What do you think about the last Jim Sterling video?

Unity is already used in film, serious games, serious training and realtime simulations - to name a few things. Unfortunately, those concerns are years behind and those applications being on the board have already helped the engine grow in many ways that benefit everything that it is used for.

 

Still bothers me though, as unity creating a game engine but never using it to create an actuall game or even just a game demo, well at least for the latest version.

 

I suppose. Unity is a tool though, it works, people use it for stuff and there's no need to pin it into a corner or stunt its potential. Games are it's top market but games are just software like everything else. Unity as a tool has been fitting in several different spaces because that generality.

 

If you think about it though it does make sense. Using a game engine, at least for some stages of film production, allows film makers to alter a scene and immediately see the results of it. With traditional software you would have to wait hours, days, or even weeks depending on how significant the change was.

We've actually been making short films in game engines for years. We just tend to use different terms like "cutscene".

Unity isn't the only game engine being used for films either. Here is an example for Unreal 4.

https://www.pcgamesn.com/insurgency-sandstorm/insurgency-sandstorm-unreal-engine-4-steam

Here is an example for CryEngine.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/crytek-cryengine-film-engine,31682.html

 

Thing with game is it have additional logic behind all of that visual.
Anyway, it seems i'm using poor choice of word on my last post about unity not creating a film (sorry about that). What i mean is Unity lately pushing more film and cinematic aspect (which i don't mind), but (hope i'm wrong) seems to disregard most game aspect and put them on low priority (don't worry i'm not going to make this thread another feature request thread).
Which is why i was hoping for unity to at least creating a new game demo (at least), rather than another cinematic (why not both).

 

We have yet to reach 100k (on our unity game, the company itself makes alot more than 100k) but offcourse paid to get rid of the Free version splash. I guess most none hobby companies like myself does not want to publish on a free version

 

@rea there is no negative to Unity adding movie features as these are all used in games. All AAA games have movie features. Are you saying you prefer to do all the hard programming for timeline and camera ?

Please, help yourself



Also Unity has staff that work on cinematic stuff that will NEVER work on engine stuff. These people don't know how to do engine stuff. They were hired for specific purposes.

So there is no negative. The same staff cannot be used elsewhere. It does not slow Unity's progress.

 

You'll have to better explain what you mean by this. When Unity's license mentions entities, they are not referring to just the game itself. They're referring to the organization - the company - that is developing it. If your company is making more than $100,000 and the company is the developer then you already have reached the limit for Unity Personal.

https://unity3d.com/legal/terms-of-service/software

 

@hippocoder well i'm not saying that is bad (as in my last post) . I'm just hoping the "game" aspect also having the same treatment.
Maybe i'm just overthinking this

 

Thanks for this.. ..i have never been a youtube follower of any kind and rarely even watch fail videos which for some sick reason i love. I will watch more john smith/jim sterling. Made me chuckle a bit. Really I didn't take that as bashing unity as much as bashing lazy devs out for a buck. He even mentioned more than once some good content from unity. I watched his video from after the digital homicide lawsuit and all I can say is haaa. I will watch more

 

My company is a consultant company originally, making much more than 100k a year on that business. But our game is our first product and it makes alot less than 100k a year. Right now atleast. If I wanted to I could have created a new company to get around the 100k limit. But for me its not very professional having a splash screen telling that we are using a free version, so regardless of the 100k limit I would have paid for the Plus/Pro version, and I think im not alone.So Unity would lose alot of money on removing the splash screen for free version is my guess

 

Jims greenlight bashing videos are F***ing funny, I like the guy

 

I can't deny I've got a somewhat love / hate relationship with Unity, for every one thing it does right three other things seem half baked and sloppy which requires time / effort / skill to workaround, something a lot of beginners / flippers and lazy dev's aren't willing to do or can't.. You only have to work a couple of weeks with quite a few other engines to figure that one out..

But what it does well it does great, Unity 4.X for larger PC / Console games was atrocious and I can say that now it's been and gone / replaced with something orders of magnitude better.

So I get where some are coming from, some are way off the mark and many others just bank on reputation.. There are issues with every engine, I mean it's not specifically a game thing it's a software thing in general. Although Unreal and CryEngine can use the look at all these massive high end "AAA" games that were made card, these games have reached audiences far and wide with their engine logo spammed everywhere they could. If an indie screws up in UE then it's of course instantly their fault..

