, and the console ports are unplayable.

It's all InXile's fault, of course, but they'll never admit it and come with talk like "now Unity has been updated, we'll fix stuff...". THEY shift blame towards the engine.

 

[Scroo]

Every unity game heats my cpu up like an oven, even if it's just some stupid idle game so I dunno I came to the conclusion that unity is p shit all by myself :D

If a software is capable of overheating your CPU/GPU, that is problem with your ventilation, not with the software.

I know and I bought a new cpu fan 2 years ago, I just am too lazy to build it in so I rather blame Unity

But to be fair it really only happens with Unity so yeah.

 

[I ASK INANE QUESTIONS]

Looking at a list of games to see if I've ever played any that didn't have Unity Problems and nope.

What, even PoE? Don't think it had any problems other than load times.

 

[CyberWhale]

"I was telling you all to stop bashing Unity 3 years ago and everyone was laughing, and we had huge threads and I was called a retard by so many here. And now it starts to dawn on you? Fucking finally.

What the fuck are you mumbling about? We are going to bash and laugh at it in future as well, because it's mostly a shit engine. Fuck Unity.
The more developers switch from that piece of shit to Unreal the better.

 

[Tacgnol]

load times

This seems to be a particularly prevalent problem in Unity games.

 

[barker_s]

This seems to be a particularly prevalent problem in Unity games.

And I'm pretty sure that's still the game's in question problem rather than specific engine problem. Let's be serious for a moment - you guys are still stuck in a fallacy that the Unity games you played loaded slowly, therefore all Unity games must be like this. The thing is, for each Unity game you bring as an example, I can probably name three that do not have this problem. Long loading times were always a thing in gaming, regardless of the engine.

 

[I ASK INANE QUESTIONS]

The more developers switch from that piece of shit to Unreal the better.

And as soon as all these people switch to Unreal, the same thing will happen to Unreal.
You'll get games made entirely in blueprints by people with no programming knowledge whatsoever, with horrible optimization(lol what's lods), with shaders written with at least 250+ instructions, all made with terrible asset store models.
They'll look horrible, they'll feel like horrible floaty bullshit, and they'll roast your CPU, but hey, at least they'll be made in a superior engine. What a fucking relief. Surely this means gaming is saved.

And the best part? It's already happening.

 

[CyberWhale]

The more developers switch from that piece of shit to Unreal the better.

And as soon as all these people switch to Unreal, the same thing will happen to Unreal.

Except it won't. I still haven't played an Unreal-based game that caused such strained on my PC. Not to mention that most of them looked a lot better than their Unity counterparts.

 

[Fedora Master]

Protip: when it works well, you don't notice it's Unity.
Always blame developers, not the engine.

t.developer

Looking at a list of games to see if I've ever played any that didn't have Unity Problems and nope.

Looking at the list on Wikipedia mainly tells me that Unity is used for phone game shovelware apparently.
It's almost as big a warning sign as Denuvo.

 

[I ASK INANE QUESTIONS]

Except it won't. I still haven't played an Unreal-based game that caused such strained on my PC. Not to mention that most of them looked a lot better than their Unity counterparts.

I still haven't played an Unreal-based game

Ark: Survival Evolved, Squad, Hatred, Daylight are all well known for horrible performance, bad netcode, and awful loadtimes.
Ark is flagship game for UE, Squad is a midrange title, Hatred is indie and Daylight is, speaking charitably, a launch title. A broad range of games, all with the same problems - and they're all built on the Unreal Engine.
Guess it must be the engine's fault.

 

[Dexter]

Except it won't. I still haven't played an Unreal-based game that caused such strained on my PC. Not to mention that most of them looked a lot better than their Unity counterparts.

I still haven't played an Unreal-based game

Ark: Survival Evolved, Squad, Hatred, Daylight are all well known for horrible performance, bad netcode, and awful loadtimes.
Ark is flagship game for UE, Squad is a midrange title, Hatred is indie and Daylight is, speaking charitably, a launch title. A broad range of games, all with the same problems - and they're all built on the Unreal Engine.
Guess it must be the engine's fault.

