This seems out of my price range, but hopefully it finds an audience. There may be people out there making enough on their Unity creations that $100 a month is worth it, and if it is, then it helps to fund the creation of the Unity engine. I will say, the only negative, is that it may feel some of the indies like us feel left out, because we’re missing out on some of the cool new goodies. But, I guess we’ll see how it works.

Yet another product that has “will be abandoned soon” written all over it

Unity, as a company, seems to be absolutely obsessed with making all the worst possible decisions and driving down the value of the company as much as they can. I hope shareholders see just how negatively people feel about Unity’s future, and do everything they can to do a complete 180.

Here is the winning strategy to make users happy, it’s very simple:
– Focus on making sure the core engine is extremely stable & robust before thinking about any bells & whistles
– Every feature must be accessible to everyone. Paywalled features give off the impression that they’ll not be supported properly because not enough people will be willing to use them, and there will be no community knowledge/resources about them
– Communicate clearly what your future goals are with things like DOTS and SRPs. It’s hard to get answers at the moment
– Stop spreading your dev resources on a million different things. FOCUS your resources on high-quality production-ready features
– TEST your engine. And no engine can reasonably claim to have been tested if its makers haven’t shipped an actual game with it

ooof, this is just too expensive.

Looks like a nice tool, but the price model… this is what I feared would happen with Unity after going public. Itemizing off each new feature in expensive payment plans. I worry the Unity’s future will look like this across the board, and eventually the goal will be to get every Unity user to fork over money on monthly basis if they want to use the new versions of the engine. Sooner or later, it will reflect Adobe CC but at enterprise price levels. I will jump ship if it gets to that point.

I would use a new tool like this if it were not going to cost me over $1000/year. Sell it as an asset on the asset store for a reasonable price. I don’t know. I’m not feeling optimistic about the future of Unity. Sorry.

Interesting product but the prohibitive cost is very disappointing.
Why would someone pay more for this when they can get the Substance suite?
The AI stuff seems very useful in a vacuum, but in comparison to what’s available, most of it doesn’t seem *that* much better than the kinds of parameterized solutions you can easily achieve in other node-based texture software.
It seems like more of an incremental improvement on a very small set of artist tools rather than a monumental leap over everything that’s currently available, which is what Substance Designer/Painter was able to provide.

In addition, why make this blog post and pretend like Art Engine is something any Unity user might use when in fact it’s ridiculously expensive, and for that reason not suitable for independent developers? (or frankly any developers, again considering the competition)

Unity has so many good opportunities to give their game engine a *huge* leg up over the competition but they seem to frequently miss them.
Given its inaccessibility and lack of features/production value compared to the competition, I would not be surprised if this was another slowly forgotten and abandoned project…

I think ArtEngine is awesome at what it does, but on marketing/business front it needs some serious new plans. Considering their direct competitors are either totally free (quixel+ue4) or cheaper(substance suite), I don’t see the benefit of being conservative with ArtEngine. It is simply hurting the product. Free tier for Unity developers is a must.

And in the meantime, the competition keeps throwing free stuff at their developer community…

This ArtEngine thing is never going to take off unless it comes included with the engine or as a free package. The extent of how Unity’s management DOESN’T understand its community/users keeps baffling all of us. Great example of how the corporate decision-making process consistently fails at solving even the most basic problems

Sort of looks like a much worse substance designer, kind of interested in why anyone would pick this over substance designer given the price?

It costs 4x the amount a license costs to get the ENTIRE substance suite. This just seems like a massive rip off, offering a service that is much weaker than the competition (quixel still exists too) but at a much higher price point.

If this had been rolled into the engine you would have had your first “look at us, we have the good features now” feature to brag about instead of UE always getting the juicy stuff for their users, but instead its at a really high cost with a much much slimmer set of features.

Its a shame, this could have been something amazing with the right mindset.