That's irrelevant of how much said AAA company had to make changes to get the engine to work how they needed it to. That's the funny thing about reputatation, it doesn't always reflect how things are in reality..

 

Why didnt jim do videos of games on google play store, or xblig. He only got as big as he did because steam was a walled garden with quality control where people were used to seeing "good games" on the platform. Now that he has so many "bad games" to choose from people will probably lose interest and wont watch his vids. I dont think unity has a problem i think he has a problem

 

There's also a decent argument that Jim's jackassery contributed to that image problem. Probably more than the actual problem itself.

People are always going to make bad games. Once the general population comes to terms with that and better curation is a priority, this image problem becomes a non-issue. Actually, it's already a non-issue, but Jim's existence as a YouTube personality basically revolves around the very things he whines about so he has to keep doing it... Heck it doesn't even make sense that he tries to nuke Unity, since his popularity - according to him - revolves around the ecosystem of crappy unity games.

 

They don't need to hand curate their store.

The recommendations system (the queue) is designed for people who want to browse games like what they play. I won't say it's perfect, but it actually works rather well. I never get games with tags I've disallowed, I almost always get games based on tags of games I play (and I've noticed that they weight it a bit based on recently played games as well), and I almost never get extremely poor quality "asset flip"-type games.

 

How is this possible if this video was published yesterday?

 

Really? Jim has published such videos over and over again. This is not his first. I guess he just needed to do another one because his last bash was forgotten. The other post included this particular video too since it was still on ongoing post.

 

Feel free to describe the problem, rather than making vague "most games on there are trash" comments. I rather explicitly described how the recommendations and the queue deal with the issue of "crap games." Do you have any argument against my statement?

 

Well reviews says nothing about the quality of a game. Take these examples from our game






Basically they say the game is good but gives it negative review anyway. But I guess Steam EA Reviews is a forum thread on its own

 

People just have problem with game they don't like, that's on gamer's lap.

The problem you never know what's good or not, when I was a kid rpg was S*** because you didn't control things directly, I was wrong, I thought inventory tetris was a nonsense, I was wrong, Graphic novel were an aberration I was wrong (thanks Christine love), that IF were a relic of the past, I was wrong (thanks emily short), etc ...

And there is the case of allowing people to grow skills on game making, community management, business dealing, production, etc ... of course you start crap, you never know who can make a hit after years of crap, many instant success in the indie space has been these scrappy dev who did nothing of note until they did (scott Cawthon).

There is real problems:
- Snobbery taken too far (when you say bad games aka boring game shouldn't have a place in x or y)
- Predatory toxic dev (which are taken care of pretty fast now).

The entire existance of indie is predicated on things considered bad games at one time, ie game that were not of AAA polish. People fought for smaller product to exist and we won and the market exploded, not only in diversity, but allowing dead genre to have striking success, and game + genre innovation have come back to a fast pace (see minecraft survival to dayZ to battleground).

Not possible with snob gating.

 

To be fair I dn't think that was even the argument: it was more like "nintendo is pirating you ignoring the fair use law, aren't they losing their moral ground on piracy? If you pirate Nintendo, it's illegal, but so do is their disregard of fair use, what give?"

 

If anyone wants to see a fair video and listen to a well-spoken person, instead of foul-mouthed "look at me, I'm on YouTube" self-absorbed type of person, I just ran into this video regarding this topic:

The guy actually has contributed to game development, and actually is significantly more qualified to discuss the topic.

To summarize the main points in the video:
1. "Bad" games are symptom of the success of Unity, rather than the quality of the game engine
2. Developers of "Bad" games are not to blame, unless they take objection to criticism.
3. Was Unity lowering the barrier a good decision by Unity?
4. He claims Unity has slippery movement and dodgy animations if using the built-in tools ,thus lowering the quality of the game. Not sure what he's referring to. Sounds more like operator-error to me
5. Unity should remove the Unity logo by default, to stop associating itself with bad games
6. They should work with developers to show the Unity engine in the best light
7. Unity should develop their own game to showcase the engine.

