TDC #08: 13 Years Inside Unity with Mike Geig

Yuri Sokolov (00:00)
So after speaking with a lot of people from different perspectives, occupations, and whatnot, we're kind of back to to our bread and butter, unity. Yeah,

Amit Netanel (00:11)
Yeah, back to basics. Back to basics.

Yuri Sokolov (00:13)
unity. And we've invited Mike Geig, Mike is a principal developer advocate at Unity.

Amit Netanel (00:22)
Yeah, so he's been working there for thirteen years, which is awesome because first of all, when you say unity, you don't imagine someone has worked there for thirteen years and yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (00:33)
You don't imagine that it's been around for thirteen years, right? But but it's it's also close to twenty years, right? Unity is is

Amit Netanel (00:40)
Yeah, it's really really matured. And since he's he's been there for so many years, he has lots of perspective about how the company has changed. And we talked about this about this at length, right? what's the current company's strategy, what they're doing. Yuri challenged him quite a bit about recent things that are happening and

Yuri Sokolov (01:03)
Yeah, during this conversation we've been able to both talk about the good sides of Unity, the the things that we consider good sides, but also talk about some criticism, some things that we don't like or kind of afraid of. We've spoke about AI naturally, we've spoke about Godot and how a lot of Indie developers migrating to Godot. We spoke about many things happening in Unity, like dots, HDRP, and Unity 7, and Core CLR, and whatnot. And if you're into Unity development, I think you'll find a lot of interesting stuff in this episode. So take a listen.

Yuri Sokolov (01:57)
So it's it's about about time we'll bring someone from Unity to this conversation. And today we're with Mike here. hi Mike.

Amit Netanel (02:08)
Hi.

Yuri Sokolov (02:10)
So Mike, you're you're a principal advocate, right? You you

Mike Geig (02:13)
Correct.

Yuri Sokolov (02:14)
started in Unity 13 years ago as a screencaster, whatever whatever that is, and

Mike Geig (02:19)
That's right, yeah, yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (02:23)
thirteen years later you're a principal advocate and we'll get to that in a minute, but usually the first thing we're we we're asking is, have you played anything recently? Something interesting, something you're playing now?

Mike Geig (02:36)
I've too many games. so right now, so I s I started playing Warframe again and I've I played it when it first came out and it's

Amit Netanel (02:43)
Really? Yeah.

Mike Geig (02:45)
been out for like what, twelve years now, more and so there's so much cont

Yuri Sokolov (02:47)
Something like that. A lot, a lot.

Amit Netanel (02:48)
Almost as long as you've been working in unity.

Mike Geig (02:50)
right, there's so much content now. But my son, my youngest son, has this habit of being like, I'm playing this game, you should play this game and the moment I start it, he stops and so I'm now I'm just playing it by myself, you know, but I'm I'm playing

Yuri Sokolov (03:02)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (03:02)
a lot of that. and then, you know. playing through the Assassin's Creeds again and just always jumping around. But yeah, I play too many games. It's ridiculous. well right now I'm

Yuri Sokolov (03:11)
What Assassin's Creed do you play? Unity?

Amit Netanel (03:16)
Wow.

Mike Geig (03:17)
playing through Mirage.

Yuri Sokolov (03:20)
Mirage.

Mike Geig (03:21)
but and I I wanna get the Black Flag remake. 'cause I didn't play it the first time, so it's the one I haven't played, so

Yuri Sokolov (03:27)
I didn't play it as well because I was a huge fan of Assassin's Creed and then D the one with the Native American I don't I don't remember what Assassin's Creed it was. It was already

Mike Geig (03:38)
Yeah. Three.

Amit Netanel (03:38)
That's three. Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (03:41)
underwhelming because the story was weak, and then I kind of got bored of the i of the game and Black Flag didn't play. I returned to the series with Walhalla and

Mike Geig (03:55)
yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (03:55)
I liked it a lot. But I like that that that Assassin's Creed returns to the origins with Mirage when you basically it's not an RPG anymore, you just do what you do and like that a lot.

Amit Netanel (04:09)
Yeah, it's they

Mike Geig (04:09)
Yeah.

Amit Netanel (04:10)
scoped it down after like making huge open worlds and endless quests. Yeah.

Mike Geig (04:14)
But Odyssey was so good. Odyssey was

Yuri Sokolov (04:14)
But no, they have they have another hu

Mike Geig (04:17)
my favorite, man. There was

Yuri Sokolov (04:19)
RC

Mike Geig (04:19)
so much to do, but yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (04:22)
I was unable to play Odyssey and Rockstar are the reason for it. so basically I've played I've played Red Dead Redemption 2. I

Mike Geig (04:33)
Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (04:33)
finished the game. The game is amazing. It's one of the most beautiful games I've ever seen. And I finished that and I'm looking what what I what do I play now? And somebody said, You should try Odyssey, you should try Assassin's Creed Odyssey,

Mike Geig (04:48)
Mm.

Yuri Sokolov (04:48)
and I say, No, no, I I don't like Assassin's Creed games anymore. They're they're not they're underwhelming. They say no, no, you should play Odyssey. So I'm starting Odyssey, the the tutorial at the st at the beginning. And I just finished the Red Dead Redemption 2. And in Red Dead Redemption you you walk through a forest and he sees sees leaves, he's taking them out with their his hand, everything reacting to everything. I mean horse

Mike Geig (05:16)
Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (05:17)
t testicles shrink in w

Mike Geig (05:19)
I saw that, yes.

Yuri Sokolov (05:19)
Cold w weather.

Amit Netanel (05:20)
Most important mechanic in any video game.

Yuri Sokolov (05:21)
Yeah, yeah. But but it's the attention to details. And

Mike Geig (05:23)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (05:25)
then I I'm starting to play Assassin's Creed and there's a huge coin like in Mario spinning

Amit Netanel (05:32)
Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (05:32)
and I'm approaching it and it disappears. And I'm like, No, I'm not playing this game and just

Mike Geig (05:38)
Ha ha.

Yuri Sokolov (05:38)
turn that off. No, it it

Amit Netanel (05:39)
it's not it's not accurate enough, you say. Not historically accurate

Mike Geig (05:42)
You mean when she just reaches

Amit Netanel (05:42)
enough.

Mike Geig (05:43)
and grabs the olive branch and all immediately has arrows? You're like, nah.

Yuri Sokolov (05:48)
No, it it was just the the sequence. If maybe, maybe, if w if I haven't just finished the Red Dead Redemption, I would enter this game and play it and yeah, yeah,

Amit Netanel (05:58)
Give it a chance, basically.

Yuri Sokolov (06:00)
but th I was unable to do that.

Mike Geig (06:02)
I'm like that. Anytime I finish a Souls like game, I'm like, I need to play another. And I start and like, nah, it's not the same. Nope. Yeah.

Amit Netanel (06:06)
No, no. Not right now.

Mike Geig (06:07)
So you need to you need to reset in between for sure.

Yuri Sokolov (06:11)
I mean, have you played anything recently?

Amit Netanel (06:13)
Man. Well, as as you and the listeners know, I like to lose at stuff like trading card games. So I've been on a losing streak on Marvel Snap and Magic the Gathering. I actually I attended

Mike Geig (06:28)
Mm-hmm.

Amit Netanel (06:29)
last week I attended a pre-release of the new Magic the Gathering set called The Hobbit, which is the second Lord of the Rings set of Magic the Gathering, and I I Got back home like 0-4. Like I didn't even win one match. So I decided, okay, I'm really good at losing at card games. So maybe I should start losing at other genres. So I bought the new Marvel Token tag fighting game.

Mike Geig (06:59)
Mm.

Amit Netanel (07:00)
And I've been playing it nonstop. Losing non-stop. It's an amazing game. Fast-paced.

Yuri Sokolov (07:05)
I I even didn't hear about this one.

Amit Netanel (07:08)
It's super, I think tag. Fighting games are even more niche than fighting games. you select basically four characters that you swap in and out

Yuri Sokolov (07:19)
Mm-hmm.

Amit Netanel (07:20)
in like a Tekken or Street Fighter like game. it's really high polished, the animations are amazing, and it's tough as nails. So I did manage to win one time out of the I don't know, like fifty online matches I already tried. and I'll update update you next time. On the amount of salt that it built in my body.

Yuri Sokolov (07:42)
Yeah. Sure. I actually

Mike Geig (07:45)
Huh, wanna throw out there real quick the

Amit Netanel (07:46)
That's basically it.

Mike Geig (07:47)
the

Amit Netanel (07:46)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (07:47)
teenage mutant and turtles magic gathering set. my god, so good.

Amit Netanel (07:51)
Yeah, I got the commander deck and I really thought about

Mike Geig (07:54)
Me too.

Amit Netanel (07:54)
playing it and my group just said no, no, we we don't accept universes beyond that are not fantasy related. Because there are some ridiculous cards. There's

Mike Geig (08:06)
Tell me the ninja rules aren't fantasy.

Amit Netanel (08:07)
there are some ridiculous cards there, right? I mean

Yuri Sokolov (08:12)
Nerds.

Mike Geig (08:12)
Fairly. Fair fair.

Amit Netanel (08:13)
I don't know. New York has been featured

Mike Geig (08:14)
I mean

Amit Netanel (08:15)
in like three Magic the Gathering sets in the last two years. Like the game has changed. Get on with the times. That's what I said to my group.

Mike Geig (08:20)
yeah. Right.

Yuri Sokolov (08:23)
But they say no, you're

Mike Geig (08:24)
Fair enough.

Yuri Sokolov (08:25)
out. I actually

Amit Netanel (08:25)
Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (08:27)
played a game made with Unity recently. So I've got into I I search for a game that I can play with my son. He's three and a half years old, so he's a toddler. He don't really play he plays on his tablet, but doesn't matter. So I've searched for something that is not violent and Not flashy enough, and I found this game, it's called Tiny King. Wow,

Mike Geig (08:55)
Mm.

Yuri Sokolov (08:56)
this is an amazing game to play with your kid. So if anybody listens here and he wants to play with his kid and with his toddler, it's just awesome. No violence, you cannot lose there, you cannot die there. everything everything really smooth and the interactions. he loved to watch me play, and then he takes the the gamepad and ask me how do I jump and I explain to him. And now he's just navigating the word world by his by himself. It's awesome. I can't recommend it enough. An amazing

Mike Geig (09:29)
Nice.

Yuri Sokolov (09:30)
game.

Amit Netanel (09:32)
You know what I didn't like about it? And it's an issue that's that comes up with many games that you play. So I think we have maybe like like a a a a a mirror image of tastes. Okay. Yeah, I I like to lose. Like I mean,

Yuri Sokolov (09:42)
Different taste. I like I like quality stuff, you like shit. So

Mike Geig (09:47)
Yeah.

Amit Netanel (09:48)
listen, listen, listen. All the games that you played recently have three dimensional spaces that host billboard characters. And I hate that. I I super hate that because you have like two characters, they come and meet, and you don't know on the Z axis where they are. So if you have if even a bit of action in your game, like the the the game Code of the Lamp that came out like four years ago, I think. It was a huge, huge hit.

Yuri Sokolov (10:16)
That the that's the game you liked and I didn't.

Amit Netanel (10:19)
I don't know. It it I I like the the aesthetic, but the moment to moment gameplay was terrible because I I was uncertain if the attack will hit or not and Tidekin suffers even more because you have lots of like Pikmin like characters going after you. So I dunno. I don't know.

Yuri Sokolov (10:37)
I don't know. I it feel it it feels

Mike Geig (10:37)
The old streets of rage, right?

Yuri Sokolov (10:38)
like you haven't played it enough. but doesn't matter. Let's forget about

Amit Netanel (10:42)
Could be. Could be.

Yuri Sokolov (10:43)
Tiny King. Don't forget

Mike Geig (10:44)
Ha ha

Yuri Sokolov (10:44)
about it, but let's put it aside. Mike, you're a developer advocate. What the hell does this even mean? What what is a developer advocate?

Mike Geig (10:54)
That's it's funny because I I I've been I get asked that question, especially by my family all the time and I always have a hard time answering them. I always tell people I just do whatever it takes. that's what the developer advocates do. But breaking that down, what we really do is we we travel to events, we interface with the the community, the customers, we give presentations, we look for opportunities to highlight customers and and cool games and cool experiences, and then we learn from our users and then we bring that information back and we represent the users internally for product decisions and c communication and marketing and stuff like this. so, you know, our team isn't we're not a part of sales, we're not part of marketing, we don't have quotas. We're measured entirely upon how happy the community is. and that's it. That's our our just how often are we interfacing with people and how happy are they? And that's that's that's what we do. So You know, some days I might be helping with a blog post, other days I might be helping diagnose a bug, other days I might be on stage giving a presentation. It's just whatever, whatever is needed by our users at any given moment. That's why I hopped in on the terms of service, even though I wasn't involved. I was like, okay, someone has to answer these questions. No one's doing it. It'll be me. Do whatever it takes. Let's go figure it out and see what we can do. so yeah, that's what our team does. It's it's weird.

Yuri Sokolov (12:20)
Awesome, but you said something that you've measured on on the happiness of the Unity users, which is a really strange KPI, I would say. So how how

Mike Geig (12:31)
It is.

Yuri Sokolov (12:31)
do you actually I don't know. I worked in a corporate I wor

Amit Netanel (12:33)
W when d w yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. Go ahead because I I have the I have the exact issue like marked nailed down. Go ahead.

Yuri Sokolov (12:39)
I yeah, I worked in a corporate environment. I know how the things behind it work. So basically you have your performance reviews and your annual bonus or whatever, how every company is structured differently, but it's all tied down usually to some KPIs. So as a developer, I I can't define KPIs. I I work I deliver in time, the quality is sufficient. How do you measure happiness of a user?

Amit Netanel (13:10)
And and and to add to that, the the the

Mike Geig (13:10)
So go ahead. Yeah. Yeah.

Amit Netanel (13:13)
the reporting is unvalidatable and usually they only speak out when there's something to complain about. If everything

Yuri Sokolov (13:21)
What yeah, yeah.

Amit Netanel (13:22)
is smooth sailing, they're silent.

Mike Geig (13:25)
So yeah, I mean you have a good point. Like so the the quantitative analysis is is pretty challenging because, you know, either people are really mad and they're speaking out, so your you know, any sentiment measurement is really low, or you did a presentation, they're happy with the presentation, so the sentiment's just really high. So it's either like a hundred percent CSAT customer satisfaction,

Yuri Sokolov (13:48)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (13:49)
or it's like zero, you know, and with very little in between. So for us anyway, we don't really rely so much on the quantitative because I mean, universally I think folks know developer relations and community and stuff like that. the ROI, the metrics, all that stuff is is really fuzzy. so we focus a lot more on qualitative. Like, you know, what are the instances that I actually helped? What are the instances where we actually turned something incredibly negative into something positive? What were the instances where we prevented something that maybe needed to to cook a little bit longer from from going out too early. plus I do like part of my role is I do like broad analysis across not just the unity users, but just all game dev industry, right? using, you know, these tools that do natural language processing stuff. And you take that with a grain of salt, but at least it's good at showing trends across the industry and where we can do things better. So it it's been an interesting road over the my time at Unity to get to a point where you're like don't have these hard Coded A KPIs, like we do, like you know, how many touch points, how many impressions, how many events, how many this and that and the next. We do measure those things. But

Yuri Sokolov (14:58)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (14:59)
when it comes down to it, it's ultimately like, hey, anytime we haven't had people doing this, things went poorly and these things tanked and stuff. And then when we have it, magically that stops happening so much. So it you know, it's it's obvious that we need it. And, you know, I like to view it a a little bit as Unity's investment in the community that Yeah, there's this whole team of people that, you know, aren't tied strictly to making money. In fact, a lot of times we're advocating for doing things that maybe make a little less money and stuff like that. But it if if they're received better for everybody. so it's it's a fine line, but ultimately it's it's about at the end of the day, if you can say here are these positive, impactful things that that we accomplished, that is what the company's looking for, and that's that's how we're reviewed.

Yuri Sokolov (15:50)
Interesting. Interesting. So how how does your day look like like basically you're you don't have plannings, you don't schedule anything ahead of time. Maybe some of the things, right? So if there is a conference somewhere you know you you know it beforehand that you need to prepare something for that conference, but day to day in in a daily manner, how how does your day work? So you you get up, you grab your coffee, what n what's next?

