The best part is painting the train with pink flowers =D

cybereality Despite the hardships, I wouldn't trade the indie dev life for anything. It is, from what I gather, the hardest and most amazing occupation ever. So unpredictable, but so rewarding, and full of skills to learn.

Change of subject, is Unity in a heap of trouble right now? I'm glad to be out of there if it is. 👀

I still liked that engine. Hopefully, the Godot Marketplace will take off and feel similar to the pride and joy of Unity, the Asset Store.

      Nerdzmasterz
      I don't know if they are in trouble, but they did just fire 4% of the company (263 employees).

      In particular, they fired the entire Gigaya team. That was a game Unity was making partly as a complete sample project for users, but also to learn better what the game developer experience with Unity is like and how they can make it better.

      Their shares are down 70% over the last year too. Apparently the big issue is a large chunk of Unity's income is from targeted mobile ads, which has been hit by Apple's recent extra privacy stuff.

        If being down 70% shares and losing 4% of a company isn't being in trouble, I don't want to know what is. 😖

        Ad blockers should totally be illegal.

          cybereality I'm not denying or arguing with that, but how do you know? I wouldn't have a clue, but that is quite a statement.

          Unity had a lot of uses, but game engines are expensive. I always thought their profit came from that massive asset store, not the ads.

              Nerdzmasterz Ad blockers should totally be illegal.

              👎️
              Advertising should be prohibited in any form.

                Nerdzmasterz

                I'm not denying or arguing with that, but how do you know? I wouldn't have a clue, but that is quite a statement.

                The numbers are all public.
                Unity's net income:
                2019 : $-273million
                2020 : $-282million
                2021 : $-533million
                2022 : $-603million

                They have over a billion per year in revenue, but spend more than that (such as their purchase of part of Peter Jackson's Weta vfx company for $1.6billion last year)

                    Kojack They mainly do that to escape paying taxes. They are basically a successful company. At some point they will have to start showing a profit. As far as being down 70 percent this year, that's not much different than most tech companies. It's a very bad year. Worst in over a decade for drop in stock prices.

                        fire7side They are basically a successful company.

                        A successful company makes money. Or at least provides some public service that is beneficial to society in some other way. Unity, it could be argued, opened up game development to indies, so they were successful there. However, if you are consistently losing hundreds of millions of dollars each year, that's not a success.

                            I wonder how Godot is doing, though, as it relies on donations, it seems? It's partly why I liked the Godot Marketplace when I saw it as it was "supposed" to give a percentage to the engine.

                            Godot is fine, because they do not rely on making profit. Sure, they do need donations to keep full time staff, but most of the contributors are volunteers, that donate their time for free.

                            cybereality Virtually every company starts out in debt. Unity is a relatively new company. They have decent revenues, but all the money gets invested which is typical for a growth company.
                            "Unity has published its financial results for the first quarter of 2022, and reported a 36% uptick in revenue year-on-year, reaching $320.1 million. The company's Create Solutions segment, which includes its game engine, particularly grew during Q1 2022, with revenue up 65% to $116.4 million.May 11, 2022"

                              fire7side They mainly do that to escape paying taxes. They are basically a successful company. At some point they will have to start showing a profit. As far as being down 70 percent this year, that's not much different than most tech companies. It's a very bad year. Worst in over a decade for drop in stock prices.

                              Aye, this is the correct assessment, for companies like this they operate in heavy losses while they perceive themselves to still be in their growth phase. Which they will remain in until their investors finally give them a hard kick to finally start producing them their profits(edit: by that I mean the dividends). In other words, if such a kick hasn't happened yet and their investors are still bankrolling them then it must be that their investors still agree with the assessment that they have growth potential.

                                Unity came out on June 6, 2005. So that is over 17 years ago. If their business model isn't sustainable now, it will never be. I mean, how many game developers are there in the world, and how many of them are already using Unity? The market is pretty much saturated at this point. The only thing they can do is increase their revenue stream without losing users, which means increasing the cost of the engine significantly, or doing a revshare like Unreal, or providing additional services that developers pay for (but they have already done this, and it hasn't made money). So I doubt they will ever turn a profit. At some point the investors will say enough, and Unity will raise the prices, and then everyone leaves for Unreal or Godot or whatever.

                                  And yes, I think the whole tech industry is a bubble and these "valuations" are imaginary.

                                  I mostly have respect for it, though it's not very good for newbie devs who are just trying to make a player jump. Perhaps they've gotten better in the teaching department, but I learned most of my stuff from when they offered a really expensive set of courses for free due to Covid. Honestly, it did not have to be so expensive, everything in there seemed like more basic aspects- no inventory systems or anything, just basics with physics, game designing, and game mathematics. I learned as much stuff in as I felt I needed to get started, then left before it got expensive again. Awful? Maybe, but otherwise I would've still been struggling and given no help- if it wasn't for the academy. Heck, that was a lifesaver, until Unity had some major problems. Now I wish I spent my years studying elsewhere.

                                  I'm hoping the switch from Unity to Godot is smooth, as I have hit a few speed bumps. I'm still looking at very basic stuff and working on fully mastering them, but in Unity, I was already researching inventory systems, XP and skill systems, advanced enemy AI... I've lost a lot by making the switch, but hopefully it's for the better.

                                  It's sort of why I stress about open world concepts- a lot of my game worlds would've been considered as such, s it was so easy! Unity just automatically set it up for the user. It deactivated things that were not within a given range.

                                  cybereality Unity came out on June 6, 2005. So that is over 17 years ago.

                                  But they only went public in September 18, 2020.

                                  cybereality At some point the investors will say enough, and Unity will raise the prices, and then everyone leaves for Unreal or Godot or whatever.

                                  Perhaps. But that's speculation.

                                        Megalomaniak Perhaps. But that's speculation.

                                        Correct. I don't have a crystal ball. But it seems like a reasonable guess to me.