 

Instead of browsing "new releases" a good idea would be to rely on steam's suggestion service and discovery queue to show up things you might find interesting. Those are usually quite decent.

Also, calling people "zealots" is kinda rude.

Hey, to be honest those tell you about a problem with the game:
There's no one to play with online.

 

Bad games are from bad developers.

Developers of bad games are to blame.

Of course, unless Unity should be bad at business and go extinct.

Really scratching my head at that. Didn't really want to carry on then

Yeah I didn't bother replying because it's clear he doesn't get the Unity community. We're fair. We're also Unity's biggest critics. Or, well I try to be.

 

You know, I have had issues with the FPS controller and weird movement. Oftentimes I'll let go of the movement key and the character will move for like half or a quarter of a second longer, which is terribly imprecise. I haven't really been able to identify the cause, though I haven't spent a great deal of time looking.

 

Here is a video from Zaxtor99 about Jim's Sterling's video about Unity:

Quick summary: This video disagreed with Jim Sterling's video regarding Unity. It said bad developers should be held accountable for bad games,instead of blaming Unity and Steam.

It will be interesting to see how many other YouTubers respond to Jim Sterling's video.

 

For what? for being bad? They are bad by which authority?

 

If the game is bad, the developer is bad. Is it rocket science, mate? Look at the classics. They look terrible and are made with virtually zero resources but they're fantastic and widely heralded as classics regardless.

This has nothing to do with production values. If a game is bad, the dev is bad. And everyone can happily vote that, with their wallets.

 

They're to blame for what?

My early games weren't exactly stellar examples of the craft. Everyone starts somewhere. I know very few first games which are "good", and my own advice to starting developers is to make small and simple things, knowing as I say it that they're unlikely to be "good".

The difference, of course, is that I didn't sell my early games, and I don't advise starters to make their first games commercial, where the things being picked apart here are things on sale on Steam.

The issue is that, while I can't put my finger on it, there's some influence from somewhere in game development culture for beginners to commercialise stuff prematurely. Sure they shouldn't do it, but are they really "to blame"?

 

Uh, why are we still promoting Jim Sterling?

 

Nostalgia is a huge part of this, though. The main people interested in playing old games and who consider them highly are those who played them in their heyday, and this shows by the fact that most of them aren't on sale any more - because they can't compete against new games with new audiences.

If Metal Gear Solid were released for the first time today, as-is, how do you honestly think it'd fare?

 

For not being good at it.

It doesn't matter. Growing up as a anything means also not having a problem admitting that first creation were S***. IMO.

No, dude. Some of the classics are actually very good. Doom I/II are a good examples. While graphics didn't age too well (still looks okay), the gameplay is still stellar. And if you try to dismiss it as nostalgia, then I played many of the classics properly long after they were first released.

 

Thomas was alone. Tetris. Crossy Road. Whatever, there's a lot of butt ugly games right now, which are great. Some of the games, right now which are great aren't as good looking as a lot of 8 bit titles.

Yes and what is more, indies these days still fail even with all the power of Unity behind them, to get anything remotely as fun.

Bad devs exist folks, you read it here. This isn't about bullying people who might make something that sucks and everything to do with just being honest. Because only when you work with somerthing true can you have a hope of improving anything.

Seems like 2017 is the year where people get upset if you say anything except exactly what people want to hear. IMHO nobody cares if someone on these forums sucks at development. You get all sorts of people. You can still say "well that dev sucks at making games" and that's not actually offensive. It's just a personal observation. Usually based on the game being utterly devoid of fun I guess.

Note: I don't mention that huge budgets, visuals, audio or any of that is needed, just core fun. Prototype fun.

 

To be perfectly honest, I think it's a good thing to have people like Jim Sterling ripping into crappy games. The reason is very simple: there's no other mechanism except popular outrage that will have any success in dealing with the problem - and despite the fact that popular outrage is an extremely inefficient way to do anything at all, it's still something (and it's sometimes entertaining as well)...

Let's look at the alternatives. Who decides whether a game is bad or not? Surely there are some that according to 95% of people are absolute rubbish, but the moment you have to define 'rubbish' you might as well argue about who's puppy is 'objectively ugly'. Not only will everybody suddenly disagree if you asked them directly, but, if there was an 'objective' filter for crappy games, suddenly everyone will realise that they can make the world a warm and fuzzy place by organising protests and mobilising vast operations to 'save' crappy games from the extinction they deserve.