Mike Geig (16:19)
Yeah. well I mean, first off, I be I I wouldn't discount the number of events that are out there. Like so my team, like well, I myself, I think by the end of September will have traveled close to a hundred thousand miles this year. so we go to a lot of events. because again, if you're not interfacing with the customers, then you're gonna lose sight of how they're feeling about things and and you know, what's true for them in their world. so we're on the road a lot. But but when I'm not on the road, you know, usually it's a let's wake up, let's check Reddit and discussions and make sure something didn't blow up overnight, you know, that we need to like take a look at real quick. even though I'm not technically on the community team, I still again, whatever it takes, we we we pay attention to those things and and interject ourselves where we can. and then there's just a lot of check-in meetings with the various teams within the company, just to be like, Hey, what are you guys working on? What's this? Who's thought of this? What are we doing with this? What's the status of this? You know. all those things that helps us be better informed when we do interface with our customers. you know, because for us anyway, we we we pride ourselves with being, you know, individuals that that users can trust when we say a thing. And part of

Yuri Sokolov (17:32)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (17:32)
that trust is trying not to be incorrect or at least understanding why we're making certain decisions so we can properly represent what's what's happening. Because it's it's a big complex machine, truly. so there's just always a lot of pieces to it. So lot of my day is meetings, just lots and lots of meetings or analysis of of things that are being posted or or being on the road.

Yuri Sokolov (17:56)
Well, AI wouldn't replace that.

Mike Geig (17:59)
No, no. It I mean, I do

Amit Netanel (17:59)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (18:01)
use AI to to aggregate information, but then I go through and read like so every month I put together a report of everything that's been happening on our community channels and stuff that. While AI will help me like stack rank the top a thousand

Yuri Sokolov (18:12)
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (18:13)
posts or whatever, I still go through and read them all to verify like how you know, how accurate was it and you know, to to make sure we're again we don't want to operate on false information internally either. So a lot of it is just effort.

Amit Netanel (18:26)
But by the way, lots I I imag I could only imagine a company at the scale of Unity has also lots of inner company stuff to be also to to just being updated on, but to weigh in on. Like stuff you you could identify beforehand that will be either good, bad for the users, that is not communicated, or is communicated not in a way that for like for example. we we'll we'll reach the the Unity C L I I think in a bit, but I I could only guess. But recently, like it's been more like we've we've heard you, here's the the cool thing that you need. It's like in the the last year or so, it's been more like that. So I could imagine that you need to somehow like push these things forward. Like do you so you do lots of meetings or how how does it work in the context of Unity?

Mike Geig (19:25)
Yeah. I mean, it's it's it's I wouldn't say it's pushing, right? Maybe sometimes a little nudging, but I bet a lot

Amit Netanel (19:30)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (19:32)
of times people be like, Unity is this, unity is that, you need and I part of me I'm just trying to tr always trying to remind people, Unity is not a a person. Unity's a collection of a thousand people, all truly actually trying to do the right things. They just have a different perspective of

Yuri Sokolov (19:48)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (19:48)
who the users even are, right? Are we talking about indies, we talk about hobbyist students? Enterprise customers, game developers, non-game, you know, like so, or, you know, you know, what it does it, what's a fair value trade or what's this or that. but ultimately with the goal of doing the right thing. So usually, you know, if if you know, I'm part of a conversation stuff, it's it's generally just like, well, here, let me give you maybe a different perspective that maybe helps you go, I didn't think of it like that. Let's let's do it this way, or here's what we could do, or whatever. But a lot of it is just mostly just trying to stay informed and It's so difficult these days. They it's gotten so complex with so many different components that there was a point in time where I was developing content at Unity. and I was like I prided myself like I know all the new features and I know all the changes because I'm making content for all of it nowadays. I'm like, I when did that happen? I didn't know that happened. Who what's this? this is cool. so that I'm so far behind on learning some of the new stuff and everything. But but yeah, I mean, so a lot of it is just checking in And making sure people well and the big part of my job and and I think the advocate's job is making sure that the people inside Unity see the positive impact of all their hard work. Right. If you're,

Yuri Sokolov (21:00)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (21:01)
you know, on the engineering team and you're just behind closed doors building stuff all day, it means a lot when I show up and be like, Hey, I talked to this this group and they loved this thing and here's these cool pictures and here's some neat games they made with it. And that that means a lot. so a lot of it is also just letting people see the positive impact their work is having and, you know. Making everyone kind of feel really good about the stuff that we're doing.

Yuri Sokolov (21:24)
Well, I I can get behind this with all my heart because in what I love about game development and even even if we'll I I I love indie game development, the PC mo PC console games that you pour your heart and soul into them. But I also love most of my career has been in mobile gaming, which is not well received among gamer community, but I still love to do it and one of the Reasons why I love to develop mobile games is mobile games are the only games overall are the only industry where there are so many passionate people with and they passionate about what you do. So even if you're developing some really simple game, there are huge communities that love this game and every new feature you're releasing, you get the feedback immediately. They

Mike Geig (22:22)
Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (22:22)
tell you, this is awesome. This is terrible. They and they they respond to you immediately. And this is one of the things that I like so much about developing games. So yeah, I can totally get behind the the idea of delivering on your side, delivering internally what impact people are doing. Because I don't know, I I always like comparing it to things like there are no communities out there that are super passionate about I don't know what Vault do or Amazon. I I don't know, some food delivery stuff. Wow, did you see how how awesome this this new awesome feature in this food delivery app? they just don't. In games they do, even if your game is one simple button that you click every day.

Amit Netanel (23:14)
Yeah. The

Mike Geig (23:14)
Yeah.

Amit Netanel (23:14)
the users and the developers as well. Like we started this interview with what are you playing? Because we're all also gamers.

Mike Geig (23:22)
Yeah. The con you consume the thing you make.

Amit Netanel (23:24)
It rings all the fields.

Mike Geig (23:26)
and always tell someone that every game is someone's favorite game. Like there is no game without any partic you know, that has absolutely no value. Every game, someone out there is like, this is the best game ever. You know, it's just universally

Amit Netanel (23:37)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (23:38)
true. so

Yuri Sokolov (23:39)
Unless it's the the Eti game from Atari. do you remember this?

Mike Geig (23:43)
That is someone's favorite game, I assure you it is.

Amit Netanel (23:45)
I yeah, I'm sure I'm sure there are E.T. connoisseurs out there.

Mike Geig (23:49)
Yeah,

Yuri Sokolov (23:49)
Yeah.

Mike Geig (23:50)
all people that have like stacks of these things, they collect you know, like that's someone's even just for like the the story behind the game itself. But yeah. So it's

Amit Netanel (23:57)
Yeah. Just for the lore.

Mike Geig (24:00)
yeah, exactly. But it is an an incredibly passionate community. as you said, like with getting feedback and stuff and that's what makes it great and sometimes terrible, but mostly great. just the the passion is so so extreme. almost more so than I can think of any other industry.

Yuri Sokolov (24:18)
Yeah. So as a developer advocate, are you a developer? Or are you more of

Mike Geig (24:22)
Yeah, yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (24:23)
a an advocate?

Mike Geig (24:24)
No, that's okay. I mean, I would say these days I can feel every day my skills draining. Like every day I'm like I wake up in the morning like, remember polymorphism. You forgot it. Remember it now. Like all these old school object oriented things. no, I I I'm a developer. I I I actually I'm my my very first kind of more major game is on that flappy disc

Amit Netanel (24:45)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (24:45)
right there. but my yeah, it's called Mystic Battles, in C plus plus. sort of a a mud. But but yeah, no, I've been developing games for quite some time. Though nowadays I obviously more so focus on community and things like that. So certainly my my dev skills need some work because

Yuri Sokolov (25:06)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (25:07)
you know there's just so many other things to work on and stuff like that. But I always tell people that I'm a game developer first and a Unity employee second. Right. So I my I will always align myself which with whatever is good for developers and I try to keep up to speed as much as possible. And more often than not, if I'm having to do anything in a spreadsheet, I'll be like, I could write some script that does this for me. And I'll spend ten minutes doing something that would have taken me thirty seconds to just do manually. But Yeah, but I still I like it. But I am a developer first.

Yuri Sokolov (25:36)
No, nowadays you just ask Claude to do it for you and he's he's

Mike Geig (25:40)
Yeah. It's hard to not be la it's hard to not I don't want to call it lazy, but it's it's hard not to, like, 'cause it it is pretty good at the simple stuff. But every once in a while I'm like, No, I'm gonna do this myself, even though I could just ask and it would be done, but still.

Yuri Sokolov (25:53)
I I recently I released an open source MCP for After Effects. so I was

Mike Geig (26:00)
cool.

Yuri Sokolov (26:01)
talking to my friend who's working in the advertisement industry and all he does is working with After Effects. So I said to him, Take a look at that. And he was so amazed. awesome, we have we can make Claude do stuff in After Effects now. So I told him, here's the repo, go install it. And tell me what issue you encounter because he's installing it on Windows, I'm installing it and on I developed it on Mac, and he's using Claude Desktop, I'm using Cloud Code. I wanna see what what issues you as a non-developer encounter. So next thing he sends me, he sends me a screenshot of Claude Cowork. He just pointed at

Amit Netanel (26:46)
Mm.

Yuri Sokolov (26:46)
the browser to cowork and said, install this thing for me. And the And Covark installed him node on his device and everything he needed. He just it do I said, but I I created you can install it with three lines in the terminal. Basically later I reduced it to one line, but doesn't

Mike Geig (27:08)
Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (27:09)
matter. I you can install it with three three commands in the terminal. I didn't have the the time to read all those documentations you put there, so I made callot do it. Okay. Whatever.

Mike Geig (27:22)
It's true. It's true. You can even ask Claude now to install Unity C L I and then use it to install Unity and it's like cool, boom, you know, like

Yuri Sokolov (27:31)
Well yeah,

Mike Geig (27:31)
Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (27:32)
yeah, it's it's making us a bit lazy. It's like remember Wally? It's those

Mike Geig (27:38)
Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (27:39)
those vibes. but

Amit Netanel (27:39)
Yeah. But I don't know, installing packages

Mike Geig (27:42)
It's yeah.

Amit Netanel (27:42)
like we discussed before about someone's favorite game. I don't think installing packages is anyone's favorite like activity. Like if you can make a

Mike Geig (27:50)
Yeah.

Amit Netanel (27:51)
shortcut about you know, just installing the necessary stuff to get going. Why not?

Yuri Sokolov (27:56)
I think the problem is with that that if I delegate this work to Claude, it installing the time it takes him to understand my query and then implement it is slightly more time than if I would do it manually. And the issue is not the time itself, it's that I tell him to do it and then I'm switching my context and going doing other stuff. And then the task

Amit Netanel (28:19)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (28:20)
ends up a lot longer because I caught up in some YouTube video or something. So it's the context switching that that are making it awful, for me at least.

Mike Geig (28:30)
Yeah, absolutely.

Amit Netanel (28:30)
It's also it's also fatiguing. It's super fatiguing.

Mike Geig (28:34)
Can be. It can be.

Yuri Sokolov (28:34)
Yeah.

Mike Geig (28:36)
I like that you refer to Claude as he. This

Yuri Sokolov (28:36)
By the way. Yeah.

Mike Geig (28:40)
is how it begins.

Amit Netanel (28:40)
And not an it. No, actually, I think it's because of Hebrew, because we usually don't have like gender neutral things. But we think we think with genders most of the time. But but no, but Claude is totally

Mike Geig (28:49)
okay. Interesting. Okay. Fair enough, fair enough.

Yuri Sokolov (28:53)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's probably it.

Amit Netanel (28:55)
a dude, I think. I I I never in

Mike Geig (28:57)
Yeah, 'cause it'd be Claudette otherwise. Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (28:58)
Yeah, in one of my videos

Amit Netanel (28:59)
a million years would imagine as like you know a Cortana-like entity. Yeah, yeah, it's twirly, mustache twirling dude.

Yuri Sokolov (29:03)
It's a French dude. Collot

Mike Geig (29:05)
So French does.

Yuri Sokolov (29:09)
is a French name, I mean so it it must be.

Mike Geig (29:10)
Yeah. Yeah. I never really considered that. Maybe that's why it's so sassy to respond to me. Just like ha Clawed being clawed. Yeah, no, right that the

Yuri Sokolov (29:20)
By the way, you're

Mike Geig (29:21)
context switching is ch is tough.

Amit Netanel (29:23)
Yeah, it's really churning. Like at the end of every day, I one of the things I want to develop is like just a summary of all the things you did today because I usually work with like several, like I have Claude and Cursor, and two cursors because I have two Unity projects open, like simultaneously, one mainline, one on with the feature I'm working on, and I just swap between all of them. all day they all work like every time I get up from my chair I need like mentally it wasn't like that like a year ago. I mentally I just have have to have like at least one agent doing something. And if it's not doing anything, I feel like you know time time is being wasted. So it it's it's mentally fatiguing really.

Yuri Sokolov (30:16)
Yeah, yeah, you can you can't allow yourself to go to the to the toilet unless you

Amit Netanel (30:22)
Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (30:23)
waited enough so Claude will finish his last task to give him a new one and then you can go. And yeah. But what I d

Mike Geig (30:29)
See I I'm only like that with video games. I'm like the something always has to be cooking or building or whatever. In real life, it's fine. You know. In games we can lose nothing. In real life, you know, whatever. Yeah.

Amit Netanel (30:40)
It's fake FOMO, but it works. I mean

Yuri Sokolov (30:41)
Something but by the way, something you can do both with video games and with with cloud, for example. For instance, what I do today and is so if I really need to go and and cloud hasn't finished yet, I just enable remote connection and then I open my phone on my trone, on my white drone, and then and I deliver the next instructions. You can do the same with games.

Amit Netanel (31:07)
No, no, we totally live in the future. Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (31:09)
You can do the same with games. So I kind of connected both. but

Mike Geig (31:13)
Yeah, that's true. That's true.

Yuri Sokolov (31:15)
I had a question. I had a question. So you say that you're talking a lot with with the community and bringing back stuff. What is the most requested thing people tell you about? So what is the most requested feature? I don't know, bug fix or

Mike Geig (31:32)
yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (31:32)
whatever.

Mike Geig (31:33)
Well, universally everyone recognizes that Unity has gotten so much so much slower, right? We know this, right? Like it's that's one of the big things about core CLR with the domain reloads and the shader compilation. So I would say universally that's the number one. But that's not a surprise. I think everybody knows that. the beyond that, it really does scatter a bit. But I think a universal thread is that I I I believe a lot of people would like us to be more opinionated. We've spent a long time making stuff work for everybody in in kind of this very universal way.

Yuri Sokolov (32:08)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (32:09)
But that's led us to having two UIs and two simultaneous input systems. And you know, you know, and so I think a lot of people would be like, why don't you tell us, you know, how you think this should work? And obviously with options, flexibility and stuff like that. But But having us be a little bit more opinionated is a thing that I hear a lot. and also like having a place where people can more easily find our information, our announcements, new features will come out, they won't know about them. And then when I show them they're like, That's been there for a year and I've been doing this this other way. How would I even have known that? You know, and it's so I get that a lot. and then in terms of like say the Unity editor itself, world building tools are very old and we all know this. and it's it's tough. because again, there's world building means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. But I think universally we recognize, yeah, our our terrain tools are are very old and outdated. And on one hand I could make the argument that there's so many great third party solutions that it's it's hard to justify putting something first party, but you can only use that exp you can only use that for so long. I mean, that's only th that you can only say that so many times before you're like, Yeah, but you know, it is something we should look at. But I would say,

Yuri Sokolov (33:21)
Actually

Mike Geig (33:22)
yeah, those things.

Yuri Sokolov (33:24)
actually I think the the argument about the third parties is is a solid one because I don't know, I don't expect from a company, even company as big as Unity, to know best for everyone how to do stuff. So for example, I can take addressables as an example. So there were asset bundles, which is bare

Mike Geig (33:47)
Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (33:48)
bones. You can take it, use it, whatever However, you want. You can if you want to use it only for streamline asset loading locally, you can do that. You want a dynamic content delivery system, you can do that. You need to build above that. So then addressables came and Unity said, Okay, we'll develop something that will wrap those addressables and and provide you An awesome API. I I must say it's an awesome API. I was with addressables from the first open beta. I actually put open beta of addressables into our production game at the time. So because I loved this, yeah, 2017

Mike Geig (34:32)
Like two thousand seventeen, yeah. Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (34:36)
and addressables and URP simultaneously. I did that. I was a first employee in a company with developed an idle RPG game. So I did it with URP and addressables. I work with it a lot. And the issue with addressables was this that Unity didn't know, at the time at least, how big mobile companies work with dynamic content delivery systems. because when I worked at Jelly Button, which was relatively big company with big hits in a mobile market, and I've started migrating our tools to use addressables, Me at the time also I didn't know how big games supposed to work with content

Mike Geig (35:22)
Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (35:22)
delivery. So I brought my knowledge in in addressables to the table and we started developing things. And each rule is would break our things because addressables would have a bug. To fix this bug, you need to update addressables. But when you update, it doesn't support previous builds built previously.

