Unity is a game development engine that has grown in popularity since launching in 2005 and become a games industry standard. Unity’s strengths are the reason for its widespread adoption, and the engine has powered the largest percentage of new games released every year for the past decade, including over 50% of new Steam games released last year and 70% of the global top 1000 mobile games. Despite Unity’s success, competitors like Unreal still dominate the AAA industry, while Godot is growing in popularity among indie developers and hobbyists. Read on to learn about the aspects of Unity that make it worth considering, as well as the problems it faces.
Is Unity a good engine?
Unity isn’t a good engine on a technical level due to performance issues and design choices that make it less reliable than the major alternatives. Unity does have strengths in the form of extensive community support resources, easy prototyping tools, and versatile game design features, however. The Unity asset store provides ready-made assets and tools for game designers and artists, while the Unity community itself is well-established, making finding help easy. Unity’s ease of use through visual scripting and C# development allows even new game developers to use it for prototyping. Versatile features like Unity’s graphics capabilities and support for cross-platform development let game designers create different types of games that are easy to port. If your purpose for using Unity is learning or teaching, or you want to develop quickly on a budget while capitalizing on Unity’s existing community support and resources, I recommend it.
Unity’s asset store is extensive, created to support developers and artists through providing assets, plugins, and other ready-made tools for the Unity engine. The Unity asset store saves game designers time and effort – something small teams and solo devs in particular are concerned with. The resources available at the asset store are one of the main pulls of Unity, both for new developers who want to dive straight into game-making and for smaller studios who prefer to move fast and avoid reinventing the wheel. Many of the assets in Unity’s asset store come directly from the community.
The Unity community is well-established, making it easy to find support online when struggling. The Unity forums are a great place for asking for help, and you will find Unity users in every game dev forum due to the engine’s popularity with both industry and hobbyist game developers. Community support for Unity extends to code repositories and plenty of beginner-to-advanced tutorials on Unity online, such as the Brackeys beginner game development courses on YouTube. You’ll also find Unity developers at game jams and game development meetups, due to the engine’s industry dominance, versatility, and utility in prototyping. One of the reasons for Unity’s widespread adoption and the growth of its community is the engine’s low barrier to entry.
The Unity engine is considered easy to use, including for new game developers. Visual scripting lets users map game logic through a graph system that shows visual results, rather than getting stuck on complex programming. Unity’s inspector and scene views also allow users to modify game objects and add behaviors, while seeing visual feedback of the object in the scene. Another feature of Unity that makes it easy to use is having C# as its primary language, which is far more accessible to beginners than Unreal’s C++. As a result, Unity also avoids by default the near-inevitable null pointer exceptions Unreal brings to the table. Besides built-in resources, another thing that adds to Unity’s ease of use is its asset store.
Easy prototyping is a strength of Unity. Features like drag-and-drop visual scripting not only allow designers to customize game components easily but provide instant visual feedback on the game’s layout, speeding up iterations. Unity’s Play Mode lets designers demo the full gameplay in the engine itself or run tests. This provides instant feedback for quick bug-fixing and configuration tweaking. Additional visual features of Unity that give immediate feedback to speed up iteration are its powerful graphics tools.
The Unity engine’s graphics capabilities allow developers to create both 2D and 3D games. Unity has powerful tools that visualize changes in real time, like ray tracing for reflections, an animator for different character states, and graphs for customizing shaders. In terms of rendering, Unity supports complex graphics and lets game designers automate the process through its Scriptable Render Pipeline (SRP). SRP lets game designers add custom specifications, as well as including pre-built options like its Universal Render Pipeline (URP) and High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP). These presets provide platform-specific optimizations, making cross-platform development easier.
Support for cross-platform development is one reason for Unity’s prevalence in the industry, as the engine is able to port to mobile and VR devices, consoles like Xbox, PS, and Switch, and even the web through WebGL. Portability makes Unity ideal for low-spec devices like mobile phones or older platforms, hence its strong presence in the mobile game market. Unity’s APIs are quite consistent between platforms, reducing the need for code changes when porting to a new device.
What are the common problems with the Unity engine?
Common problems with the Unity engine are design factors that impact the engine’s usability, struggles with performance issues, and the tiered pricing model. Despite Unity’s overall user-friendliness, the engine’s design choices and limitations still affect usability in significant areas. Unity’s stability and performance issues are disruptive when it comes to rapid prototyping, one of its major purposes. Additional performance-affecting factors are unoptimized assets from Unity’s asset store and the system requirements of the engine itself. Unity’s pricing, which puts a paywall behind features like console deployment, is also a consideration for indie devs and small-budget studios.
