Unity is laying off hundreds of employees
In 2019 Unity reached out to me for feedback after I cancelled my subscription. I wrote them a pretty long and detailed email on how to save the company. But, since most of things I suggested never happened they ignored it I guess. Though, they did sort of fix integrating a bit and they closed unity connect. However, they never replaced unity connect with something else which is a problem.<p>My email response: 
&quot;1. I felt that throughout my subscription that there was a lot of &quot;do it yourself&quot; and &quot;here&#x27;s a video.&quot; Some of that is fine, but there&#x27;s a point at which it all feels a little money-grabby. You&#x27;ve paid for the subscription! Now pay for some extra lessons, assets, etc.<p>I would recommend extending personal assistance, e.g. assigning someone to be a studio&#x27;s success guide that sticks around from beginning to end.<p>Also provide a job market similar to fiverr for commissioning logo, concept, 3d artists, musicians, sound effect, software engineers, etc. If you can&#x27;t swing that maybe partner with sites like upwork or fiverr that can handle it. I&#x27;d actually recommend the fiverr model for art and content, it&#x27;s more affordable in the long run. Upwork&#x27;s model is better for developers or writers, though. Unity connect felt like walking through a dark alley in a 3rd world country waiting to be mugged.<p>You provided me with plenty of customer loyalty specialists to bother me to resubscribe after the project failed, but didn&#x27;t support my efforts when I needed it most. The outcome could have been different if there was a support structure along the way that assisted in the different aspects of building a successful game company and product. That just wasn&#x27;t there.<p>2. Funding is hard to acquire.<p>Why doesn&#x27;t unity have it&#x27;s own kickstarter&#x2F;indiegogo&#x2F;gofundme&#x2F;fig system? You&#x27;re a well known company, many people use your engine, and the public at large knows about it. Why isn&#x27;t there an effort to push to help fund those using your engine to accomplish something? At the very least partner with one of those sites or help guide your customers to acquire that type of crowd funding. Epic is doing this with a $10mil grant.<p>And, I don&#x27;t just mean making a video saying, &quot;If you had funding, this is how you&#x27;d probably get it.&quot; Either provide assistants or create a webpage or app that helps guide the creation of a game design document, crowd funding pitch, provides a timeline for milestones of where your company should be along the way to hit their targets, production goals, provide marketing expertise, etc.<p>3. The community in unity connect itself is rather toxic; filled with naysayers, pessimists, and scammers.<p>You need to revamp unity connect entirely. It is barely salvageable as is.<p>4. The forums were good.<p>This was one area I felt shined.<p>5. Sometimes assets would try to release a new update and your store would block them for months. Other times assets would get deprecated or removed that still had life in them. The store also lags very badly, logs you out randomly, and is difficult to search.<p>Fix the store. And, make things more convenient for asset creators.<p>6. Planning and staying on track is also very difficult.<p>I&#x27;d also recommend providing a system similar to Notion, Hacknplan, and Slack integrated into your own site for gamedevs to build, design, document, and track content and progress. Don&#x27;t overcharge for this. Also, importantly, provide a way for them to export their data.
If you can&#x27;t swing that yourselves, again partner with someone who already has the infrastructure.<p>7. Your company felt very distant; like it exists simply to consume money and doesn&#x27;t care if the customer succeeds or not.<p>Make your customers feel like you&#x27;re with them in their struggle. Don&#x27;t wait until they cancel to suddenly be concerned.<p>8. Time to iterate is so slow.<p>When I hit play the game should launch and simulate immediately, there&#x27;s no excuse for the extremely long load times. Unreal shines here in comparison. This really slows down development.<p>I would suggest working on a rewrite of the editor that allows real-time runtime editing of content, scripts, prefabs, scenery, etc where everything can be saved &#x2F; persisted without having to click Stop. In other words, you&#x27;re ALWAYS running by default. This is how HeroEngine works for example, and it&#x27;s really cool to be able to create an entire world WHILE the game is running. And, you can play it multiplayer with the other developers and artists while building the world and see collaboratively the pieces come together in real-time. While HeroEngine might not be one of your big competitors, it&#x27;s worth looking at how they pulled that particular feature off.<p>There are probably more things that could have helped that I can&#x27;t think of off the top of my head.<p>Hope that helps.&quot;<p>Addendum: It is also worth noting that Nvidia Omniverse allows the real-time editing that I recommended.