Mike Geig (35:46)
Gotta rebuild everything.

Yuri Sokolov (35:46)
But we must maintain tons of assets that are on separate branches and stuff like that. So I don't expect Unity to know everything for everybody. I do expect it to build a great engine, great customizable engine, and then a community can bridge the gaps that it has. I don't really need for Unity to develop all of those things for me.

Amit Netanel (36:10)
Yeah, but I I I do want to give a counter opinion to that. Because I was a part of the mobile team mobile

Mike Geig (36:14)
Me too.

Amit Netanel (36:16)
team that used addressables and it was really difficult to implement it. if there was a huge sign at the at the lawn the the the landing page of the addressables documentation that said if you're developing a mobile game that will update like every week, don't use this. Goodbye.

Yuri Sokolov (36:37)
But they didn't know that. That's what I'm telling. They developed something without at the time without knowing the the actual needs. I assume that after Marvel Snap, Unity Team already knew what what needs to be done. Because I mean if Marvel Sna

Amit Netanel (36:52)
Probably. Probably even before. Probably even before.

Yuri Sokolov (36:56)
if probably before, I don't know, at least at the point of Marvel Snap being developed, like this huge game with which have live ops and dynamic content delivery, they probably figure things out somewhere at this point. but before that, it I I was in talks with support, I was in talks with a lot of people in in Unity, and they said, Well, it is what it is. It's it doesn't

Mike Geig (37:24)
Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (37:25)
suppose to do that. you want you want

Mike Geig (37:27)
So I Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (37:28)
that use asset bundles. But your counter anger argument,

Mike Geig (37:31)
True. You know, and I I will

Yuri Sokolov (37:33)
Mike.

Mike Geig (37:33)
Yeah, well, and I'll offer up too, like so we we we've known about s many of the shortcomings of addressable for quite some time. A lot of work underneath the hood had to be done to the rest of our asset pipeline and stuff like that to improve some of these things, which is well underway and and a lot of it's done. And we've got the new content directories, which is like this this evolution of addressables that's supposed to solve the problems addressable's had. so I mean, there is an evolution there. Again, it's like, why doesn't you need to just fix this? And it's like, man, to fix this requires fixing this. And to fix that requires fixing this. And I remember when why maybe maybe it was Mechanim one of the first when it first came out and then was like, I want to be able to zoom in and out on the Mechanim chart. And it was like, yeah, that's easy. That's a two week fix. Turns out it was not like it required an entire rewrite of the

Amit Netanel (38:22)
Mm.

Mike Geig (38:23)
editor UI at the time. This was, you know, back in 2014, 2015. But it was like

Yuri Sokolov (38:27)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (38:27)
a year's worth of work. Just to fix underlying code that then enabled us to zoom in and out of a graph view, which then completely helped us remake our entire graph architecture and all these other things, build these other great tools, like like r GPU graph and shader graph and stuff like that.

Yuri Sokolov (38:45)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (38:46)
but it's it's always, you know, it's always one of those things like, Why don't you just fix this? Cause I've been saying the same. Why don't we just fix this? And it's always like, well, because there's these seven other things that need be fixed first or updated or changed to make that work. But When it comes to things like terrain, I'll just go back to terrain as an example. One thing that I I'm I'm always cautious of, or at least on the lookout for, is any scenario where if you start using a feature of Unities, in this case the terrain tools, w being ignorant of the shortcomings of it, of which terrain has many, like the performance shortcomings, you get into a position where you've now late stage development and you're in a corner. You you can't make this thing do what you need it to do. So now you have to undo all this work, go back, rip all this stuff out, and then put in a third party solution. That shouldn't have we should you shouldn't have been able to hit a a dead end like that. it's also one of the challenges with having the built-in rendering pipeline and the universal rendering pipeline and HDRP is that okay, you made this decision. You when you started, you picked HDRP because you wanted the best graphics. And then later on you're like, I can't make this work on the platforms

Yuri Sokolov (39:57)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (39:57)
I'm targeting. Now I have to walk all that work backwards and and change it. And it's like, okay, we shouldn't have helped you put yourself in that position. And so that, you know, in areas like that where we're streamlining into a singular rendering pipeline so we can be like, Hey, let's let's fix that. So you don't you're not at risk of that anymore. but with terrain, it's still it's still a risk 'cause someone will I've I've Tons of conversations where people are I'm doing all the optimization I can. This game is so slow. And I'm like, well, using the built-in terrain, it's not doing this, it's not doing this. So I highly recommend either turning that into a mesh or swapping out to a third party terrain tool. And you know, the response is always, but that would be a ton of work. We explore doing that. But you know, at this point, it's so much work and we have deadlines. I'm like, Yes, that's the problem. Yeah. So certainly not not to not to dump unused terrain stuff. Sorry, guys. But like that one is tough. It's tough. It's old. and yeah. Would love to see something better there.

Amit Netanel (40:52)
I I'm going to a to to give you an example and also ask a question. Like for example, I'm working on a gacha RPG mobile gacha RPG for a while now, with my studio and like six months ago ish, we finally beat the bullet and upgraded to Unity six, six point three. I mean from

Mike Geig (41:14)
Mm-hmm.

Amit Netanel (41:15)
Twenty twenty two three, the latest LTS, like it was a year

Mike Geig (41:19)
Yeah.

Amit Netanel (41:19)
into the deprecation that we decided, okay, we're heading towards production. We we we have to upgrade. Okay. So we went in with open eyes, we said, okay, probably half of the packages we're using are deprecated, and we need to upgrade this and that and that and mainly URP stuff because it was like four versions of URP. it went relatively okay, by the way, but the the

Yuri Sokolov (41:49)
Set shaders probably.

Amit Netanel (41:50)
yeah, the the thing that was the most challenging for us is is just understanding what to what to look at. I mean if if

Yuri Sokolov (42:01)
Yeah.

Amit Netanel (42:01)
there was a way to for for the engine to tell us, okay, I see you've upgraded these internal packages because Unity works with packages internally, which is amazing. here's what you need to look at. And one of the things that fell between the chairs is the shader warm-up, like the whole PSO ecosystem that we didn't

Mike Geig (42:21)
Mm-hmm.

Amit Netanel (42:22)
work with before and had to like in crunch time to to figure out. And actually it was it was a good also some plugins that we worked with in the past were like deprecated apparently, like Polybrush.

Mike Geig (42:38)
yes.

Amit Netanel (42:39)
Which was apparently unused by our art team for a while now, so it's a good thing that we got rid of it, but it could could have been painful. So

Yuri Sokolov (42:47)
Say things that you've used the the input system prior the upgrade because

Amit Netanel (42:53)
Yeah. Yeah, we use the old yeah input system. We used many, many, many old features. so I I I I guess it's it's first of all, I I don't know. You you probably get this a lot, but engine upgrades are are intimidating. And every like

Mike Geig (43:14)
Yes.

Amit Netanel (43:14)
feature is being used somewhere, like probably wrongly so. but Communicating that is probably just, I don't know, a massive undertaking, like how to tackle all the packages that are being operated when you skip like

Mike Geig (43:31)
Yeah.

Amit Netanel (43:32)
two major versions ahead. I I don't know, I I wouldn't know how to do it from your end. Right.

Mike Geig (43:35)
It's tough. Well, it's tough 'cause, you know, well, for me anyway, like w I'm balanced in that line of like I want people to upgrade to the latest, right? Yeah, obviously at uni we want people to, but I understand the reality. It's like I'm I would never advise someone who's in production to upgrade the engine unless they have to, unless there's some either killer feature that they absolutely need or, you know, the the reaching end of a life cycle on one and you know, it need to need to move forward because it's scary. Right? Stuff breaks. It just is. Right. And I think personally, I think I wish we would I wish we'd break more in between updates because that would enable us to get rid of some tech debt. That's

Amit Netanel (44:16)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (44:16)
my own opinion. I understand the realities is that's a terrible thing to happen. But but sometimes we're like, we we we couldn't have broken that because we need to make things backwards compatible. And it's always like, but that means it's gonna be slow or it's gonna have to do this or that instead. So there's a way to think of it. But yeah, I mean the truth is is upgrading engine versions we do our best we we do a lot of tests we do a lot of work to make that as smooth as possible but the realities are is if you're doing anything custom custom shaded anything like that yeah it stuff's gonna break especially when you go out multiple you know major versions at a time then it's it's tough for sure. Some people some people have production projects and they're like hey I upgraded to the latest and Not a single blip and other people were like, Nope, just just destroyed everything. Like, okay. You know, like that that that's tough, but it is what it is.

Amit Netanel (45:10)
And of course, every like

Yuri Sokolov (45:10)
Yeah, and while I meet

Amit Netanel (45:11)
after every upgrade, we say, Okay, this time we won't wait two versions. Like next LTS version, we're going to upgrade. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was everyone

Mike Geig (45:19)
The lies we tell ourselves.

Yuri Sokolov (45:20)
huh.

Amit Netanel (45:22)
looked at each other like we're lying to each other right now, right? And

Yuri Sokolov (45:26)
And

Mike Geig (45:26)
Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (45:26)
while Amit fixing his background, I can tell you, Amit, that wait,

Amit Netanel (45:29)
Yeah. Something broke in production here.

Yuri Sokolov (45:32)
wait for

Mike Geig (45:33)
Ha ha.

Yuri Sokolov (45:33)
you to wait when you're upgrading to Unity 6.5 because a lot more things are gonna break. And I love it by the way. I love it. a lot of a lot of third parties broke because Unity changed a lot of stuff internally. I love the direction currently. I have a couple of things to say about it later. I explained later in the episode in a in a some scope. But actually I really love the direction. I was one of the advocates for Core CLR for for as long as I can remember because I started using Unity after I've been a developer for a couple of years. so I not a game developer. I was a developer, I worked with PHP, JavaScript, and mostly C sharp. I wrote Anything you can think of on C sharp. I used Xamarin long before Microsoft bought it. And when I came to Unity and just discovered that a lot of stuff just doesn't work. It's async await. when I started using Unity, there were was no async await if I remember correctly. only core teams. that no, sorry, there was async await support, but nobody knew about that. In All companies, everybody used core routines and nobody wanted to use tasks. So a lot of the staff that I was used to I was unable to use and I'm really happy we're moving to core CLR and I'm waiting for that Unity 7 alpha to pop up in my in my Unity hub. So I would download the alpha immediately.

Amit Netanel (47:19)
Immediately. Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (47:20)
I'm not downloading 6.7. 6.7. I'm not downloading the yeah. I'm not downloading

Amit Netanel (47:24)
Because of the meme?

Mike Geig (47:25)
Right. And because of the meme

Yuri Sokolov (47:28)
Unity 6.7 because it's only it's only partial support, right? For Core CLR. So I don't want to dive in just yet. Again, I know what to expect from Core CLR because I'm developing.NET applications all the time. So the here's that. But the thing that S something that gets me, I don't know, nervous a bit, is the trend outside among Unity developers. on on on one side it's great, on the other it's not so great. I don't know. so GMTK recently published published the stats for the latest GMTK gem, and it's first time in nine years that Unity was surpassed and Godot engine was the most used engine. And I think like since the the and the fees scandal and stuff like that a lot of indie developers started migrating towards towards Godot and I know that there's no way today for mobile game companies to migrate to Godot because Because stuff, because reasons, a lot of issues there, but the indie community is migrating there. How how does Unity react to that? What what what are your thoughts about it?

Amit Netanel (48:58)
And does it even want to react to that? That's an angle I wanna know.

Mike Geig (49:01)
Sure. Yeah. No. I think, well, one, I I think it's it's it's great. I wouldn't necessarily call it necessarily an indicator. So let me take a step back. Here's how I feel about like Godot, right? I feel like Godot is a great reminder of where unity came from, right? The scrappy upstart, you know, kind of, you know, offering. And To me, it's a great reminder of, hey, there's there's someone on your heels and if you get lazy, they're gonna catch up. Right. It's a constant reminder of like, this is a competition, you know, in for lack of a better term, with with with Epic, with Unreal, with Godot, with with people's built in engines, like in house engines and things like that. so it's what's that?

Yuri Sokolov (49:52)
Jonathan Blow part here.

Amit Netanel (49:54)
I have something to say about that later, Yuri. We need to pump the numbers. Okay, we need to pump the numbers. I have something about it later.

Yuri Sokolov (49:54)
I know it it's we we just it's it's kind of a tradition. We we will look for places to to say something about Jonathan Blow in our episodes. And you didn't mention custom engines. Jonathan Blow once again developed his custom engine for his latest game, so we kind of never mind, it's an internal joke.

Mike Geig (50:15)
No, I'm I'm

Amit Netanel (50:16)
I'm going

Mike Geig (50:16)
a Jonathan Blow fan.

Amit Netanel (50:16)
to mention it later because he said something really interesting lately.

Mike Geig (50:20)
Well, that sounds like Jonathan Blow saying something.

Yuri Sokolov (50:20)
Okay. So sorry for for cutting you off.

Mike Geig (50:23)
The witness was great if you've never played it. but yeah, so so there's that. So it it's great to see this tech because you know, competition is good for all of us, right? Just when when Unreal 4 came out and they changed their pricing model and we all went, my god, this is so cool. Like, but now it means we gotta do a lot of work because now we got like some re real hard competition and stuff like that. So that's great. It has been my observation. I'll just call it my observation. I don't have any hard numbers behind this. But in things like Global Game Jam and the Game Jams my team goes to and stuff like that, that we see the people using Godot pull more from the people that were using Unreal than the people that were using Unity. there will always be a contingent of people that'll they'll never use Unity, either because they don't like the product or they they don't trust us based off the, as you've mentioned, past, you know, business is decisions that weren't great. and That meant that they were using Unreal, but now Godot is like, we can use that instead. So we we have seen our numbers dwindle a little bit. We've seen at least at game jams and stuff like that. I've seen numbers for for Unreal dwindle a little bit more. but at the same time, like if this is indica indicative of of of indies or people participating in game jams checking out Godot and playing with it, then great, right? Like that I don't know, I don't feel any any way bad about that. I think that's That's awesome. And it's a reminder that we always have more work to do. And we always, always, always need to continue working hard to rebuild trust, to to to reemphasize the good stuff that we're putting in the engine and while we're doing it. because at the end of the day, the the worst thing I think we can be is complacent and and be like, you know, that's not a problem and that's not competition. you know, we we've got no, you know, nothing is taken for granted, right? We always look at those numbers and we say, cool. Good for them and let's let's get back to work. though I did I I did kind of enjoy a lot of the the posts I saw was like like Godot has dethroned unity. And you know, I was like, What what? And then I was like, yeah, right.

Amit Netanel (52:30)
Yeah, it's always a hot take. It's always like hyperbole.

Yuri Sokolov (52:36)
Yeah, but but the question is, do Unity really sees this part of developers as as a core, as as someone to preserve does because today Godot is again, it's not viable for mobile game industry. And AAA companies are kind of either with their custom engines or mainly sticking with Unreal today.

Mike Geig (53:02)
With the real. Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (53:04)
so Mo and recently so there was an earnings call some time ago, really recently, and we saw that more than half of the growth for Unity year over year wasn't related to gaming at all, to to the a engine at all. So there's Unity industry, there's the AI vertex vertex you call it, the the advertisement network. Then you

Mike Geig (53:35)
well if you didn't ask me what it was called right now, I'd be able to tell you what it was called. Yes. S the name flew out of my head

Yuri Sokolov (53:39)
Something starting with V, as something that replaced

Mike Geig (53:44)
right now. But yes, yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (53:45)
Yeah, so most of the most of the money Unity making right now is not from the editor itself. So on one hand I have the question, is Unity still considering in the community vector.

Mike Geig (53:59)
Vector. Vector. Took me a second.

Amit Netanel (54:02)
Vector, vector, vector.

Yuri Sokolov (54:03)
Vector. So does Unity still considers indie game developers, solo game developers as as a niche worth investing in and competing with Godot. And the second question is maybe maybe it's time we made Unity open source with dual licensing or something that that will still that will allow people to to create PRs but will still allow Unity to charge money for for the usage. So it it's still possible.