Not only that, but any game store that restricts games based on a quality bar - unless that's what their brand is all about - is shooting themselves in the foot by setting up a system where they have to vet games, deal with complaints, deal with social media fallouts, deal with competition from other stores that are less discerning etc etc, needlessly cornering themselves into a difficult and costly position.

So the only way things can go is for game engines to get easier to use, game stores to be more open, and people like Jim Sterling bringing to ruin (hopefully) the makers of asset flips and buggy messes. It's not a particularly efficient system, but it is, shall we say, somewhat of a balance of market forces.

 

Can't see how youtubers have benefited anyone but themselves TBH.

 

I dont think thomas was alone looks like a very "fun game", it seems like one of those flash games on armor games

 

There are counter examples, sure, but they're few and far between.

The early Doom games are also one of the few examples which I still occasionally see on store shelves. How many other classics does that hold true for? If I walk into my local game store I see many, many new titles and maybe one or two old "classics". That's pretty telling as to how competitive they are in today's market.

"Simple" and "butt ugly" aren't even remotely close to being the same thing.

 

Well, as far as I'm concerned, the video is right in that a) a lot of crappy games are being made, and b) Unity, being the easiest game engine to use and therefore being used to make these games, has an image problem.

So the argument being made, IMO, is relevant. We as game developers, especially those using the free version, might feel targeted unfairly, and that the video is propagating a myth about Unity and where the problem actually lies. But think of it from the perspective of a gamer - for them, there are a lot of crappy games going around, and they are often labelled with 'Unity'. From that perspective, the Jim Sterling video is on point, and further Sterling says that Unity has an 'image problem', not that it is necessarily the problem in itself, although someone could make a convincing argument of that as well (though I don't agree).

The video is a symptom of the current game market (both sides of it, the number of crappy games going around, and the ease of making them), and it's not a coincidence. We simply have to find a way to differentiate ourselves even more in a swamped market. If that means removing the logo then that's just what we have to do - it's not up to us to decide who can use it, and it's certainly misguided IMO to think that Sterling is doing any harm by bringing attention to the matter.

What's the alternative? Either we:

• Ignore the problem and wish people like Sterling would go away, which is just letting the bubble grow bigger;
  
• Try a 'prohibition' type solution that very probably won't work (even if everybody could agree to it which they won't).
  
• Or we try to make the problem as visible as possible to try to influence gamers individual choices, and differentiate ourselves as much as possible.

If differentiating ourselves must mean removing the logo, that's what we have to do. Unity have to decide who can use it in what circumstances, it's not up to us. There are a number of things they can do to reverse the image problem and it's up to them.

I've thought about this problem in regards to asset store kits as well (especially with the thread about whether demo scenes should be included). Anything that makes game development artificially harder is the wrong approach IMO, shooting everybody in the foot for highly dubious results. If I make a starter kit with very easy to use, very comprehensive code, maybe a great artist who can't code will use it to make a really great game, or maybe someone will upload it as-is to Steam. There's nothing I can or should do that would effectively solve the problem, the best thing is to highlight the problem, pressure stores like Steam into having good search algorithms, and make gamers more aware and discerning in their choices. As well as making my own games stand as solidly on their own feet as possible.

 

Dude, you're trying to transform "there are classics that are still great" into "There are no classics that are still great" by switching criteria from quality of the gameplay to availability of the game in stores and dismissing "games that are still great".

That's... not a very good tactic, especially when you concentrate on physical game stores. Last time I bough a physical game was at least 3 years ago. Also, this kind of trick will essentually turn everything into semantic/dictionary argument which will result in no useful information.

There are also old games that receive remakes (Icewind Dale, Planescape: Torment, Baldur's Gate, etc) and remasters.

While there's some nostalgia exists, the thing is, nostalgia cannot really withstand a simple test of replayability. Basically, an old game you played 15 years ago and loved my turn out to be quite bad if you replay it now. Which means,
IMO, If you still enjoy playing an old title now, then it is actually good, and nostalgia has very little to do with it.

 

Jim's videos are part of my weekly youtube entertainment feed, and with good reason.

