13 Pros & Cons to Know Before Choosing Unity 3D

Unity 3D is an all-in-one platform for mobile game development. It has gained tremendous attention from the game developers community with its quirky features, supportive pricing, and strong capabilities. With its ability to function as a cross-platform game development tool, it saves developers time that would otherwise be spent in developing games for individual platforms. But before you decide to choose this solution it is important to know about the pros and cons associated with it. Let us analyze them, here.

Interested in Mobile Game Development? Catch the latest innovations and trends with our free eBook.

Pros of Using Unity:

1. Unity is the best app for Game development. It is very effective while rendering 2D scenes. In this era of visual treats, Unity can very well be used for rendering 3D images also. The quality offered is also relatively good compared to other apps.
2. Unity is excellent for cross-platform development. Cross development platforms are trending much these days. It is really time-consuming and demands lots of efforts for developing native apps. Platforms like Unity have made the process quite simple and easy to use when compared to previous times. Using cross-development platforms, a single script can be compiled and used for many platforms.
3. The assets store is also reportedly great when compared to other platforms. Basically, the tech support for Unity is efficient. The tech support members are also highly skilled and they can be relied upon in case of any technical issues.
4. In case of the visual platform, Unity is excellent. But we cannot appeal the same in case of the non-visual platform. It might vary in terms of the app’s application and usage.
5. It is also easier to use compared to many other technologies. There are so many other complicated technologies which become tougher while we use. Unity is an exception here.
6. The cost is very less when compared to all its other competitors. Cost efficiency is one of the main advantages of using Unity.

Read More: Top 5 Tools for Mobile Game Development 

Cons of using Unity:

1. The documentation of several features is quite out of date and in some cases it is completely non-existent.
2. Even the technologies like render textures, profiler and stencil buffer support which are common in many free tools are still behind the $1500 paywall.
3. The Terrain engine and Movie Textures are not good at all and they need a lot of effort for no reason.
4. The Unity Pro license doesn’t bring all the features to mobile. Hence an additional $1500-3000 investment is needed for Mobile Pro licenses which seems quite extravagant.
5. Until Unity 5.0 the engine is set to remain in 32-bit which means that the editor will silently crash if you run out of memory and the engine is not suitable for AAA games.
6. The outdated (in fact ancient) version of Mono results in the developer fighting the GC once the project reaches a certain size.
7. There seems to be no upcoming update for the OpenGL support to 4.x thus, things like Compute Shader or Geometry Shader won’t be available for OSX or Linux.

Read More: 7 Tips to Successfully Develop a Mobile Game

From the above analysis, we can conclude that the Unity is a great platform for creating small and mid-size games. If you are planning to create an AAA game then it is better to choose a more powerful tool like Unreal Engine or Lumberyard. Unity 3D is easy to learn and offers a very affordable pricing for the needs of indie developers. Any developer can use the free version of the tool that offers most of the features and pays only if the game makes more than $100K in revenue. Overall it is a good choice for most of the games.

Have a great game idea but no developers? Get in touch with us and get your game developed today.