I saw a discussion recently saying: "the best engine is the one you know best"
Look: I kinda agree. But only on the short term.
If your team has shipped for years in Unity, knows the tooling, knows the editor pain, knows the rendering pipeline, knows the asset workflow, and knows where the bodies are buried...That matters a lot.
I have spent decades in Unity myself doing:
- Tiny/huge prototypes.
- No-budget games.
- AAA-budget games.
- Performance rescue missions where the frame & time budget was on fire
- And Unity is still my daily driver. Especially when I’m helping teams diagnose and fix performance problems.
So this won't be a "Unity is dead" email (that's lazy and clickbaity bs).
But there is one shift people are uncomfortable about: AI changes the engine conversation
Not because AI magically builds games for you e2e. It doesn't (yet). And it is not replacing your senior engineers next Tuesday either.
But it is already useful:
- For boring repetitive work.
- For tooling & debugging.
- For automation.
- For unfamiliar systems.
- For all the annoying glue work that eats senior engineering time.
That part is real... with one catch:
LLM workflows get stronger when they can inspect the actual source.
And this is where Unity has a structural problem:
- Unity gives you docs.
- APIs.
- Packages.
- Samples.
- MCP tooling.
- A massive ecosystem.
But it doesn't give you the full engine source (obviously).
And this matters a lot because docs are not the engine. And when something is crashing, stalling, allocating, blocking the main thread, or behaving like cursed machinery...
You want the actual path. Source code doesn't lie. Documentation does, all the time.
So I believe:
→ The best engine today is often the one your team knows best.
→ But the best engine tomorrow may also be the one your tools can understand best.
For Unity teams, my advice is simple: do not panic-switch engines. But also do not pretend the engine landscape is frozen.
Get serious about the context your tools can access.
Because if your LLM only knows "generic Unity", it will give you generic Unity answers. Nice looking suggestions, zero fixed FPS spikes.
Cheers,
Ruben
P.S. If your Unity project is already hurting from CPU spikes, GPU bottlenecks, Quest budget misses, memory creep, or loading hitches, send me an email and tell me what is going on. We'll help you in no time.