Mike Geig (54:33)
Yeah. All right. So answer your question. I'm actually gonna answer them in the reverse order because I've been fighting the open source battle for years because I firmly believe the same thing, or at least like make it read only so you can see the source code and so you can know like, okay, this is why this is happening and something like this. I used to be I used to do Unreal development in the past back in the Unreal three days, and and not having source code access meant I was chasing my tail on so many things. Where it was like, why isn't this thing working? And it's like behind the scenes was deprecated and we just didn't tell you and whatever, right? Things were very different back then. But I would love to see the source code available for Unity. there's an internal, like just debate always ongoing of whether we should versus whether we shouldn't. Yeah, it it's just one of those like It's it's a philosophy decision, it's a business decision, it's a lot of these things. But I I'm in agreement. I would I don't know that I would go necessarily open source 'cause there's a lot of overhead with going through those PRs and things like that. But at least making our source code available because everyone knows it's out there anyway. You can find it. People have decompiled the engine or leaked our source code. It's not impossible to find. So at this point

Yuri Sokolov (55:42)
The code available is not really helping. I mean I mean I mean I'll tell you I'll tell you why I'm asking this question and

Mike Geig (55:49)
Okay.

Yuri Sokolov (55:50)
why this is a topic I wanna force everywhere, but I'm not active enough on social networks. Is a lot of people constantly complain about stuff missing from the engine. And then when Unity shifts its focus to develop something, maybe this something is really awesome and important, like Core CLR, for example. I'm I'm all

Mike Geig (56:13)
Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (56:13)
for that. So Unity kind of covering this this topic for me. I like it. But some, I don't know, technical artists out there are struggling with some tools, the other tools, and say, why we we don't need this core CLR. Go develop the tools we need. And with that, and Unity can do so much because there's a limited amount of developers in the company. And putting the this the code out there, even in a dual licensing system, not MIT or whatever, you you're making dual licensing like a lot of tools do these days. And allowing, okay, create PRs. It's a lot cheaper to maintain two or three developers full time that will all that they do is reviewing PRs than developing all of it yourself. So I think this kind of Or bug fixes. You know what? Bug fixes. Unity has bugs. What can you do? If a community can fix

Mike Geig (57:14)
Yeah. No no no, I agree with you on the bug fixes for sure would be awesome.

Yuri Sokolov (57:18)
those bugs while Unity can still maintain the the financial side of things and still charge you the same amounts without, you know, compromising, because dual licensing cover that covered this.

Mike Geig (57:31)
Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (57:32)
So it it can be awesome. I don't know. This this is why I'm advocating for this.

Mike Geig (57:38)
No, I I don't disagree with you. I I'm on your side. I mean, I would love to again, I in my mind, the easiest path is just making source code available, but obviously it would be even better, with a little bit of effort to to be open source. I don't I don't disagree with you. And I will keep fighting that fight, and maybe someday I'll win it. But please do.

Amit Netanel (57:57)
I wanna be devil's I wanna be devil's advocate about some

Yuri Sokolov (57:57)
You know what?

Amit Netanel (58:00)
of the things you've just said. I I also go back

Yuri Sokolov (58:01)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll mute you for a second.

Amit Netanel (58:05)
from I I also wanna start with the latest and go back just a bit. the open source like community. when you're embracing the open source lifestyle, you're embracing drama, basically.

Mike Geig (58:24)
Ha ha ha.

Amit Netanel (58:24)
Okay, you're you're inviting drama into your organization. Like the most how do you know that you've made it in open source is that is the moment that someone forks your project because it disagrees with the way you're running things. Okay, that's not that's how you know you've made it. And for a company, it's really, really important to keep like for some sort of focus. And I think that what we're seeing in recent years. That I like about Unity and I'm not married to I mean my my income is kind of married to Unity in a way, but I'm not I'm not sold on Unity, but Unity's value to me has increased because I'm developing a mobile game. And I think that recent like product decisions have served this like my my segment more than other decisions. Like the move to core CLR and The the reason?

Yuri Sokolov (59:23)
You won't see it. You specifically won't see the core CLR. You just migrated from Unity two thousand Yeah.

Amit Netanel (59:29)
like two years two years after it's ready, b maybe, or in the next game. I don't know. But or in my side projects. But I digress. I think the the the stabilization and stuff we're seeing in recent years is more aligned with my goals as someone who's like a tech lead in a mobile studio, okay, or something like that. serving the the audience. That develops games for game jams that ban like AI usage, like the GMTK game jam. I think, okay, that and that's why I'm the devil's advocate, is not serving the the mobile game segment. Right? It's people that are opinionated, they they flock to drama and it will basically divert Mike's attention from making the product better to being like a politician or like declaring stuff all day long and keeping maintain and and maintaining stuff that is important to people that are not me. Okay. That that that we we we we operate in like parallel fields. We're both game developers, but we we we are in completely different worlds. And yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (1:00:46)
And that's exactly why it should be open source because then y Unity would not have to shift focus towards one side or another, because there will be people that are passionate about some stuff and they develop those parts. But again, I had another question you that you that kind of got lost here. Yeah.

Mike Geig (1:01:06)
Yeah. Yeah, let me get back to the the first question there about you know, wh where our priorities lie and stuff like that. So I you know, you you mentioned like the growth being on the non gaming side and and most of our revenue coming from things like, you know, ads and IEP and and and all that stuff. And that's been the case for years and years and years, right? Where in a way we kind of subsidize the development of the engine. actually within the last year and a half, two years was like the first time the engine actually made money from its licenses. Otherwise it lost money and we relied on ads and things like that to to basically cover the cost of an engine development. and that's not unique to us. you know when I think I I forget what it was when when Epic had to lay off all the folks from Fall Guys, right? Because of of loss of No no no they no no they they

Yuri Sokolov (1:01:55)
Because they used Unity.

Mike Geig (1:01:59)
they they bought the company or the studio, converted them to Unreal but but laid them off when s Something happened because the developing the engine was so expensive, right? Like so people subsidize the development of the engine because it's expensive to do and and yeah, it doesn't necessarily make a ton of money. But our ours is profitable now, which is great. But when you ask if if our priorities are not on the the indies, the hobbyists and things like that, no, no, it is that's our bread and butter. That's like our most important people, right? Like sure we're showing a lot of growth in non-gaming because there's a lot of growth to be had because it's such a huge You it's not an industry, it's many, many industries, right? That have never even heard of a real-time 3D engine, you know, like this. So there's so much growth potential where there's no one in games who hasn't heard of Unity, right? So obviously our growth is gonna be limited there. but these developers, the the they're kind of the heart and soul of the industry, in in my opinion. But they're also the folks that are kind of the lifebloods where new ideas come from. It's where just all of these unique and interesting, explosive pieces of content come from that eventually get turned into more corporate art, you know, how many copies of a copy of a copy of Flappy Bird can we possibly have. But but no, I think the the indies, the hobbies are incredibly important to us. I'm not particularly precious about which text someone chooses to use for a game jam, you know, but you know, I would I would fight very hard to convince someone who really wants to make a game and wants to make it commercially viable, I'd fight really hard to convince them that Unity is the right tool for them for a lot of reasons. Even if they're, you know, just a hobbyist who's not really sure what they're building or a one or two person studio. I think absolutely incredibly important. That's I mean, that's where I live my life, right? We have anyone who has like the the the mid size or bigger studios, they have reps at Unity that they can just call up. People at Unity that manage their accounts and stuff like that.

Yuri Sokolov (1:03:52)
Mm-mm.

Mike Geig (1:03:53)
My team, we speak for everyone else. Everyone else who doesn't have that. so no, they're incredibly important. It it gets lost sometimes because some of our tools are aimed at some of maybe the bigger studios and stuff like this. and it's challenging to find that line of like, okay, but how are we building this so the people that maybe maybe don't have this or availability of this can still be very successful. but yeah, it's a big part of what we do and we align ourselves to is is the the the indie, the smaller studio, the studios that that need these really professional tools to build amazing stuff. try to think of

Yuri Sokolov (1:04:32)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (1:04:33)
pretty particular examples, but but yeah, it's constantly things that we're focused on. It may not always look

Yuri Sokolov (1:04:41)
Great to hear.

Mike Geig (1:04:42)
like it.

Yuri Sokolov (1:04:44)
Well, you know, it's the it depends on the person looking because I don't know, I think me and Amid here can can agree with the with that because we've been working in big companies in our past. we know how things work and one of the things you said earlier in this conversation is that unity is not one person. It's it's many, many people that everybody

Amit Netanel (1:05:09)
Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (1:05:10)
wants to make it better but have different opinions. So We felt it firsthand and maybe, maybe people that never worked in such a big environment. Maybe people who worked in intimate companies, small companies with two, three people, ten people that everybody thinks alike and and they never experienced those issues. And yeah, I do believe that Unity want to do something for this community. Not necessarily they will do that, but I do believe

Amit Netanel (1:05:41)
Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (1:05:42)
People inside Unity do want to do that. And speaking of the the thing you said that there are industri industries that never heard of 3D live whatever you use real time 3D

Mike Geig (1:05:54)
Real time three D. Yeah, yeah. As a concept.

Yuri Sokolov (1:05:57)
right. So I know that Unity is kind of big right now in Unity industry, right? It it's called Unity Industry or Unity

Mike Geig (1:06:04)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (1:06:06)
Industries. So which I see a lot as as a Unity certified instructor, I see a lot of documentations and and companies that that interact with Unity for this topic specifically for digital twin. And I have to ask why in the world somebody need a digital twin?

Mike Geig (1:06:31)
I mean well there's a a l well, one, there's a few different ways to think of digital twins. And from that there's a lot of different reasons someone would need it. so one of the the earliest examples when we first started kind of serving the non-gaming industries that that I I used a lot is there was GE who has these offshore oil rigs, right? And

Yuri Sokolov (1:06:55)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (1:06:56)
a big part of Of onboarding for executives was to actually visit one of these and do a tour of these offshore oil rigs, but that required you to put someone on a helicopter and fly them offshore out into the deep seas to these oil rigs and whatever and walk them through it. And they were one of the early adopters, and it this may not still be true. I don't know what it's been a long time since I have any concept of what they're doing. So sorry, GE if I'm misrepresenting what you do now. I just know what you did back then. is they would have a digital twin of the offshore oil rigs that they would use to then virtually through VR, walk the executives through so that you didn't actually have to take them out there. you know, so there's something like that. But there's also a lot of like marketing, right? There's a lot of digital twin twinning used in in marketing content. there's a lot of it used in training content for teaching people how to do I don't know repair on Schnook helicopters and things like that. A lot of simulations and stuff like that that all require this concept of the digital twin. which you could think of digital twin as either just a digital representation of something that exists in the real world, or you could think of it sort of in the metaverse, like you have this real world thing and its exact digital twin, like my pair of sneakers as a digital thing, which is not usually what we mean when we say digital twin, though some people might mean that. but ultimately it's just, you know. Go ahead.

Yuri Sokolov (1:08:15)
I've just so saw a couple of examples and and comp companies, tractor company in somewhere I think in Finland if I'm not mistaken, that build

Mike Geig (1:08:27)
Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (1:08:27)
this digital twin on their website that you can come and and like visit the visit their store online and I'm look

Mike Geig (1:08:37)
Yeah. Like a configurator.

Yuri Sokolov (1:08:40)
I'm with a configurator and stuff and by the way I Thanks to this company, I discovered that inside of tractors there's there's amazing tech. They they

Mike Geig (1:08:51)
yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (1:08:51)
put subwoofers and and and many, many fun things inside, but that doesn't matter. When I looked at it and I said, well, it looks like kind of a gimmick to me. Like, I don't know, it probably cost a lot more than it than the benefit it brought to to develop online 3D representation of a store. Because I don't know.

Mike Geig (1:09:20)
I I I so there was a a medical company that I visited again

Yuri Sokolov (1:09:24)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (1:09:25)
years ago. But what they did is they they they specialize in surgical equipment, like really, really high end, really, really sophisticated surgical equipment. And their sales reps would travel all over the country and and demo these tools at hospitals and stuff like that. We're talking like bone saws and stuff like that, and just the demo kit, just just for the the sales rep to have this this collection of tools cost the company like five million dollars each because these tools are crazy expensive and they replaced much of that with digital twins. So the idea being that you know you could either with with with VR AR or just through their website or whatever, like learn and and experiment, play around with these digital versions of these tools. And then if you got to a point you were so interested, but you absolutely had to see it in person, then that a rep would come out specifically for you. But otherwise, you could just make your your purchasing decisions and stuff online. so, you know, there's a lot to be made. And I firmly believe that if it costs more than it brought in, companies wouldn't be doing it, but a lot of companies are doing it. So I I trust the money that some that that someone has validated that this this helps.

Amit Netanel (1:10:42)
I got the chance to see all sorts of usages for Unity. I couldn't imagine. Like I was interested in buying a house and went to some sort of agency.

Mike Geig (1:10:52)
yeah, the walkthroughs.

Amit Netanel (1:10:53)
Yeah, and I saw the Unity logo at the start. I was like, Yes, I know how it was built. And I had a consultation client a while a while back that works within a university. That has a VR lab that they they actually conduct like social study experiments, but because setting up like a maze or a moral dilemma is so hard to do with real people that setting it up with virtual real reality was super easy. And I actually worked with them on how to reproduce lots of those because once one laboratory saw the effects. of that, everyone wanted to use it. So they got swamped with requests.

Mike Geig (1:11:41)
I when VR when VR was first like really exploding with like the Oculus Rift and stuff like that. yeah, I used to travel around and do a talk, the neuroscience of VR as like what's actually happening with your eyes and your brain and stuff when you're doing these pres even when you're when you're

Amit Netanel (1:11:56)
Mm.

Mike Geig (1:11:56)
using it. And you're right, it's so interesting because your brain imprints VR as like these real sort of memories and experiences. So you can actually use it for like real tests that require emotional connection and stuff like that, which seems ridiculous. Like you're like, I know I'm in a VR thing, but But a lot of your brain doesn't. Most of your brain doesn't. Just part of your

Amit Netanel (1:12:13)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Mike Geig (1:12:14)
brain does. so you actually do a lot from from things like training your eyes to to effect more effectively work together, treatment for PTSD and and a lot of these other things. So yeah, a lot of medical companies, a lot of research facilities, the digital twinning stuff is is incredibly important for them.

Yuri Sokolov (1:12:31)
speaking of other v Unity ventures, Unity Studio, what is it?

Mike Geig (1:12:37)
Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (1:12:38)
And who is this for?

Mike Geig (1:12:41)
So Unity Studio, which I'm not as familiar with because I I'm mostly on the game side of things, but Unity Studio is effectively a not really a light version of Unity. Maybe we could consider it that, but it is a way for folks who don't want to have the the full editor experience, right? So we're talking like, you know, tech managers, decision makers, people that need to review stuff. There's this lightweight sort of browser based version where you can do some small amounts of edits, but really it's about seeing the work that's been done. you know, in the editor. So yes,

Yuri Sokolov (1:13:12)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (1:13:13)
there is a an editing interface so you can do again some some modifications, some changes, some some interactions and stuff like that. But for the most part, it's like, yeah, let's let's check through these things. Let's let's say yes, this is good and let's, you know, collaborate on this thing here and stuff like that. So that's probably the best way to kind of talk about that. It it's an evolution of a product called struct. that, you know, basically was like like, hey, let's let's make this thing better work for again, I don't want I I'm gonna say editor replacement. I don't mean an editor replacement, but an editor replacement for the people who didn't want to use or didn't know how to use the

Yuri Sokolov (1:13:50)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (1:13:51)
full editor experience.

Yuri Sokolov (1:13:52)
Who don't want to download the Well, I I I encountered encountered this recently. I never thought about it this way, but I've thought a class in a university this year

Mike Geig (1:14:05)
Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (1:14:06)
and I had

Amit Netanel (1:14:07)
Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (1:14:07)
students That complain that they cannot install more than one

Mike Geig (1:14:11)
Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (1:14:12)
Unity editor on their computer because it's taking too much space. And I'm like, I never had this problem. I like I'm sitting with five Unity versions simultaneously and a ton of other other software, but but naturally there are people and if if somebody is working in I don't know a product manager for example. usually gets a computer that is less less powerful with less storage and maybe for those people. But again it it's not the same thing as Unity Pipeline, right? It's two different two different

Mike Geig (1:14:50)
The they're two different things, though the idea of the pipeline will eventually support Studio and enable you to create your own tools atop of Pipeline that can do stuff like that.

Yuri Sokolov (1:15:02)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (1:15:03)
we we go back and forth between calling it Unity Pipeline and just the Unity API, because they kind of mean the same thing. But but basically, yeah. So the idea is that we'll be exposing you know, different APIs that will allow you to create tools.