It's a lot easier to build impressive (both good looking and well performing) scenes using Unreal Engine than Unity and Unity notoriously has performance problems in even very simplistic scenes, with a global light source, a few moving objects and a bit of decoration, it's also known for things like overheating phones.

That some very experienced developers might rewrite enough code to make it look and perform like an entirely different engine and are able to optimize properly doesn't tell you as much about Unity, just like a few developers being able to screw up Unreal games doesn't tell you as much about Unreal. For instance, ever wonder why there are no popular Multiplayer FPS or even MMO titles based on Unity, if it's so performant and great to work with? This thread is talking about "Indie developers" specifically, think your "average" Indie game experience, they will likely not rewrite graphical pipeline, net code, instances etc. but use basic features to design their games. It's also generally a lot easier to get into and use Unity than Unreal or CryEngine, so the expectation that something is likely Shovelware is generally true and not unsubstantiated.

tl;dr "Indie dev" in OP is a moron, likely a part of the "muh Indie pixel game, games are teh art" crew that barely have any idea what they are talking about, and he's specifically calling for game publications to deliberately inform game consumers less in favor of personal benefit to himself.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Long loading times were always a thing in gaming, regardless of the engine.

First we need to know what is determined to be an acceptable loading time before we start using the word "long".

I come from a time where 5-10 minutes to load a game was not only normal, but acceptable. I've also seen the same game loaded up from disk in 30 seconds. I don't mind 30 seconds myself, especially if I know that the game is jam-packed with content, but obviously tastes will differ.

Second, your statement is just wrong. Cartridge games, for example load up in an instant, you can be up and playing many cartridge games within 10 seconds from turning on the computer.

So, past examples in gaming history have shown us that games can load up in anything as short as a second, up to 10-12 minutes in extreme cases, with the average somewhere around 30-60 seconds. This was on small computers, obsolete "junk" by today's standards. Today's computers are literally millions of times faster and more powerful... yet far too often they seem to be unable to keep their loading times under 60 seconds when it comes to modern-day games, even when they're just modern-day upgrades of basic games like Tetris or Bomberman.

Strange, don't you agree?

So where's the problem?

The problem lies in bloat. It's everywhere. Because the technological limitations that plagued computers for decades are all but eliminated, one would think that now we would see all those resources put to good use.

No. Developers code bloated code, because they're lazy. And in the case of the Unity engine it's lazy and incompetent developers building a game engine using bloated code, and then selling it as a development tool. And then more lazy and incompetent developers buy that dev tool and write more bloated code, and then have to spend months in a feeble attempt to optimize their code once they realize that:

# Any console that tries to run their game melts into a puddle of slag.
# Any high-end PC has problems running the game, even on the lowest graphical settings.
# They're spending the equivalent of 20 tons of concrete, 10 tons of wood, 5 tons of metal and half an ocean of water - just to realize that they've reinvented the wheel.
# It's not up to them to fix the problems they're encountering, but to that other group of lazy, incompetent coders that built the Unity engine in the first place.

And before anyone says it, this also applies to other "game engines" of today, especially those being sold as such. Due to Unreal's higher bar of entry you don't see as much incompetence, but it's still there.

If a game made in today's technological environment was made with the same mentality that games were made 25-30 years ago, we'd be seeing something spectacular. Actually, I do believe there's someone doing just that. Some game called Grimoire, you may have heard of it. And from that example we can see why developers prefer to be quick and sloppy about their work; they want to be paid now, not 20 years down the line.

And it's because the Unity engine sells (and games made with the Unity engine sell) that the Unity devs don't see a reason to fix their engine. The only way gamers have found to actually make the Unity devs see the error of their ways, is to boycott buy Unity games. Hence the opposition to Unity. It's having an effect, but it's not leading to any changes... yet.

Which makes that dev Twitter rant sound so retarded: He's not only blaming the wrong guy, he doesn't realize that he's to blame as well. And if he fails Logic 101 so easily, what else is he failing?

 

[Vorark]

wants to know: Is Unity the new Gamebryo?

Anyway, I only played a few Unity-powered games:

Shadowrun series -> weird stutters, long load times. Not so much in the first one, but DF and HK could get pretty bad.
Pillars -> long load times. Read it got better in one of the patch notes, no idea if it's true.