U New Unity Roadmap is exciting. Unifying render pipelines is good. Shader Graph 2 looks good. New animation and world workflow looks good. DOTS Multiplayeri is good. It has the potential to create income for Unity but only when mass adoption of multiplayer with Unity Services is done. It sucks for us, but paying for bandwidth through Unity Relay + CCU services will generate income for Unity. The focus moving forward WILL be multiplayer games. That's why the runtime fee was implemented (and removed) because they wanted to grab a share of the free-to-play-with-ingame-shop games. The new pricing model is aimed towards the huge companies earning tons of money from their free to play games by, again, focusing on revenue.
Potential catalyst is when Unity starts releasing template starter projects for multiplayer. Something that's easy to start with and deploy for new developers. Similar to Source SDK which launched Garry's Mod and similar mods. This is rare by Unity tho, as they're known to release the tech and let the users figure it out on their own. I would see this is a company shift, a good one, where Unity provides as much as they possibly can to make users create projects and start to generate revenue through multiplayer games.
A competitor to Unity DOTS Multiplayer is Facepunch's S&Box. It's free to host, runs on Source 2 and will include ingame shops. It's like Roblox but on a powerful 3D engine. It's not ready yet but I give it maybe 1 more year to fully mature. I don't think it will take a huge chunk out of the game engine marketshare but a combination of fortnite, roblox, vrchat, s&box, garry's mod will chip away at it. S&Box is also planning for you to be able to release your S&Box game as a standalone executable if you want to so there's that. Unity needs to catch up and start making template projects for multiplayer.
Unreal is still a massive competitor and all they have to do is to just keep doing what they do. They're also tinkering with an ECS solution which will be a competitor to DOTS. The drawback is that you still have to get into C++, a huge undertaking, and Unity is making it easier to code high level functionality with the DOTS workflow. It's easier to start with Unity, so most people are inclined to stay there. It has been bleeding users because Unity has simply been awful to work with, but it's getting better (finally?????).
With RUST and other data oriented programming languages becoming more and more mainstream, object oriented programming will become less popular. I don't think the shift to DOP will be fast, but Unity is already grabbing a huge chunk of that "market share" by being ahead with DOTS. Easy for huge nerds to jump into gamedev if you provide secure, multithreaded, cache pleasing frameworks out of the box.
Moving forward, 5-10 years, DOTS will become inreasingly more powerful. All future Unity tech will be built on top of it and all their hard work will pay off. Unity will continue to dominate the mobile market and with WebGPU the browser market. Yes, Unreal has the graphics, but ultimately in the end, in regards to multiplayer, performance and scalability is the key. This is where Unity has an advantage on both rendering and server performance.
In conclusion: Good tech but the board still has to change to be more user and game focused. I still see ironforge members on the board. Fuck that shit. You want to see true change? Get Unity industry veterans on the board and kick everyone from Electronic Arts out. It's still a huge wankfest of suits and I simply...don't...trust...them. Especially after seeing nothing but SELL SELL SELL on openinsider. Unity needs "Ryan Cohen"-like board members and leadership that doesn't just drain the company of money and shares to dump.
U As long as the board stays as it is the company is going to bleed users to Unreal and Godot. Muse is not a unique enough selling point for Unity to generate revenue and their live services can be swapped out by free alternatives like Steam Datagram Relay. Unity is also competing strongly against its own userbase because of their ability to develop assets faster, better and often more transparently than Unity. Often open-source. See Rukhanka, Orbis and plenty of other assets that are far ahead already in the Unity DOTS ecosystem.
Bull points for turnaround potential: + New board. The userbase hates the board. CEO leaving after the pricing model fiasco is not enough. The whole board has to go. + Unity 6 pay per install is removed completely. Even if they have a "fair" pricing model right now this is open to change in the future. I don't trust the board. Just copy Unreal Engine's pricing model. ++ Template starter projects instead of never ending sample projects of DOTS technology. Give users a starting point, not samples to "figure out". DOTS is too difficult to learn. Once this happens the adoption rate will increase.