Yuri Sokolov (1:15:19)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (1:15:19)
that sit on top of the Unity experience or or extend your workflows in meaningful ways.

Yuri Sokolov (1:15:24)
Got it. Got it. Interesting. Interesting. I still don't really 100% sure I know what people who work with Unity Studio will do in Unity Studio because I don't know it it's it's a 3D modification software. I don't know, it's a it's a cat online or it's a it's a replacement for a blender online or What i is it? Can I develop games with it? Can I develop something with it?

Mike Geig (1:15:53)
I would say that it I mean, well, you could develop games with anything, right? Like that if if if humanity has taught me anything, we've got Doom running on pregnancy tests. Like you can you can you can use anything to make games. My first game I wrote on

Amit Netanel (1:16:03)
Confirmed.

Mike Geig (1:16:05)
a TI eighty three calculator in basic syntax. but but no, the idea is that like it's it's limited in terms of like scripting and interaction and stuff like that. So it's it's a lot more for just like graphical changes and such.

Yuri Sokolov (1:16:20)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (1:16:20)
And again. I might be speaking ignorantly. Sorry, Unity folks, if I'm misrepresenting. I've not touched Studio beside beyond just seeing the our initial internal, like, this is it, this is what it does, and check it out.

Yuri Sokolov (1:16:30)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (1:16:31)
I'm like, this is really cool. so there may have been functionality that's been added to it that I'm I'm ignorant of. But but again, the idea is that it it's truly just a light editor experience. It's not something that I would sit use to primarily create start to finish an application or anything like that. Maybe it would be doable if I was creating an incredibly light application, but but not anything of any like substance.

Yuri Sokolov (1:16:57)
Got it.

Mike Geig (1:16:59)
Yeah.

Amit Netanel (1:16:58)
Yeah, I took like three, four minutes to come up with what you guys are talking about because I saw the the announcement and played around with it a bit and shut it down because but but I I totally as as someone who also teaches Unity, I can totally see how it works in a classroom environment.

Mike Geig (1:17:19)
Mm-hmm.

Amit Netanel (1:17:20)
people have I I won't say many, it's not over encumbering, but I don't know, like people have issues setting up Unity sometimes and it you know it gets for for developers, I would say, yeah, solve the issue. Like you you're a developer, you should you should be able. it's a good experience for you. But for I

Mike Geig (1:17:44)
Mm-hmm.

Amit Netanel (1:17:44)
don't know, someone young, let's say high school age, it's it's it's awesome. Like just whip up your browser and start you know, moving transforms

Mike Geig (1:17:52)
Absolutely.

Amit Netanel (1:17:53)
around.

Mike Geig (1:17:54)
And you know, honestly,

Yuri Sokolov (1:17:54)
By the way, I just

Mike Geig (1:17:55)
it it it's something I have heard more and more is is people, especially folks in emerging markets and stuff like that, saying, like, my laptop is too slow to run unique. That's why I use Godot. And it's like that's

Amit Netanel (1:18:04)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Mike Geig (1:18:06)
good feedback, right? Like that's that's true. Like if it if it's too cumbersome, you know, like in in this case, I know we're talking about studio, but but it is something that it has come up a little bit more as the engine has gotten bigger and heavier and stuff like that that It is a real limitation for some folks. So a lightweight.

Yuri Sokolov (1:18:22)
But it's the same like saying my my driver's license does not allow me to drive a truck. That's why I'm a cab driver and a not a truck driver. It's like, okay, sure, Unity is slower, but it's also offering you a lot more, like if you put everything that's inside of Unity into Godot, Godot will also get slow. So

Mike Geig (1:18:41)
it would also be absolutely. I'm not I'm not saying it to be like we've screwed up in some way, but it's just the realities, right? Like sometimes things just don't work a certain way because just the realities of your hardware. but but certainly, yeah, like again, to your point, Godot would have the same problem if it had, you know, the all of the code and features and all these things. It's not unique to us, it's just the

Yuri Sokolov (1:19:04)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (1:19:05)
reality that we have right now.

Yuri Sokolov (1:19:07)
Yeah. By the way, as as I said, I'm really fond of the changes that Unity implementing in the in the whole Unity six lineup. It's like you've just made yourself, okay, we're taking all of the tech debt and we're starting tackling the tech debt and the the most technical aspects of the tech debt, right? The core of the engine and it it stick in my box. I really love it. but I still there is some sorts a little bit of criticism, I would say. And I would like to to discuss it. For example, at the beginning of this year, I remember myself talking with a lot of people and praising Unity saying, you know, Unity at last started to understand what it is to develop a game. Because a lot of for a lot of time there was this criticism that hey Epic Games they have Fortnite. They know what a game developer needs and they develop tools that they need and the other developers needs. Unity don't

Amit Netanel (1:20:19)
Yeah. For for an organization as an organization, they can close close the loop of feedback. We need

Yuri Sokolov (1:20:26)
Mm-hmm.

Amit Netanel (1:20:26)
w the tooling that we need internally. They don't need Mike to hunt for the feedback, you know.

Yuri Sokolov (1:20:33)
Yeah, and and Unity kind of it felt at least from the sidelines. I I don't know how it's internally from the sidelines, it looked always like Unity is is throwing something out there and hoping it will stick. And then here somewhere between year two thousand twenty-five, two thousand twenty-six, I told money people, I think even on my YouTube channel, I mentioned it. That I love that Unity at last understands what it is to build games because there were a team that develops games internally, and there were Supersonic that develops games for mobile market, and Unity started to work with external studios like Marvel Snap. And and this year there will were other studios, I don't remember the exact names of the studios you advertised. And now suddenly we see the that supersonic got sold. The team that were developing games internally got disbanded and people probably got fired. I I'm not sure if they were fired or not. But basically, we're back to square one. And this is kind of disturbing to me as a developer because I really liked this direction and suddenly it's cut off.

Mike Geig (1:21:52)
So what here's what's interesting about that is that for years now, Unity has been making games. We've made hundreds of titles. We do this with our internal teams under contract with third parties to build these for them. And so you never hear about it because they're not our games. They're the games of these third parties and stuff like that. I believe what you're seeing is not that hey, Unity finally started making games, so they're they're integrating these features in the engine and and making good decisions.

Yuri Sokolov (1:22:20)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (1:22:21)
What you're seeing is the efforts of the last couple years where we went from a company that was trying to be everything to everyone, putting, you know, putting features out for

Amit Netanel (1:22:32)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (1:22:32)
everything and film and this and that and all these to say, you know what? Who are we? you know, I always say that, you know, when the original goal was the democratizing game development, and when we did that, when we succeeded, right? It was like, well, now who are we? Where the hero that slayed the dragon and came home and goes, Now what? And we went through a few years

Yuri Sokolov (1:22:51)
Advertisement.

Mike Geig (1:22:53)
of this identity crisis of being like, who are we? We're we're we're gonna drive the creation of everything. And it that's not realistic. And so over the last maybe year and a half, two years, we've said, you know, we're gonna be this thing. We're gonna, yeah, we we have industry and we help industry and there's some really good use cases there, but but really We need to get back to our core and focus on games and our game developers. The rest will come. Like the more people that use Unity to build quality games, the better our vector ads solution become like all of these things feed into each other. And so what you're seeing now is the results of us taking this feedback and applying it in a very concentrated, focused way. And we didn't disband any internal teams that make games. We we've changed structures around considerably, but we still have the verified solutions partners. the VSP team, which we talk about, no, no, not the VSPs. forgetting the acronym I just use the the name of the people that we use for the asset store and that's not the same thing. Sorry the acronym has escaped me, but we just talked about it during our roadmap talk at Unite Soul. There is this team that verifies every feature with real production games that's building these games and solutions for

Yuri Sokolov (1:24:07)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (1:24:08)
for people and and really using that feedback and and more than anything That is a now central to every feature we release. So before, where it was like we would gather information, use that to inform our roadmap. Now no feature hits the shelves unless it has been verified by an actual production, both internally and externally. so that's that's what you're seeing. Not that we've, Supersonic's

Yuri Sokolov (1:24:35)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (1:24:36)
gone or this team's gone, and so now we don't care about this anymore. We care about it more than ever. It's just now. become a part of this central process to our devo like our development. So it's less visible, which is why we specifically call it out. I'm I'm I've got the the slide deck in front of me here. I'm just gonna look real quick 'cause it's bugging me that I can't remember the name.

Amit Netanel (1:24:55)
That's the difference between a good question and an excellent question.

Mike Geig (1:24:59)
Yeah, it's bugging me now. But anyway, but yeah, so this stuff is still incredibly important to us. and more than yeah, production verification, the P V team. Okay, that's yeah. so yeah, that that is still core of of what we're doing. And and I'll say, you know, obviously my perspective might be a little biased, but but I've noted even that the The people who internally work at Unity within the last couple of years have felt better about working at Unity, have felt more like, okay, we finally are focused again. We're finally doing things that that we feel really good about and morale, you know, is is is going up and up and up. now it was painful to get here for sure. And there have been a lot of layoffs and things like that, which which sucks, truly sucks. but it was all for this effort of focusing in. in my opinion, on the things that we all agreed, like, yes, we need to to to do this instead of everything.

Yuri Sokolov (1:26:01)
Okay, so this this is kind of a reassuring. you've mentioned that you've developed game that you for clients of Unity clients, were there those games? I I'm not asking you to provide me names or s stuff like that, but are those games something that I can, I don't know, encounter in the wild, like maybe something

Mike Geig (1:26:25)
yeah. Yeah yeah. Tons of

Yuri Sokolov (1:26:26)
I've played and basically it's under the NDA Unity Developed, but nobody knows it and mm hmm.

Mike Geig (1:26:32)
Kind like ghostwriters, right? Like we were what the what what was originally called our Spotlight team, and I think it

Yuri Sokolov (1:26:37)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (1:26:37)
had a different name even before Spotlight, but Spotlight's the name I remember. and it it's has since changed names and whatever, whatever a whole bunch of times. What hasn't, but but yeah, so we effectively would have basically these internal teams that could be basically rented out. So if you were a studio you could hire us for support, you know, and we have our different support tiers and stuff like that, or you could go the highest level of support and say, Hey, you make my game. in which we would then be the development team for your game. and then take that that learning and that feedback, you know, back in with

Yuri Sokolov (1:27:14)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (1:27:14)
us. But again, it would there was never as much of a concentrated effort to integrate that feedback as there is now.

Yuri Sokolov (1:27:22)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (1:27:22)
It's at an all time high because we understand for years people saying, I wish you need to make games and we're just like, But we do. You just don't you just don't know about it, but we do.

Amit Netanel (1:27:29)
It's it it's it's

Yuri Sokolov (1:27:29)
Ha ha

Amit Netanel (1:27:31)
you know it's part of the it it's it's a bit I don't know it's a bit tragic because you have developed stuff. Yeah, yeah,

Yuri Sokolov (1:27:37)
You need to scream about it on every corner.

Amit Netanel (1:27:40)
yeah. You can't be I the the thing you can be you know vocal and show is your consultation work, I think. Because there was a long period of time in which like every a week or other week or so you would go online on YouTube with a developer that makes a game within Unity and talk about tech stuff. I really like that series, and it's coming back. I think I saw a scheduled broadcast, but I don't know that that's

Mike Geig (1:28:15)
Quite possibly.

Amit Netanel (1:28:16)
that that's an indicator, like a strong indicator that Unity is at least you know working with studios that make games with Unity, and that tells me. That okay, the feedback is is being received. Like and

Mike Geig (1:28:30)
Yes.

Amit Netanel (1:28:30)
if I if I like the game and it's a good game, then even more so.

Yuri Sokolov (1:28:35)
And speaking of international

Mike Geig (1:28:35)
Yeah, the feedback was always coming in. It's just now that we're making a much greater effort to use it.

Amit Netanel (1:28:41)
Mm-hmm. Cool.

Yuri Sokolov (1:28:42)
And this is kind of awesome. speaking of internal games, so I saw recently one of tutorials that Unity start started to put in out kind of recently. I saw a game and I'm looking at it and it's I at least from the videos, it it looks like something a friend of mine did during a game jam, but he did something completely different. The idea behind the game is the is the same. It's It's two stages and the crowd, the kind of each band need to steal the stage. I searched for that

Mike Geig (1:29:16)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The K pop versus middle.

Yuri Sokolov (1:29:20)
yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly that. So I searched for that and and came to the conclusion that it's something internal that you never published publicly. Is there any

Mike Geig (1:29:30)
Correct.

Yuri Sokolov (1:29:30)
chance to get my hands on this thing?

Mike Geig (1:29:36)
I could try to find it for you.

Yuri Sokolov (1:29:36)
Because I need to kick kick K pop asses, you know. I need

Mike Geig (1:29:41)
So that was that was an internal dog fooding experiment of some of our creation tools, specifically our AI creation tools, to see like, okay, what can a person just generate through prompts and things like that. we were going to do more with it. We still may. I don't know what the plans for are right now, but it was never really meant to be like this let's show this the world, it's a demo that you can Pull apart or stuff like that. I was I might be able to find it for you, but but but yeah, it was a part of our internal dog fooding efforts. and that's another thing. So what we do is we often do these like dog fooding weeks where dev teams will will take a pause and actually use features and stuff to make games internally. And there's a lot of really both cool games that come out of it and then also a lot of learnings. Every time

Yuri Sokolov (1:30:34)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (1:30:34)
I do it though, I I my games are Garp. My games are always terrible. I can never commit to one idea. So my game is like a little bit of this, a little bit of that. And then it's just being me just seeing how how much I could try to break the engine more more than anything. So everyone's like, let me see your game's like you don't want that.

Yuri Sokolov (1:30:47)
That's why me and Amit are working. That's why me and Amit are working on a team. That's why we're doing this podcast together. Because if it was one of us, we're kind of balancing each other. So if it was one of us, it would be awful. I can guarantee you.

Amit Netanel (1:31:02)
It's it's a reality check. Like every

Mike Geig (1:31:04)
Yeah.

Amit Netanel (1:31:04)
time you suggest a ridiculous idea, mid-sentence to another another just another person, you know, just say it to another person and you start to realize what you're saying is insane and you stop mid-sentence,

Yuri Sokolov (1:31:15)
Mm-hmm.

Amit Netanel (1:31:17)
that's that's the all-value proposition of of pitching to another person.

Yuri Sokolov (1:31:21)
Yeah, but but we're

Mike Geig (1:31:21)
That's fair. That's

Yuri Sokolov (1:31:22)
kind

Mike Geig (1:31:22)
fair.

Yuri Sokolov (1:31:23)
kind of drifted to a positive vibe. I want to bring us to the the to the the darker me. yeah, yeah, yeah. Something like that. It's it's

Amit Netanel (1:31:27)
Yeah, yeah, that's the that's the journalism part of the podcast. Yeah.

Mike Geig (1:31:29)
sure. Yeah yeah. Mm hard hitting questions.

Yuri Sokolov (1:31:33)
not journalism per se, because I'm not in a i i in this area. I'm more talking about my experiences and what's important for me personally, not

Amit Netanel (1:31:41)
Yeah, sure. Sure.

Yuri Sokolov (1:31:43)
for my potential viewers or listeners. There were a couple of couple of packages that were closed recently with all the shift of attention to core CLR, DOTS and stuff like that. And mainly one of the packages that I think is is absolutely must for completing the the ECS transition, the DOTS ecosystem is the animation framework, the new animation system.

Mike Geig (1:32:16)
Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (1:32:16)
Are there Any plans on bringing it back or maybe open sourcing it

Mike Geig (1:32:24)
I I suppose the best I can say is that I can't say right now. that's

Yuri Sokolov (1:32:29)
Got it, got it.

Mike Geig (1:32:30)
all I can offer up on that. I mean, yes, we're aware of it. I here I let me actually I'll take a step back. The two things that were cut that that come up all the time was the world building stuff and the animation tools,

Yuri Sokolov (1:32:41)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (1:32:42)
right? That that were were cut as a part of like the refocusing and the layoffs and just the restructuring and stuff like that, for sure. a lot of things, a lot of times we don't get a chance to talk about the reasoning behind stuff. Cause it wasn't like, we don't care about this, we're getting rid of it. the tools as they were at the time, and this is my understanding, and I I'll just preface by saying that I will never lie to you, but I reserve the right to be wrong because I'm a human being. My understanding of it at the time is that we brought these tools to many customers behind closed doors and realized that the tools, while cool and powerful, weren't actually serving the real needs of anybody. Right. It was like one studio is like, I need it more like this, or I need it more like and it wasn't accomplishing. And so it was like, all right, so we have these things we could just keep building, but without so many other priorities, we're like, okay, let's just pause it because it it's not hitting the marks we need it to hit. So it's not that we don't value those tools or understand that our users ask for them constantly, constantly, constantly. They come up every week. It is that we didn't want to do a thing where we built this thing and then it comes out and everyone goes, All right, but what's it actually f for? Because I needed to do this and not this and this and not this. So with all that being said, we are aware of that. And we are we're looking into it. And maybe later this year there's more I can talk about.