There is a lot to learn from failed games.

When you are working in your own development zone, it's very easy to get stuck in your own little bubble,
and ignore what other people are doing or working on.
And I think I speak for most here, when I say that, in general, we are more interested in making games rather than playing them.

I think Jim Sterling (and Nerd3) is very important to the developer-reviewer-consumer symbiosis.
I constantly try to find videos of people playing games that are outside the public eye, and developed without the founds to get attention on it's own. And very few people are willing to try out these "small" games, unless it's on the level of Firewatch etc.

A few of these "failed" games have a genuine good idea or concept, but fails to execute in some area or other.
And there is a lot to take home from that.

 

I really don't see unity having an image problem.

Which is a hillarious statement to make.
"It's easy to move dirt with this wheelbarrow of this specific maker but neighbour used his wheelbarrow of that specific maker to lay some dirt in the middle of the road, so wheelbarrows of this specific maker now have a bad reputation!"

Moving logo from few-hour-indies to concrete releases: too late now.
What are they going to do? Ask devs, who paid to get the logo removed, to put the logo back up?
And what other solution is there? Making games harder to make in unity?

 

Unity has an image problem. This is different from whether it should have an image problem. Yes it is a question of association. Like others have said probably many gamers don't even know what it means, except that there's a reasonable chance the game that follows is going to be underwhelming.

I don't think there's anything wrong with Unity at all in this respect, it's a great tool and that's what it should be. A tool should be as easy to use as possible and that's what Unity have pursued with great success.

The question of the free/paid logo thing, like you say, is probably too late to deal with now. But people don't care about that, they care that Unity is associated with bad games, and Unity will inevitably come up in these discussions.

I think the discussion should be in general terms, about what it means for the game market to have highly approachable engines in general, and highly open stores in general. But that's not for me to decide.

 

Wouldn't this be a problem of late Steam Greenlight? Where else do these games get published? Bad games don't exist in a vacuum. Somone wants them published. And further, someone download them and played them despite seeing gameplay and screenshots on the game's page on steam.

 

To be honest, I think nobody is to blame really, except that the market has moved too fast for everybody.

Unity is a tool for developers. As such, the easier it is to make anything at all, the better for developers. There's nothing really for them to do.

Steam is a store for customers. If customers want crappy games sidelined, Steam will find ways to do that. So yes, I do think this is the point where influence is best applied. But it has to be through customers and their preferences. So highlighting the problem is really the only thing to do, to make customers aware and hopefully make them be more willing to do things like pay attention to promotional media, fund good games, and spend more for better quality.

 

That's pretty clearly not at all what I'm saying.

 

Let bad developers develop bad games, let them be criticised and maybe they improve. Let youtubers criticise bad games and praise good ones. If unity has a bad reputation because only bad games show that they are made with unity the consumer has to be better informed on the store shelf level i.e. steam. Unity could join the curator program on steam and promote the good games made with unity. Steam (and others) could do a made with unity (and other engine themed sales) sale to raise awareness of quality games and bury the really bad ones.
I think it all comes down to good/clever PR and not wether there is a logo in the game or not.

 

Seeing the quality of questions and accepted answers over at answers.unity3d.com and also here at this forum my educated guess is that 90% of games created in Unity are not made by developers at all. 80% are made by consumers (gamers) that does not know any coding at all and they buy a few assets and try to cut and paste something together (Its here were unity asset store makes 95% of its money). 10% are artists that try to make a game them self, slapping cut and paste code on their own assets. 10% are teams with developers that actually make a living at writing code, 1% of those 10% are actual good programmers

I sound bitter, I know, but I have worked 17 years as a professionell developer (Enterprise systems, not game related), the latest 8 as a System architect, and I have seen so many bad developers over the years. Its so refreshing when you meet someone that are actually good and take pride in their code, design and architecture.

 

Please tell me these are NMS reviews.

 

@AndersMalmgren

Not to discredit your what you are saying, because I know where you are coming from, and why you would say that.

But, what you are talking about is writing code and not making a game.
Yes, writing functional code is a big part of it, but still only one piece of the puzzle.
But in the end the final product is the only thing that matters.

And way to many times have I seen excellent programmers make a complete mess of basic functionality such as UIX, or intuitive user design etc.