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GDC 2014 Wrap-up

March 29, 2014 in News | 3 min. read
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Wow! What an incredible conference GDC was this year! Our booth was awesome, incredibly busy, and full of amazing friends and partners demonstrating how talented the wide Unity community is. But while the show was great for us, it was truly amazing for developers everywhere.

10 short  years ago, Unity was just 3 guys in a basement trying to create tech to enrich the lives of developers. Who would have thought that the company we started and technology we built would grow into this amazing community and have such an incredible impact on the industry!

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It’s humbling to see our mission to democratize development succeed in a golden age of creativity. We want to continue providing the best tools to empower you to create awesome games and become successful. This means keeping the largest number of supported platforms, increasing the usability of the tools to make sure you can experiment and iterate quickly to realize your vision, and providing services to help you connect your games with great audiences.

Unity’s acquisition of Applifier, creators of the awesome Everyplay and GameAds services, was a big step in our new journey to democratize the bits that sit outside of creative game development. Connecting players with your game and your studio is easily one of the biggest challenges to modern developers. Of all the solution we have seen (and we've seen many) the Everyplay replay sharing network is the coolest way to help a game connect with an audience, and for current players to find out more about the games they're playing. You can read more about this announcement here.

Our other big announcement was Unity 5! This is a leap forward in graphics fidelity, adding physically-based shaders and real-time global illumination with Enlighten – but this major cycle is about more than that. The unified shader architecture, real-time lightmap previews, and revamped audio system are there to make your lives easier and games better. The best part of this is that what we announced at GDC 2014 is just Unity 5.0: there are a lot more major additions coming in this cycle to get excited about.

Check out the Unity 5 announcement and make sure to check out the preview video as well.

Our Unity 5 announcement also brought news of our 19th platform, WebGL. We have been hard at work with Mozilla behind the scenes on this and couldn’t be more proud. Seeing Dead Trigger 2 look so good and run so well with real meaty gameplay is amazing. You can see Mozilla’s blog about our work together and the video demo below.

Along with the Unity 5 announcement, we also discussed the future of the 4.x cycle, which includes two more big releases: 4.5 and 4.6. Unity 4.6 is especially noteworthy as it marks the release of our much anticipated new GUI system. We can't wait to get it in your hands!

If the games and developers hosted in our Games Pavilion this year are any indication, we can expect a lot out of you all in the next couple of years. Not only did we have top notch visuals covering a variety of genres and styles, we had a group showing off just how powerful the tools can be for small teams. Just look at Team Colorblind, a team of two, creating Aztez for seven platforms, including all of the consoles! So thank you to 5 Bits Studios, Amplitude Studios, Dynamighty, HB Studios, Infinite Fall, Madfinger Games, Press Play, Proletariat, Snowcastle Games, Team Colorblind, ustwo, and Witch Beam Studios for making us look good! And, if you haven’t seen it yet, check out our new game reel from GDC that showcases some of the games that were at our booth along with a few others.

GDC 2014 turned out amazing! The industry as a whole lept forward, and we’re extremely proud of the part we played in this transformation. It’s exciting to walk side by side with so many of you into the future of the industry.

– David Helgason

March 29, 2014 in News | 3 min. read

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