Amit Netanel (1:34:12)
No

Yuri Sokolov (1:34:11)
For me, for me it was

Amit Netanel (1:34:12)
no because because I have to say before Yuri brings it up, he talks about dots a lot of the time and he has to always just end the all the nice things he can say about ECS and dots with don't use it because it's not completed yet. There's no animation system and you're going to have a bad time animating your your game in general.

Yuri Sokolov (1:34:35)
So b yeah, yeah. So basically if you're looking at any any example of game made with dots with ACS particularly, it's usually non humanoid characters moving there. So no it's usually hard surface elements, tanks, cars, flying cars or whatever. Because in order to add skin meshes and animate stuff, you need to kind of use them the use it with along with game objects, which for me, and maybe you'll correct me here, for me it's kind of defeats the purpose because I'm aiming towards towards optimization and from my experience I know how even an empty game object, if there's enough of them on the scene, how this can affect the performance of the game.

Mike Geig (1:35:28)
It's it's challenging. So we've had different narratives and different ways we've talked about ECS or dots over the years. and I think that our our current approach and the way that I talk about them, I I believe is to be, you know, maybe the the better way. I don't recommend anyone sit down and be like, I'm gonna make my game entirely with dots. You know, you're I I just don't think it's necessary. Then because to your point, right, animations and other systems just don't work with it. instead I always advise to to build a game object-based game. And when you hit a problem that you can't solve with object-oriented, you know, patterns with component-based systems, stuff like that, that's when you convert those pieces to dots. And in fact, a lot of our our baking systems and stuff like that exist that way so that you can just work with game objects and have them turned into ECS behind the scenes. So yeah, if you're doing humanoid animations, obviously you would use entities maybe to represent the data layer behind those those dumb ob dumb game objects, what I call them, those dumb objects, right? That that purely hold like animation stuff like that. And maybe even just you just stencil stamp a bunch of those or use particles or whatever even. But but yeah, it's about using the tool that solves the particular problem. so I wouldn't advise go out and make a dots game. But like even one of the the the demos I used to talk about all the time is where I have this game and I'm shooting and now there's a bunch of enemies and my game slows down. Well let's let's convert some of that collision detection to to dots. Let's convert some of that, you know, behind the scenes tracking of bullets and enemy positions and stuff like that. Let's convert all that to dots and it's like, you know, fifty thousand times faster, something insane. so that, you know, it works. Or like the boat attack demo that we put out where the water was basically this really sophisticated Gertzner wave function, which is how it got the nice rolling water,

Yuri Sokolov (1:37:23)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (1:37:24)
you

Amit Netanel (1:37:24)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (1:37:24)
know, it's called a Gertzner wave, but that's all really heavy to calculate. So I just converted just the calculations of the points of the Gertner wave into entities with the job system burst compiler and it sped that up like a crazy amount. And then we just marshaled the data back to be like, all right, water points, this is where you're at now that we've done the calculation. So yeah, I I would never encourage someone to be like, make your entire game with dots, or make your entire game without dots. When you hit a problem that you're like, what's the solution to this problem? It's data number crunching. Then there you go. That's ECS, that's burst, that's jobs.

Yuri Sokolov (1:37:59)
Yeah, I can understand it, but it's still kind of counterintuitive for me because this thing has been developed for a long, long time and it was on pause, it was brought back, it was restructured, refactored, now the whole engine is going to a transition that that game objects will be entities behind the scenes. So kind of is this transition is the answer to our issues that kind of Okay, GameObject is an entity right now, so you can use your or we will see a support. I don't know. I don't really need a custom animation system. I just need the tools that we already have to work together. So if if an entity representing a skinned mesh, I I would expect to be able to to set up an anime animation for that.

Mike Geig (1:38:52)
Yeah. and I I think specifically with skin mesh, and again I could be wrong on this one, but the reason that one doesn't work in in Entities Land is just the way the memory is allocated for skin mesh renderers. and I think the biggest challenge with with any amount of like either job system or ECS is the much more extreme limitations on the data types

Yuri Sokolov (1:39:13)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (1:39:13)
and and how it's stored. and so that's why a lot of things have a little bit more challenge. But what we're seeing is not like a game object. has an entity or is an entity in the background, instead we're we're moving towards a system where you could put entity data on game objects so they be kind of become the same thing. And then how their processes it depends entirely upon how you write your code and stuff like that. So a thing can be an entity if you want to write entities code or be a game object if you want to write game objects code. And they become it's it's it's this merging of the two where we can you know

Amit Netanel (1:39:46)
Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (1:39:47)
Is transform is going to transition to to the entity world world behind the scenes, the transform itself.

Mike Geig (1:39:54)
I I think it already has. I think it's now called transform ref as the actual entity data. so I think I that might I think that's already in place.

Yuri Sokolov (1:40:03)
Because

Mike Geig (1:40:03)
the idea being that once this work is done, you won't see a difference. It won't be any different to you. but it will be these things. No, I just mean in your workflows. It

Yuri Sokolov (1:40:08)
But I wanna see a difference. I w I wanna s

Amit Netanel (1:40:09)
That was that was the premise. That was the premise like marketing wise, but I could totally see how it works because a game object, a transform, already has two like two pieces of data existing at the same time, right? You have the native part and you have the in engine part. like the the the non native part. So why not like converting at least the one that's under the hood? Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (1:40:37)
No, they they already do it, but I I I still think of it like game objects did the issue with them for me. If I if I want to to go to and I totally can get behind split your work, do this in ECS, do that, not in ECS. well I did work with S ECS, and sometimes it's difficult to to kind of make a clean cut. but regardless, let's say I can. I still the issue with game objects. If I plus place a lot of game objects on the scene, even if those game objects are empty, they still currently have a transform that's already calculating things as long as the the object is not static. Then every object is listening to messages. and and a lot of stuff. So we encountered an issue. There's there's the an There's an asset on asset store called Master Audio. I

Mike Geig (1:41:34)
Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (1:41:34)
don't know if you're familiar with that. And we had an incorrect setup. Somebody who s who created the integration of Master Audio in our game created a setup where each sound would have a a separate game object. So it it was incorrect implementation, but regardless, when I started working on this game, we already had Tons of sounds, like really a lot of sounds. And the performance of the game was dropping only because of empty game objects in the scene. Empty game objects, there were thousands of them, and they were reducing the performance. So now if we're bringing back dots, if this behavior stays, I want it to be changed. I want Okay, let me let me bridge the gap. Let's connect game objects with entities, but is this gonna be addressed somehow?

Mike Geig (1:42:34)
Yeah, absolutely. I think a lot of work is already done to reduce the overhead of of of game objects. it can only be taken so far, obviously, as you said, some they they listen, you know, event listeners and stuff like that. But you know, it's been it's been kind of this understanding for a long time that you you shouldn't just create a whole bunch of empty game objects for for of various reasons. but that being said, we are We have done and are continuing to do things to make that more efficient. Like it used to be that nesting things in the hierarchy view, right? Like you'd use a game object that would then just be like a folder, so to speak, to like put all these things under. But you had deeply nested, that impacted performance, right? because I had to traverse that tree, but that doesn't happen anymore. Like so that that we've we've eased up that performance hit from having deeply nested game objects and things like that. So there are a lot of improvements that have happened. and I'd be curious enough if it's still a as big of an issue nowadays to as when you originally did it. but yeah, there's there

Yuri Sokolov (1:43:35)
Not sure, it was it was in two thousand twenty one,

Amit Netanel (1:43:37)
It was quite a while ago.

Yuri Sokolov (1:43:39)
I think.

Mike Geig (1:43:40)
Yeah. Hard to say that. Maybe, maybe not. But I know a a lot of work has done been done since then. But at some point, you know, it's not an issue of of dots versus game objects. It's just a matter of

Yuri Sokolov (1:43:51)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (1:43:52)
like like n you know, good structure and and not doing things like like having a bunch of just these empty things. Because why why would you have a bunch of these empty things? one of the things Mike Mike Acton used to work here and one of the things he he said to me once it was like, right. Is because I had I was tracking all these different bullets and he's like, Why? And he's like, Well, you know when the bullet started and you know how fast it was going and you know how long it's been since it's fired. So why are you moving this bullet as opposed to just doing the quick math that just tells you where the bullet is in any moment? And I'm like, yeah. I guess I don't need bullets. I just need a list of points the bullets fired from and when they fired and how fast they were going. And it's like, cool. Right. So there's a lot of little things even with game objects and stuff like that you can do to optimize. So not to to to belabor the point. certainly there are opportunities where you look at things and think, why is this game object so slow? I shouldn't have so many game objects there, this and that and next. But I think a lot of times our answer is just to turn everything into a game object and and that's not necessarily even the right way to do. Like I've s this is back several years ago, but one studio I was talking to, they they only had one mono behavior in the entire game. And that mono behavior they kicked off all of the code for everything else. And I'm like, that's neat and it's efficient. But to your point, you probably sh shouldn't have to work like that. But our stuff should be better that you don't have to do such hacky things to make it an efficient game. And I think we have done a lot of things to improve that.

Yuri Sokolov (1:45:26)
Okay.

Mike Geig (1:45:26)
Still a lot of work to go though. That's why it's like a core C L R Unity seven, this whole bring these things together, but

Yuri Sokolov (1:45:29)
So it's always a lot of things to to work on and and I

Mike Geig (1:45:34)
Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (1:45:35)
I assure you, ten years from now, there will be young developers out there that will say, How come twenty years you haven't developed this thing? I I don't know. So yeah.

Mike Geig (1:45:47)
Yeah.

Amit Netanel (1:45:48)
Yeah. And there would would still be old people like us that tell people don't use get component, like never. Don't ever use get component. Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

Mike Geig (1:45:56)
It's a lot better. So that was one of the ones that actually got a big improvement. I always tell people I I I never say never use it. I always say use it when you absolutely need it. And then cash the results. Right. Like I think that's that's key. But I honestly I yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (1:46:10)
Cash the result is ca is key, yeah. But you always need to to understand what's the trade off. So sometimes I would want to there's there's this pattern where people like to make get component call in awake for serialized fields in case somebody forgot to initialize those. I hate this approach, I want the game to break if the editor was not configured correctly. If a reference wasn't dragged, I want the game to break. I want it to fall in my unitest, I want it to break during a QA session. So you always need to what?

Mike Geig (1:46:53)
Put it the reset method instead. Do do your get component in the reset method.

Yuri Sokolov (1:46:58)
Reset method, it's also problematic. I I did by the way, I did a video on on on that. I mentioned reset method and explain explained how it worked. And there were a couple of comments on my video that actually I kind of get behind it that reset you reset one value but it's also overriding another and and and a lm. Yeah.

Mike Geig (1:47:21)
I just meant specifically for the GitPot components. You're right though, you would wipe out other values unless you hard code those.

Amit Netanel (1:47:26)
My my

Mike Geig (1:47:27)
Yeah.

Amit Netanel (1:47:27)
I I could I could testify that in in the the studio I'm working with now we don't do any like fallbacks like you've mentioned like get component in case the serialized field is not not populated and we don't do null checks as a principle and the result of that is clean like we run the game all day, all the time. Whenever there is an issue, someone fixes it. Because it's embarrassing. Like you get embarrassed if you pushed something that causes a null exception. Yeah, yeah, yeah. and and it works. Yeah, sh shaming works in any field.

Mike Geig (1:47:58)
That's a good You've embarrassed embarrassed them into submission. It's true. It's true. Yeah. It's like yeah. That's that's why in Git they call it the blame. You can blame someone for shame's a powerful

Yuri Sokolov (1:48:10)
That's gid blame, right. Exactly. That's what I w wanted to say. Gid blame always worked.

Amit Netanel (1:48:13)
Mm-hmm. Definitely.

Mike Geig (1:48:17)
motivator.

Yuri Sokolov (1:48:18)
I I remember the days when I would sit and say, Who did this? Tell me before I opened the git blade. Tell me now. And and suddenly

Mike Geig (1:48:24)
Accountability. That's right.

Yuri Sokolov (1:48:26)
I don't remember turns into, it's me, but it was a long time ago. And by the way, another

Mike Geig (1:48:32)
Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (1:48:33)
feature that is coming that's long overdue, I think, is is the migration of HDRP into URP, right? Or how is it gonna gonna work?

Mike Geig (1:48:43)
Yeah. So there there's been a lot of con actually I'd say there's been a a ton of concern about that in the community spaces. and I maybe our messaging wasn't super duper clear about this. because i originally we talked about merging the two, right? And so that's what everyone

Yuri Sokolov (1:48:59)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (1:49:00)
had in their head is happening. And then lately we've said, Hey, we're we're HDRP is going into maintenance mode and we're putting a lot of effort in URP, which made us be like, they're killing HDRP and what about this? So again, not That that's not necessarily true, right? We're not killing HDRP. The idea is that someday we will likely deprecate HDRP, but at that point, you will no longer want it or need it because URP truly will be universal

Yuri Sokolov (1:49:27)
We'll be able to do everything.

Mike Geig (1:49:29)
and truly will have these features that you need. So it's not going away. In fact, we've we put so much effort into HDRP and added all these features that it's like so saturated with features that we're like, all right, let's just put a pause on that for right now. Right. And let's let's start improving a lot of URP because a

Amit Netanel (1:49:45)
And it's not going to waste. I mean, it will be part of SRP forever. I I I would guess.

Mike Geig (1:49:49)
Yeah, and a a vast majority of titles are using URP over HDRP anyway,

Yuri Sokolov (1:49:54)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (1:49:54)
right? It was such such a small percentage of people actually using it, but they're worried because they've again, as I talked about, you've backed yourself into a corner, you made this decision early, and now you're kinda so they're sticking with HDRP because we need these things and it it's fine. We're not getting rid of it, right? Again, not until such a time that you don't care that we're getting rid of it. someone will always care. But the idea being that once URP gets there once once it truly covers most cases, then I I also like to remind people, and I I think we've we've forgotten this, is that URP, which was originally called LWRP, the lightweight render pipeline, and HDRP

Yuri Sokolov (1:50:22)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (1:50:35)
were samples, just showing you how you can make your own rendering pipeline

Yuri Sokolov (1:50:39)
Yeah.

Mike Geig (1:50:40)
with the scriptable rendering pipeline, SRP. And over time they became Unity's renderers. And it was like, but there are samples. And They've they're not samples anymore. Obviously they're they're much more robust than that and stuff. But again, if you the whole point of SRP is that if you want it to function differently, make it function differently. It's entirely scriptable. It's entirely modifiable. You can extend HDP, you can extend URP, you can change these things. You can merge them yourself if you want. Like there you build your own completely, and a lot of studios do. so yeah, the URP, yeah. All that's to say it's a bit ranty, but but they're not merging so much as we are putting a heavy investment in in URP. and then yeah, hopefully. Yeah. Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (1:51:19)
Mm-hmm. That's exactly what I understood from understood from the recent news. And I have an anecdote about HDRP. I I once fired an editor on new a new project with HDRP, and I was already a seasoned developer at this time. But I didn't know what to do with the project once it it's booted because it was so different than what I I don't remember

Mike Geig (1:51:48)
Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (1:51:48)
even what scared me of this project. I don't remember what it was, but but I remember that it was so different and things acted differently than what I'm used to with with built-in render pipeline and lightweight render pipeline at the time. So it scared me off. And we also have a friend that

Amit Netanel (1:52:10)
Yeah, we interviewed him a while back to the other podcast.

Yuri Sokolov (1:52:10)
Developed yeah yeah developed a game in sound mind. I don't know if you're familiar with this game.

Mike Geig (1:52:17)
Mm-mm.

Yuri Sokolov (1:52:18)
It it's an indie title, it's it's horror

Amit Netanel (1:52:21)
It's a horror narrative title.

Yuri Sokolov (1:52:23)
yeah, horror narrative title in sound mind. It was relatively successful. So when they were developing it, HDRP was in beta, I think, and they were one of the first studios to to adopt it into a real game. And he told us how he struggled because nobody could give him an answer. nobody worked with

Mike Geig (1:52:48)
Right.

