This is triggering some people. Like a lot.
Devs either hate it, or love it. Almost never a middle ground. After all, gamedev is a passionate field. Maybe too passionate sometimes.
Here it is: Unity is deprecating BIRP starting in 6.5.
My view?
For most teams, good news.
Not because URP is automatically faster. In my consulting practice, I see projects perform better in BIRP, and others perform better in URP.
But because multiple pipelines = noise.
Some studios pay me just to decide the pipeline. Think about that. Should not even be needed. Like, so many devs focus on the perfect research. And research has its place, of course, but on the right things and on the right time frame.
Spending weeks on deciding the pipeline just to have half the team disagree later?
Nah, not my cup of tea.
Plus, it makes the life of asset creators harder. Much harder. Easily 50% of their time is wasted on supporting multiple pipelines. And guess what? Often doesn't even work perfectly in spite of claiming support. Oh, and that's wasted time they don't put into actual gamedev.
Me?
I'm pragmatic. I jump in a project, set the budgets and make it work (which sometimes means making some producers unhappy.. but so be it).
We joined the gamedev industry to ship games. To see them on the Steam store. To see players happily spending money on. And especially to see how our games impact people's lives (I've seen this over and over again, emails, reviews, you name it).
And time spent on arguing/fighting over what is vs. what should be is time you don't put in your game.
My take is truly simple:
You will make it work, no matter the constraints.
But for that, you need constraints. And Unity is setting them now (whether devs like it or not, that's reality).
That's it.
Now, let's ship games together in the Unity Performance Taskforce.
https://thegamedev.guru/taskforce/
Ruben (TheGameDev.Guru)