I've seen this from both the developer and consumer side of things. The legacy design of Unity encouraged truly terrible code designs which translate into sub-optimal performance on modern hardware.
Performance and tooling have historically driven game engine licensing. There's a reason why Unity has a noticeable lack of presence in so-called triple-a gaming. Believe me, if performance was "pretty good" and tooling was "excellent" then every major studio would be using Unity. Instead, they're overwhelming using Unreal or they're using their franchise engine that they've built over 1 or 2 decades similar to id Software whose engines used to be the direct Unreal competitor.
As a consumer, I cringe when I run game that is "powered by Unity". They nearly always feature extremely slow loading and sub-optimal framerate on top tier hardware. In contrast, an id or Unreal engine game will run at 4k 60fps while looking beautiful.
On another note, Unity's market has always seemed to be indie and double-a studios. I would expect a recession to cause many who would have "taken a year off to make a game" to change their minds as investments or savings drawdown.
They may not qualify as AAA, but Hearthstone, League of Legends: Wild Rift, Kerbal Space Program, Cuphead, Gwent, Genshin Impact, ReCore, Ori 1 and 2, Hollow Knight, Fall Guys, Pillars of Eternity, Call of Duty Mobile, Subnautica, Firewatch, and Valheim are pretty big games; some indie hits but many are produced by major studios.
For one thing, I think the "powered by Unity" branding is a problem, because you only see it on games that couldn't afford to actually pay for Unity and therefore have a larger chance of being poorly polished.
The "powered by Unity" is only required by less expensive Unity subscriptions so it's boarder line anti-branding. People think Unity sucks because only low budget games advertise that they're made with Unity.
It is not limited to games that use free versions of the engine. I can't think of a unity game aside from the couple of mostly 2d games like Ori and Cuphead that weren't crappy.
I meant that they ran like crap. Didn't want ti say that they were bad games, some of my favorite games are made in unity(ksp), but I really wish they weren't.
A lot of studios are starting to pick up Unity. It’s not that Unity can’t make AAA games, it’s that most of the workforce is used to C++ and Unreal style engines. Most A and AA games are being made with Unity nowadays. Unity started getting popular in mobile dev where it’s still king and now those devs are slowly moving on to bigger better games.
Performance and tooling have historically driven game engine licensing. There's a reason why Unity has a noticeable lack of presence in so-called triple-a gaming. Believe me, if performance was "pretty good" and tooling was "excellent" then every major studio would be using Unity. Instead, they're overwhelming using Unreal or they're using their franchise engine that they've built over 1 or 2 decades similar to id Software whose engines used to be the direct Unreal competitor.
As a consumer, I cringe when I run game that is "powered by Unity". They nearly always feature extremely slow loading and sub-optimal framerate on top tier hardware. In contrast, an id or Unreal engine game will run at 4k 60fps while looking beautiful.
On another note, Unity's market has always seemed to be indie and double-a studios. I would expect a recession to cause many who would have "taken a year off to make a game" to change their minds as investments or savings drawdown.