Yuri Sokolov (1:52:48)
that. And if it's beta, you encounter issues and nobody has an answer for those issues. And as a small studio they don't have a content contact in Unity and so on so forth. But at the end of the day they released a game. They released a game that became a relative success.

Amit Netanel (1:53:05)
Yeah. They even published it on on PlayStation and other like hard to certify to platforms. So it was possible, but

Mike Geig (1:53:13)
Yeah, I'm looking at it right now.

Amit Netanel (1:53:14)
when we talked about it it had it had that look in his eye that that says never again. Never again am I not not necessarily using HDRP, but adopting such such a major part early. Yeah.

Mike Geig (1:53:28)
Early. Yeah. Yeah. It's tough. It's tough. It's like the other folks that hopped on, you know, early ECS, you know, when it was it is like, man, it's changing a lot. You sure you want to do this? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Amit Netanel (1:53:38)
Yeah. Yeah, dots before one point was really different.

Yuri Sokolov (1:53:39)
Yeah.

Mike Geig (1:53:44)
trust me, I was the one who made a lot of the demos. So it was like every week of like, you broke what now? All right,

Amit Netanel (1:53:47)
Mm.

Mike Geig (1:53:47)
I gotta remake this entire thing again. Yeah. Over and over and over again. So

Yuri Sokolov (1:53:51)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (1:53:52)
yeah, early adopters, they're they're a different breed, man. I tell you, they're brave. For sure, but yeah, there's not a lot of help when things go wrong.

Yuri Sokolov (1:54:01)
Listen, I was I told you I was an early adapter of adopter of addressables and lightweight render pipeline. I remember the days when you couldn't have multiple cameras in lightweight render pipeline. So you couldn't have multiple cameras that rendering at the same time. And w I was migrating my project that was relying on multiple cameras to render UI separately. And then

Mike Geig (1:54:29)
Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (1:54:29)
my particle system which was supposed to be on top of UI. my particle system what which was supposed to be on top of UI was rendered with a different camera and suddenly lightweight render pipeline doesn't support it. You you must use

Mike Geig (1:54:45)
Mm.

Yuri Sokolov (1:54:45)
one camera. It took a while, but then Unity kind of fixed it. So yeah, being early adapter is is is difficult. And I think we're slowly coming to a point. that now is kind of supposed to be everywhere in every episode in every news outlet and everywhere it's AI. And I I'm I'm kind of I'm kinda having fun watching watching a wall fall on the meat for the fourth time

Amit Netanel (1:55:08)
No no the the window is open, sorry. The the whole set is coming apart.

Mike Geig (1:55:14)
I know. I felt like his camera was zooming in for a second. I'm like, no, the wall's moving.

Amit Netanel (1:55:19)
No no no. It's really windy here tonight.

Yuri Sokolov (1:55:23)
It's falling once again, I think.

Mike Geig (1:55:23)
fair enough.

Yuri Sokolov (1:55:26)
so yeah, we're coming to to one thing that everybody talking about.

Mike Geig (1:55:32)
Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (1:55:33)
it's kind of as an AI user, hearing AI everywhere making me sick. I I can't tell but but I still I think it's it's on the table. So I'll I'll put my criticism hat once again. And I also released, I I don't know if you've seen my video on Unity AI.

Mike Geig (1:55:54)
I'm

Yuri Sokolov (1:55:56)
I released a video on Unity AI, I I used it, I did a couple of tries with it, and it wasn't great. Right. So it's like bare bones, there were issues, the the AI assistant is cut. I don't know how it's right now. It's it's been, I think, two months or month and a half since my video. But at the time of making it, it was Gemini 3.1 that was cut from from the internet. It had an internal tool called web search, and what it did it searched only Unity related stuff. So when I asked the AI something that wasn't in his training data. That was cut off, I think Gemini was cut off in January 2025 or 24, I I don't remember. And he was hallucinating a lot, just inventing stuff on the spot. I I highlighted

Mike Geig (1:56:57)
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (1:56:58)
it in the video as well. He was hallucinating, it was reproductible, it it it was a deterministic hallucination, which is an interesting part. So

Mike Geig (1:57:07)
Hmm. Interesting. Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (1:57:11)
It it wasn't that great. So the question is, is this thing the assistant itself, not the tools around it, is this tool is being improved upon? Is this something that Unity thinks that this is the way to go? Is something we're we're gonna nail and be the the the best in the market in AI stuff inside the engine. Because there are a lot of competition out there.

Mike Geig (1:57:38)
So yeah. yeah, absolutely. So it's it's interesting. So yes, there are still improvements constantly getting better. and actually that that one demo you talked about with the K pop versus metal was actually made with a later iteration of the assistant

Yuri Sokolov (1:57:56)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (1:57:56)
tool or the AI the AI's solutions. I don't think we're approaching it in such a way that we're like, we're gonna be the best. AI tool out there because I understand and we understand that there's a so a lot of mature pipelines already. If we can use mature on for something as relatively new as AI, but we'll call it mature, why not? these pipelines that that currently exist. So I think it the the challenge is on us to prove differentiating like a competitive advantage as to why you'd want to use this. And a lot of people who don't already have these pipelines established, then it's a really low friction way to be like, hey, I just want to. use AI to help me develop some stuff and it's great and it's built in it's and things like that. so yeah, so there is work being done on it. We're not being like, hey, you can't use third parties. You have to use ours and that's our way of forcing it or whatever. We're very much open to to third parties. We very much understand that that if you try to if you try to make it more challenging, people are just gonna go around you, you know, which is something we don't want to have happen. We want to make it very easy for people to use either our our AI solution or or third parties or or whatever, with the task being on us to make our tool good enough that you'll want to use that versus something else, right? so we have some improvements, some changes that are coming that that I don't think are are announced yet. Might have been announced in Seoul, but I don't well wait a minute. You know what? Let me just I've got the slide deck right here. Let me see if we've told people about it. I don't know why I'm like yeah I think So we are sorry, I'm cheating by just looking at the stuff that we did. Yes. Okay, so we did talk about it.

Yuri Sokolov (1:59:38)
That's fine. We we we're all for cheating here. If as long as you can provide us accurate

Amit Netanel (1:59:40)
That's just fine.

Yuri Sokolov (1:59:44)
and legal information, we're we're all for cheating.

Mike Geig (1:59:47)
Yeah, so we do have new agentic authoring tooling

Yuri Sokolov (1:59:52)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (1:59:53)
that is effectively what do I want to say? It it sits outside of the editor. So it's no longer just the this assistant window that sits in the editor. And it is this way that you can run many commands at once. You can have it generate assets, you can you can do all sorts of stuff with it. So think of it like you have your editor here, but then you have this other. creative window, which is where you can, you know, set it up to all right, add this thing, change this thing to, you know, in these different prompts, different conversations with context and stuff like that. As opposed to the assistant that probably as you used it, where it was just the one window in the editor, one conversation

Yuri Sokolov (2:00:29)
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (2:00:30)
at a time. And it had a lot of bugs and a lot of problems and stuff like that. so we are making a lot of improvements there. And and honestly, the stuff that it produces is is pretty good. Like it's really good. Honestly. And and even the folks that that I've showed it to Have have really enjoyed using it, have really seen it as this powerful thing. I don't think, in my mind, again my opinion, I don't think the challenge on Unity is that people, we need to convince people it's a good tool. People use it, be this is a really good tool. The challenge is, is it good enough for you to stop using your current workflow and switch to? And that's that's the thing. Well, it either will be or it won't be. you know, and for a lot of people it is, for a lot of people it isn't. For lot of people who don't currently have any workflows like that that they're they're using, then it's great, you know. Again, like I said, low friction way to start.

Yuri Sokolov (2:01:22)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (2:01:24)
but but yeah, time will tell us to whether or not we can put the right improvements in there. And I always encourage everyone to try the all of our betas, always give feedback. That's that's how we build these things, how we plan them

Yuri Sokolov (2:01:34)
Yeah.

Mike Geig (2:01:35)
out. you know, that'll help us determine, you know, can we actually compete in this space?

Yuri Sokolov (2:01:41)
I'll tell you what what's a blocker for me, both in Unity Tools and tools like BESI or Aura or any other tool similar to that. Those tools just can't financially Compete with subscriptions like Cloud Code or Codecs, because I pay a $200 subscription monthly to Cloud, and the amount

Mike Geig (2:02:09)
Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (2:02:10)
of work this tool is able to produce in high quality. And even if you'll be able to make Unity AI internally work as good as Cloud Code. The engineering prompt would be as good, everything will be on par. The thing is that those companies like Entropic or OpenAI, they're currently subsidizing the AI usage. And yeah,

Amit Netanel (2:02:37)
Yeah, heavily, heavily so.

Yuri Sokolov (2:02:39)
and any any tool that works with them, like Unity, you're using maybe heavily discounted, but still still API prices. And you're the user would pay those API prices. And some margin that that Unity is wants to to to get from this as well, because Unity is not just in the middle c take this free tokens or something. So Unity also wants to make a margin from the from this cell. And this is why currently, as long as we're as those companies subsidizing the the AI

Mike Geig (2:03:17)
Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (2:03:18)
usage, it's hard for me to kind of jump ship. And decide I'm using something else. For any company that's above 150 employees that's using AI, this is probably gonna be not relevant because those companies, if you're if you're having more than 150 licenses, you have to use the API billing and not you can't use the subsidized version. So those companies kind of can. Okay, whatever, I can use Unity AI, I can use Basie, I can use Entropic

Mike Geig (2:03:54)
Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (2:03:54)
directly, but for the smaller studios, it's kind of for me, it's it's a it's a no go at this point.

Mike Geig (2:04:02)
You you mentioned us you charging a margin. What's that?

Yuri Sokolov (2:04:06)
No, no, I mean you want to make a margin on on selling. For example, I'm purchasing I'm paying Unity ten bucks for and some amount of tokens, right?

Mike Geig (2:04:17)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (2:04:18)
The price on those tokens is the cost Unity is supposed to pay to the AI provider, like Google, for example, if you're using Gemini in the background, and then some margin would go to Unity because you know, Unity is for profit company. It You want to make a profit

Mike Geig (2:04:36)
Sure, sure, sure.

Yuri Sokolov (2:04:37)
out of this sale. This is what I meant.

Mike Geig (2:04:40)
I'm actually not entirely certain how that breakdown works because I'm not certain that we pay a certain amount. Actually don't know. Yeah, I would be ignorant on that topic, as to how it breaks down. I know that the cost amounts are comparable to just using the thing without like if you were to just say go use Gemini versus our tool that's based on the Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (2:05:03)
On the API on the API usage, yes, exactly.

Mike Geig (2:05:05)
yeah, yeah. But but I'm not entirely certain how that how that breaks down. I do know that like say if you're a developer and you have a Unity Pro license, then the AI tools are free, up to a certain amount of usage and stuff like that. So there's a decent

Yuri Sokolov (2:05:19)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (2:05:20)
reason to at least try it, you know, because it doesn't cost anything, assuming you have a pro or above license.

Yuri Sokolov (2:05:26)
Yeah.

Mike Geig (2:05:27)
but but yeah, ultimately again, it it's about the types of work you needed to do, how heavily you want it integrated, whether gener asset generation stuff is important to you. And we've got some new things that are they'll be coming out that pretty cool. But you know, again, it it depends entirely. If you were a studio that was maybe just doing entirely just code, right? Only code, good code. and that's what you're using the AI for, then maybe the assistant stuff doesn't make a lot of sense. it just depends on the the the ways in which you want to integrate AI into your workflows.

Yuri Sokolov (2:05:59)
Yeah, well there are tools, but this is not the not the matter in hand. another thing is really interesting is that

Mike Geig (2:06:07)
Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (2:06:07)
the a lot of indie communities, PC gaming, console gaming, are really, really anti AI currently. And I kind of Yeah, yeah.

Mike Geig (2:06:16)
Yeah.

Amit Netanel (2:06:16)
Yeah, those those game jammers we mentioned earlier. Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (2:06:20)
And I I even recently when Godot announced that they're not accepting AI PRs. a lot of people misunderstood that and said, they're anti-AI, so we kind of go there. They're better than Unity, they're better than Unreal, those greedy companies that develop AI tools. How does Unity handle it? Because because as you said, those indie developers are your bread and butter, and and now integrating AI tools is kind of goes against their belief, the majority or the vocal majority.

Mike Geig (2:06:55)
It's it's it's interesting because I think I think about it the same way I think about ads, right? Where the the

Yuri Sokolov (2:07:04)
Ne the necessary evil.

Mike Geig (2:07:06)
v the vocal people are like, I would never like how dare you the art, the art of games and the spirit of of gaming and you're gonna have ads? How dare you? Well, at the same time using ads because there's a reason the games are free, you know, like ads, right? Like there is a reason websites are free, the ads, like that's the the economy that we've built. a lot of people are just very vocally anti-AI while still secretly using AI. That's not everybody. I'm just saying it and I would not I I would argue, not even argue, we have data that shows high ninety percent of of of studios, I believe it's either ninety five or ninety-six, are using AI in some capacity from from all sizes, Indy all the way up to to to AAA or whatever, right? I think the concern is more from the consumers. Who absolutely do not want to consume AI content because of the concern that it's going to become corporate art, right? It's just going to become what they call AI slop. It's just going to lose its soul, which is a valid concern. I totally understandable, right? And it's also interesting because when people say they don't want any AI in their games, they mean art and music. But you're like, well, I it for code. I'm like, I don't care about code, whatever. Because they don't view code to be a creative process, even though anyone who writes code knows it's very creative.

Amit Netanel (2:08:22)
It hurts. It hurts.

Mike Geig (2:08:23)
Yeah, it hurts. Yeah. But but to the average player,

Amit Netanel (2:08:26)
Right in the fields.

Mike Geig (2:08:27)
code's not a creative process, but the the art is. And so that's the fear. The fear is that we're gonna take the the cheap route and produce soulless things. We're gonna lose our craft because we succumb to AI. A reasonable fear. And I'm not saying there that won't happen in some situations, maybe even most situations. I don't know. I don't know the future. But I think most of the people that are worried about AI are not worried about AI. They're worried about abuse as a result of AI because they don't trust people to not use that tool in a very bad way.

Yuri Sokolov (2:09:06)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (2:09:07)
Right? Remember, dynamite was used to improve mining, but it also made atomic weapons possible. You know, like there's, you know, every tool is just a tool. It depends on how you use it. And I think a lot of people are concerned with how this tool will be used to take something that they love away. So I think they're absolutely right to be cautious about it or even to be fully against it. The thing that concerns me that I see a lot of is AI being used to justify witch hunts against people. The moment someone says something or shows you a game that you don't like, you accuse them of being AI or having used AI or something like that. And then there's no amount of, no, I didn't that will save you. It's it's It's those Salem witch trials all over again where all it takes is someone to accuse you and that's it. You're done. And that part is Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (2:09:56)
That's actually why I stopped developing a game recently. I quit my job a year ago and I said I'm going indie. I'm going full time indie. I'm developing a game. And my art skills are not that great. So I kind of planned on it's a great time, AI on the rise. I kind of planned on using AI to augment my my art to implement and then I saw in the middle. Half a year later, I saw what what's happening in the world and I said, Okay, I'm going to invest all of my savings to work full time one year on a game, and then a bunch of kids will just drown this game in negative reviews. And I'm kind of lost all of my savings that I'm never gonna get back. So I said, Okay, I'm not going full time indie, not just yet. We'll we'll we'll wait for that. And

Mike Geig (2:10:50)
Yeah.

Amit Netanel (2:10:50)
We we'll we'll

Mike Geig (2:10:51)
It's scary. Yeah.

Amit Netanel (2:10:51)
see what happens if there's a reckoning or safeguards or safeguards put in place because yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (2:10:54)
Yeah, and by the way, you've mentioned that code kind of got ignored. Today I made something, and I wonder how those people that treat code as it's not a creative process and we don't care. So basically, I needed a 3D representation of a logo of my channel. And I downloaded Blender, I downloaded Blender MCP and told Code Claude to create me a logo. is I had a vector logo that I drew myself in Illustrator, and I told them make a treaty of it. And what it did, it's written a Python code that's created a treaty object. So basically, theoretically, it's AI made in art, but it made it it's written a code. So how do you treat that? Is this an AI art? Is it's it was a code, it was code.