Design choices and limitations within Unity undermine aspects of the engine’s usability, despite the Unity engine being considered user-friendly overall. Unreal and Godot, Unity’s main competitors, beat Unity’s usability in significant areas. Unreal’s equivalent of visual scripting, Blueprints, makes the process easier for even non-developers by being flexible and powerful enough to add complex game logic without coding. Unity’s interface, too, is complex and bloated when compared to the newer Godot engine’s, with Godot being considered simpler to work with overall. Although Godot is lightweight by comparison, not all of Unity’s complexities are able to be excused by having more features. First, Unity’s component-based architecture is also more complex than Godot’s node-based one. C# is easier for beginners than Unreal’s C++, but still harder to grasp than Godot’s Python-like GDScript. Finally, Unity’s ability to demo games in-editor isn’t unique: Unreal has this feature, and Godot even adds an option to play scenes in isolation. Godot’s default of using a separate process and window for play mode is also beginner-safe, as it reduces the risk of games crashing the engine itself.
In terms of stability and performance, Unity is more prone to crashes than a lighter engine like Godot, as well as taking longer to get back up and running afterwards. Besides having heavier system requirements, Unity’s performance problems stem in part due to inefficient processes. An example is treating 2D environments as a modified 3D environment, compared to Godot’s dedicated 2D engine. When it comes to the types of large, complex projects that Godot isn’t able to compete with, Unity is outperformed by Unreal. Unity suffers bottlenecks that Unreal doesn’t, due to Unreal having more integrated tooling and less reliance on external dependencies. Unreal’s use of C++ also makes it more native than Unity, allowing for low-level control and optimization. In addition, the Unreal engine lets game developers access its code without the paywall that Unity has. As a result, Unity performance issues often require users to create workarounds. Performance issues and interruptions that require workarounds slow down Unity’s ability to iterate.
While Unity is used for rapid prototyping, it’s outpaced by the Godot engine in situations where Unity’s 3D engine and specialized tooling aren’t required. Godot’s use for rapid game development is shown through increased adoption in events like the GMTK Game Jam, where Godot made up 37% of developed games in 2024. Godot offers new features that speed up iterations, like letting users play scenes in isolation for more precise bug-fixing. Godot also saves design time through its global theme styling feature and a more intuitive interface that is faster to navigate. Godot’s dedicated 2D engine, outshining Unity’s unoptimized 2D processes, adds to its prototyping use cases. In more general performance, Godot is faster to load, run, and port than Unity, due to being lightweight and able to run on lower spec machines. An additional problem that impacts rapid prototyping on Unity relates to its asset store.
Unity’s asset store, while useful for finding ready-made assets and tooling, is unreliable due to a lack of quality control. Compatibility is a notable issue, caused by Unity’s frequent engine updates making assets outdated. Another problem is that game designers have limited control over tools and assets. Game designers run the risk of poorly-optimized assets and tools that aren’t fixable without access to the source code. As a result, these assets impact the performance of Unity games that use them, as well as adding to the size of Unity game files and dependencies.
Unity’s system requirements are intensive, meaning low-end machines will struggle or fail to run the engine. Although on the surface the Unity editor occupies only 5 to 8 gigs in space, both the engine files and the files of Unity-developed game projects are known to grow significantly due to dependencies. Modules in Unity are able to reach several gigs in size, while the cache and package manager is also able to use 10s of gigs. By comparison, the Godot editor occupies only 40 megabytes. Even combined with all of its documentation, cache files, and uncompressed export templates, Godot is usually under 500 MB in total. Besides Unity’s own files, game designers must consider the size of game assets, which are also able to occupy 10s of gigs, as well as other game files. Overall, Unity’s system requirements are intensive, with Unity’s official site recommending using a 512 GB or 1 TB SSD, which makes hardware an additional cost factor for Unity.
Unity’s pricing isn’t trivial if you’re an indie dev or a small-budget studio trying to keep costs low, as Unity Personal, the free tier, is limited to $200K in revenue. Developers earning beyond Unity’s revenue threshold will be stuck paying $2200 per year for Unity Pro. Features that require a Unity Pro subscription are listed below.
- Deploying to game consoles
- Creating 3D spatial apps for the Apple Vision Pro
- Using the Havok Physics engine
- Unity’s Cloud Diagnostics tools
- Integration with Unity’s collaboration tools
- Priority customer service
