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An Interview with Unity CEO Matthew Bromberg About Turnarounds

24 points

by feross

9 days ago

| past

| 3 comments

| stratechery.com

| HN

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Macha

1 hour ago

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> What’s so fascinating is you mentioned Knights of the Old Republic, and I think anyone who knows about that game thinks about it as one of the great successes in gaming, and it’s like that whole first period where it’s a total failure is just totally gone from memory.

I think the interviewer has mixed up knights of the old republic (KOTOR - the single player RPG) and Star Wars the old republic (SWTOR - the mmorpg in the same setting). SWTOR was “saved” in the sense that it went from a giant failure to a break even MMO. Which is not to diminish the work the interviewee and others put in to get there, but I’m not sure I’d call SWTOR “one of the great successes in gaming” (that would be KOTOR)

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NSUserDefaults

1 hour ago

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No mention of Godot? It seems to be slowly starting to eat their lunch. No mention of the fragmented rendering backends? Oh, but they do talk about basketball. Why would a CEO care about the little things… Unity is going to be fine.

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OsrsNeedsf2P

1 hour ago

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As an ex-Unity dev, it's clear Unreal crushes Unity on the "AAA" vibe side, and Godot marches forward on the "indie" vibe side. The writing was on the wall - I personally switched to Godot and couldn't be happier. Tools have new versions before being deprecated, bugs get fixed (and fast!), and there's no looming threat of Unity coming down and squeezing more money out of our products

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lambdaone

1 hour ago

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Unity is absolutely being squeezed between the two. I can't really see how it can compete with Godot at the low end; it's hard to compete with free, and most of the goodness in low end games is the gameplay logic, not graphics or animation. And Godot can only get better; look at how Blender ate the CGI tools market. This leaves Unity having to either compete with Unreal at the high end - a very high bar - or somehow finding a new business model. The switcheroo they tried to pull on their customer base can best be viewed in that light.

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jsheard

1 hour ago

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Godot isn't quite free if you want to release on consoles since those platforms are only supported by commercial forks, but I'm sure going down that route is still a hell of a lot cheaper than licensing Unity.

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kranke155

1 hour ago

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Yep it seems to be end of the line for Unity tbh.

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64718283661

1 hour ago

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Can you list even a single widely popular Godot game? Meanwhile, like half of the steam top 50, 100, 200, etc is unity.

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jsheard

57 minutes ago

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It's a bit of a weird edge-case, but the very popular Battlefield 6 is partially a Godot game. It's an odd hybrid of a proprietary in-house engine with Godot grafted onto it, which serves as a public-facing SDK for players to build their own content. I know that's not exactly what you meant but it is an interesting application in a major AAA title.

https://gamefromscratch.com/battlefield-6-using-godot-game-e...

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whicks

15 minutes ago

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Brotato: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brotato

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krige

1 hour ago

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Cruelty Squad. Also the other assertion seems rather hyperbolic. Steam top50/100 is either unreal or proprietary engines...

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64718283661

53 minutes ago

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Maybe a bit of an exaggeration. But I think at least 30%. Unreal is popular too. Unity seems to be more popular for indie/coop/single player/certain art styles. There seems to be many more unity games overall, but a lot of them are very small.

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SSLy

52 minutes ago

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Battlefield 6 of all things includes Godot as core of the Portal map-building. Casette Beasts is what Pokemon wishes it was. Upcoming Planetenverteidigungskanonenkommandant looks gorgeous from the previews.

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danbolt

1 hour ago

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I don’t know if I could list something that matches say Cuphead or Silksong, but I do think that Godot is currently on a Clayton Christiansen-style worse-is-better ascent right now.

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the_af

40 minutes ago

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Is it me or is this interview incredibly boring? Lots of words that say very little.

Also: Zynga (and its clones, like Vostu) used to be the cancer of gaming, rightly reviled by people like Jonathan Blow and Ian Bogost. From a predatory business angle maybe it was interesting to discuss, much like one would discuss the life of Jordan Belfort. Is Zynga still alive? That's one company that didn't deserve resuscitation.

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ido

14 minutes ago

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The guy in the article is the one that resuscitated it! It's doing pretty well with mobile casino games these days.