Mike Geig (2:11:49)
It reminded me of like my senior thesis years ago in university when my final result was an open GL code based Imperial ATAT from Star Wars, but it was all the just code that drew it. And I'm just

Yuri Sokolov (2:12:03)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (2:12:03)
like, yeah, see look at this. Isn't this neat? no, it's funny, like you're yeah. I agree. I think programming is an incredibly creative process. it's almost I I view it as poetry, this unique twist of a word or this phrase, or look how subtle this thing is. I mean, obviously not everyone sees it that way, but I I I do I I just laugh at the double standard a little bit of like these things are creative, these things aren't. Computers are always I've always been good at codes. Why would we care about that? This is but but the true root of the concern is that they're afraid the loss of humanity. And it's understandable. I've had so many calls from from investment folks who want to like you know interview me or pick my brain about things. And then ask a whole bunch of questions. And I'm like, just get to the question you want to ask me. Like, come on, it's the same one, right? Then eventually it's always some form of we can do text to image and text to video. Could I just do text to game? I'm like, yeah, eventually through programming, all things are possible, right? I don't know that there's a market for it. I don't know that the players will will want it. I don't know what the appetite for that is. We see a lot of these so things popping up now that allow people to just with some prompts make these games and they're cool. They're great. Right. There's nothing wrong with that. but I don't know how much of those types of experiences the market will absorb. I I it I firmly believe that the more the more that AI enables people to mass produce higher quality games, it's also

Yuri Sokolov (2:13:36)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (2:13:36)
gonna enable the people that would have made games at a level to make it made at an even higher level and outpace. I mean, that's it's what we usually see.

Amit Netanel (2:13:43)
That's that's basically what we say every episode, right, Yuri? It's like it a A AI gives

Yuri Sokolov (2:13:47)
Yeah. AI kind of re

Mike Geig (2:13:49)
That's what I hope anyway.

Amit Netanel (2:13:50)
you it gives talented people even more superpowers. Okay, it it empowers them, basically. It doesn't give them magical abilities.

Yuri Sokolov (2:13:57)
But yes, if you're bad at something and AI can make you bad but faster. so it's it's not

Mike Geig (2:14:06)
Still making bad decisions.

Yuri Sokolov (2:14:08)
yeah, so

Amit Netanel (2:14:09)
Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (2:14:10)
it's AI kind of raised the ceiling, right? So now you can achieve more, but it also raised the floor. so the gap is is stayed the same. You still have the people that are creative, people that are perfected their craft, there will they will make better things with AI and

Mike Geig (2:14:33)
Exact. I use it. I make tools all day long to help me with my job and little throwaway things here. It has not helped me make a game. Only because I myself cannot commit to a vision. I myself ha have not honed that craft to be able to say this is the vision for the game. This is what I want it to be. And so for me, every time I try to make a game with it, it's just stupid garbage. So yes, it can help me do I I was a tools developer a long time ago. So it does help me make tools because I know how to do that. And it I have automated tasks that do all sorts of cool stuff for me. I'm like a little gadgeters house. You walk in, there's little machines doing all these little things and stuff. But when it comes to a thing that more my skill set isn't as mature, because I haven't made games in a really long time, it, you know, I flounder with it because it as you said, it's not it's not giving me a thing I didn't already have. It's just

Yuri Sokolov (2:15:26)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (2:15:27)
helping me do the thing I can do a little bit more.

Yuri Sokolov (2:15:30)
It's kind of giving you a little bit. yeah. So I think we can wrap up. It was an amazing conversation. I really had a lot of fun, but we can't leave you just yet. We want to ask you any Unity tip for the listeners. Something you you've been asked a lot of times and you have An answer like this anything.

Mike Geig (2:15:57)
Ooh. man, there's there's just so many things across so many conversations. I will say this.

Amit Netanel (2:16:04)
Could be useful, could be obscure, Tip.

Mike Geig (2:16:07)
Well, here's a thing that that really helped me. I don't know how often you lock your inspector because you want to keep a focus on a particular thing, but we did have

Yuri Sokolov (2:16:15)
Lock a lot.

Mike Geig (2:16:15)
the ability to right click on an object and go properties and that creates a locked inspector window.

Yuri Sokolov (2:16:19)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (2:16:20)
And when someone showed me that, I was like, what? When did that happen? so that's a good one. stop worrying about best practices. There's no such thing. There's only better practices depending on what it is you're trying to do. I've seen some absolutely horrifying code written just to prevent someone from ever having to do like a game object.find. And I'm like just one time. And I'm like, okay, well, if it's one time only ever, you're fine. Just don't do it like a whole bunch of like. So optimize for the thing you're actually trying to accomplish. I think that's less unity and that's just more general. There's like the Unity Tips hashtag on I guess what was Twitter and it's now X, that they do on Tuesdays and there's just was that? Yeah, I know. It's tough.

Yuri Sokolov (2:16:59)
Still Twitter. It's still Twitter.

Mike Geig (2:17:03)
I I I called it Twitter recently and someone was like, It's been over a year. Catch up. And I'm like, All right, calm down, it's fine. But but yeah, yeah. So I guess I should I should update. But but Unity Tips hashtag, where I think it's we used to do these Unity Tip Tuesdays and there's still people that post the stuff. There's a lot of great tips on there.

Yuri Sokolov (2:17:22)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (2:17:23)
So definitely check that out. And yeah, I'm trying to think if there's like one killer thing. I don't know. There's just I don't I wouldn't have like one killer recommendation for anybody, I don't think. Just depends on what you're trying to make.

Yuri Sokolov (2:17:37)
I think I think you you gave already for example, I didn't know about the hashtag and the tips there, so I'm definitely gonna use that. and another thing. Yeah.

Mike Geig (2:17:47)
Well, I do have one actually. I will offer up this this is the thing. So from from a long time, the 3D physics, even if you were making a 2D game, were more performant, right? Just be due to the the nature of the three D physics engine, the physics versus the box two D. that had that we put a lot of improvements into our two D physics to make it incredibly performant now. So if you're one of those people that have always done three D physics for your two D games because it was you needed that performance, check out the new 2D physics stuff. It's really improved.

Yuri Sokolov (2:18:15)
Because you've you upgraded the version of Box T, right?

Mike Geig (2:18:18)
Yes. And we've done a lot of like the physics core work that it's that's

Yuri Sokolov (2:18:21)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (2:18:22)
coming out in the these upcoming releases that really improve physics performance.

Yuri Sokolov (2:18:27)
Awesome.

Amit Netanel (2:18:27)
I actually I actually didn't know there were like weird people that use the three D physics for two D games, but that that's what I learned today.

Mike Geig (2:18:36)
huh.

Amit Netanel (2:18:37)
Amongst other

Yuri Sokolov (2:18:37)
Yes, and

Amit Netanel (2:18:38)
things.

Yuri Sokolov (2:18:40)
and the last thing,

Mike Geig (2:18:40)
Perfect.

Yuri Sokolov (2:18:41)
we kind of we're hosting here not only, you know, Unity developers, so it's a com common theme, a common question at the end of the episode is can you recommend one book, one movie, one game? What would it be?

Mike Geig (2:18:59)
Ooh. All right. So for books, if you want to do are we talking about game related books or just books? Okay.

Yuri Sokolov (2:19:05)
No anything. Anything in

Amit Netanel (2:19:06)
Anything, anything.

Mike Geig (2:19:07)
so if you're looking at fiction fiction, I've really gotten into the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. It is so good.

Amit Netanel (2:19:12)
Amen.

Mike Geig (2:19:14)
so good. So I just finished book eight. I plowed through those books. Like definitely check out Dungeon Crawler Carl. If you like nonfiction, I highly recommend the book called The Most Human Human by Brian Christensen. It's it's about a guy who takes place ta takes part in the Turing test, with these chatbots where he has to convince people that he's a real person behind a computer screen.

Yuri Sokolov (2:19:35)
Yeah.

Mike Geig (2:19:36)
And it's all about human communication, how we talk with each other, what it means to be human when we communicate. And I think this day and age that is really important to to read about. And he's just a really good author, so I really like that book. for movies, I would recommend Memento with Guy Pierce. If anyone remembers that movie that kind of plays backwards. So you know where you're going, but not where you've been because the guy has short term memory loss. It's my favorite movie. such a good one. I've seen

Yuri Sokolov (2:19:57)
I I don't remember that.

Mike Geig (2:20:01)
that one so many times. So Memento. and then games. man, Final Fantasy 15 is still just so, so, so good. and credit scene just really makes me emotional every time. It's one of the few games I've played through multiple times just to experience it again. So highly recommend Final Fantasy 15. Wow. it's good. Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (2:20:19)
Never played it, actually.

Amit Netanel (2:20:22)
Did you play the the chibi version they released on mobile with the characters being all small? D did you know that they they had a completely different version?

Mike Geig (2:20:30)
I didn't know that was even a thing.

Amit Netanel (2:20:34)
Yeah, it's the it's it's

Mike Geig (2:20:34)
Wow. No, I did not. Yeah, yeah. the check got out.

Amit Netanel (2:20:38)
it's hilarious. I I really recommend it.

Mike Geig (2:20:41)
I would say no game has ever no piece of media to me has ever really made the idea of the hero's sacrifice hit home as much as Final Fantasy fifteen. It makes every other like hero sacrifice feel like, Yeah, but that wasn't that hard of a sacrifice. This one was like, that one hurts. But it's what you do to do the right thing. So

Yuri Sokolov (2:21:01)
Even even not the expedition 33?

Mike Geig (2:21:06)
Ooh, wait a minute. So okay. That's definitely up there. That game is fantastic. When I saw that

Yuri Sokolov (2:21:12)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (2:21:12)
game was made with Unreal, I like, Whoa, it hurts 'cause it's so good.

Amit Netanel (2:21:15)
Yeah.

Mike Geig (2:21:15)
Not that everything against it, but just personal bias.

Yuri Sokolov (2:21:16)
But y but you see that the game was made with Unreal. It's it has the Unreal look. It has the Unreal it has the Unreal motion blur.

Mike Geig (2:21:21)
Well it has it under a logo too, right up front. But but yeah, this is true. But

Amit Netanel (2:21:26)
Yeah.

Mike Geig (2:21:26)
it such a good game. But to

Amit Netanel (2:21:27)
But but what what this causes is like everyone all all the aspiring game developers, the people that want to get into this space will say, Hey, Expedition thirty three was made with a small budget. Okay, they it's classified as indeed, that's a whole conversation, let's not get into it.

Yuri Sokolov (2:21:40)
It's only t only thirty three million.

Amit Netanel (2:21:43)
Yeah, yeah. It's it's you know, yeah, a dip in the bucket. So they they all start looking at Unreal.

Mike Geig (2:21:51)
Yeah. Well, I mean it's

Yuri Sokolov (2:21:53)
Yeah. So

Mike Geig (2:21:54)
it's not even because of that. It's just because, man, it would have been amazing if it had been made with Unity. And not that I expected

Amit Netanel (2:21:58)
Mm. Yeah.

Mike Geig (2:21:59)
it was or whatever, but when you play one of those really great games, if it had said that had the Unity logo, I'd have been like Yes. But fantastic game. I

Yuri Sokolov (2:22:05)
Yeah. For me there there

Amit Netanel (2:22:07)
Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (2:22:08)
is actually one game that I with Unity logo that I say, yeah, it's made with Unity. it's it's Wasteland, Wasteland two and Wasteland Three. it's probably my

Amit Netanel (2:22:18)
Hmm. Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (2:22:20)
most favorite games made with Unity. and it brings me a question. If we're talking with Unity developer advocate, what's your top Unity game?

Mike Geig (2:22:32)
Well, I mean, this okay, this one's gonna feel maybe lame or dated, but man, it would be Pokemon Go. And not because like the this big title didn't it feel like for a moment the world was united? Didn't it feel like for the first like everyone was

Yuri Sokolov (2:22:45)
Yes. It was awesome.

Amit Netanel (2:22:46)
Yeah. Yeah.

Mike Geig (2:22:48)
outside in parks? Like you were like kids and adults and like life was just for a moment. It was just

Amit Netanel (2:22:55)
Yeah.

Mike Geig (2:22:56)
so good. Like and so I I think back to Pokemon Go, not because I I feel like it was this great technical achievement or I mean even this very impressive technical achievement, but like but just for the the feels around it, to me, like as a Unity game, I'm just like, Yeah. And then yeah, that one feels good.

Amit Netanel (2:23:15)
Yeah, it's it's

Yuri Sokolov (2:23:15)
I actually was

Amit Netanel (2:23:16)
it's crazy that they celebrated ten years this year, just recently.

Mike Geig (2:23:20)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (2:23:20)
There's they're still in the top. They're still in the top revenue wise. They're still making more than a billion dollars a year on on this game alone. So it's awesome.

Mike Geig (2:23:32)
Yeah. And the tools

Amit Netanel (2:23:33)
Yeah.

Mike Geig (2:23:34)
they built to support that they now offer both for like for for other games or even just non gaming stuff, like all the GPS and Yeah, was that?

Yuri Sokolov (2:23:40)
For other failing games, you mean?

Amit Netanel (2:23:42)
Mm.

Yuri Sokolov (2:23:43)
For other failing games. And no no games no AR game survived.

Mike Geig (2:23:45)
Well, you know, I'm just saying, but their their non gaming consultation

Amit Netanel (2:23:46)
Yeah.

Mike Geig (2:23:49)
stuff I think is really good too. Well,

Yuri Sokolov (2:23:51)
What?

Mike Geig (2:23:52)
'cause they built this whole data infrastructure

Yuri Sokolov (2:23:54)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Geig (2:23:55)
underneath that enables this game,

Yuri Sokolov (2:23:56)
Yes.

Mike Geig (2:23:57)
but but that actually could do a lot of non gaming. You know, there's a lot of really cool tech in there. So as a company, yeah, really impressive.

Yuri Sokolov (2:24:02)
Yeah, there there is. I was actually the I played the closed beta of Ingress fifteen years ago, I

Amit Netanel (2:24:11)
Mm.

Yuri Sokolov (2:24:12)
think. so yeah, yeah, yeah. It was bare

Mike Geig (2:24:12)
Yeah, I remember Ingress. Yeah, that was like the hacker one, right? Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (2:24:16)
bones, it had nothing in it.

Amit Netanel (2:24:17)
Before location games were cool.

Yuri Sokolov (2:24:19)
We were me and a couple of my friends were the only people in the area who played this game, so we kind of mapped Our cities in Ingress you would go and take pictures and send submit them so they will make it in the portal. And when when the when the Pokemon Go released, they used this data to set gyms and pocket

Mike Geig (2:24:43)
Yeah. Yeah. The gyms.

Yuri Sokolov (2:24:47)
stops, and you and they named it so in the Ingress days they didn't have the capacity to check things. So we had this statue of two abstract people sitting, but They kind of looked like two S cracks. You know, it's so

Mike Geig (2:25:03)
Ha ha ha.

Yuri Sokolov (2:25:05)
in in Russian it's called Zhopa.

Amit Netanel (2:25:05)
Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (2:25:07)
So we called this place Zhopa S and we submitted it as S to to Ingress. And suddenly it's in the middle of the city, you have a pocket stop called S. And okay,

Mike Geig (2:25:19)
Ha ha ha.

Yuri Sokolov (2:25:21)
well.

Amit Netanel (2:25:21)
Wow. Today it wouldn't

Mike Geig (2:25:22)
Why not?

Amit Netanel (2:25:23)
pass. Like to to add the location today you need a committee and

Yuri Sokolov (2:25:24)
No no no they they cleared the name.

Amit Netanel (2:25:27)
yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (2:25:27)
Yeah,

Mike Geig (2:25:27)
Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (2:25:28)
yeah. There was also a committee back there, but it was a smaller one. It's it was closed beta. Never mind. think yeah,

Amit Netanel (2:25:36)
I I would approve that location, by the way.

Yuri Sokolov (2:25:38)
sure.

Amit Netanel (2:25:39)
It's a good location.

Yuri Sokolov (2:25:44)
Yeah. Well, thanks Mike. I I

Mike Geig (2:25:42)
Fair enough. Yeah, it's good times though. Yeah. What a time. Thank you.

Yuri Sokolov (2:25:48)
had pleasure talking to you. It was really fun and informative. thank you for coming.

Amit Netanel (2:25:53)
Thank you so much. It was a blast.

Mike Geig (2:25:53)
Absolutely.

Amit Netanel (2:25:55)
By the way, most of the guests are like flubber guests from the the question of can you recommend something? And it just fired on all the questions. That was amazing. So thank you.

Mike Geig (2:26:06)
I think way too much about media.

Yuri Sokolov (2:26:06)
Yeah, usually they can't decide Do I have to tell all three or can I say only one of those? so yeah, yeah, you kind of fired on all three.

Mike Geig (2:26:17)
Glad I could help.

Yuri Sokolov (2:26:18)
thanks once again and see ya soon.

Mike Geig (2:26:21)
And cheers everyone.