Unity has an image problem.

[Richard BetsonParticipant]

Jim Sterling has a new video up about Unity and it’s image problem. Namely the reputation of Unity being associated with poor quality games. There is a lesson here, I’m sure.

[impixiParticipant]

I think the real problem is the lack of quality control at certain major online publishers (e.g. Steam). These days they’ll publish almost anything provided you can reach the ever-lowering *financial* bar of acceptance. “Quality control” doesn’t seem to factor into it any more.

Unity makes it ludicrously easy to make a “prototype” that beginners (or charlatans) mistakenly believe is worthy of publication. The online publishers are happy to “list” such games because they get a cut of the sale regardless of “quality”.

Consequently the gamers have to sort through the mountain of garbage. Much of it starts with the “made with Unity” logo so of course they’ll associate Unity with crap games, despite the fact an experienced developer can produce quality games with it.

[Mark SiblyKeymaster]

This is an interesting point actually – since only low budget games have to display the unity logo, unity has become (unfairly) associated with low budget games!

But I think he misses the bigger point, and that’s that unity co’s customers are not gamers but gamedevs, so it doesn’t matter too much what gamers think of unity (to unity co anyway). And gamedevs see all these games written in unity (good AND bad) and can see the tech for what it is and the wide variety of games etc. so I do think the logo is a big plus for unity co.

And the low budget association may actually be a bit of a plus for unity co in another round about way, as it gives gamedevs another reason to buy unity – to hide the fact that their games use unity!

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