Long answer: read on

At the Unite 2009 conference we just announced that Unity Indie would be discontinued and that a new version of Unity (called just “Unity”) would be made free. Of course this requires some explanation, and since the forums (as well as Twitter and the rest of the interwebs) are aflame with speculation I think I better get started explaining.

Unity Indie no more

Unity Indie was a cool product. It was very featureful, enabling production of rich 3D games and other interactive content for the web and standalone PC and Mac builds too. And it was a commercial product too: it cost $199 and you were explicitly allowed to sell your work and make money with it. This was no “hobbyist” or “noncommercial” license.

But also it’s not been a significant part of our business at all: Unity Pro, Unity Wii and Unity iPhone for the bulk of our (rapidly growing) livelyhood.

However what we liked about Unity Indie was that it allowed many many people to get started with Unity. These people are hobbyists, students, professional and amateur independent developers, as well as teenagers and kids. And many of them are really valuable to the community.

Instead, a free Unity

Today we launched a new product called just “Unity”. It has the same features as Unity Indie had, and the same license (and can thus be used commercially). The only difference will be that it’s free of charge. No time limits, no trials. Just a registration and a download, and you’re good to go.

This new product won’t do anything funky or strange. There’s no forced advertising, there’s no new requirements to share your revenue with us, and there’s no “crapware” or “adware” installed with it.

Indie customers, expect an email from us

Secondly, we understand that people who recently bought Unity Indie might feel really unlucky. Every single Unity 2.x Indie license owner will be offered to upgrade to Unity Pro or to add Unity iPhone Basic to their license for a big discount. And everyone who bought Unity Indie in the last sixty days are alternately being offered full refunds if they don’t wish to upgrade.

These emails are going out in the next couple of days so please bear with us while we’re inundated with excitement and while we try not to make our severs overheat

Feel free to discuss this here or on the forums (http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=34991), and we’ll try to answer your questions although we are also really busy at the conference (it’s awesome by the way, so many great people).

UPDATE: A few people asked if this move had anything to do with our new investors. It’s a fair question, but we had been thinking about this much longer. However when we told them, they were very supportive of the idea.

UPDATE 2: Thanks for the comments. A few questions have been asked repeatedly here and in our forums, so I addressed them here.

We feel terrible about those people left in the cold, so we’ve decided to bail out any Blade3D users who want to adopt Unity.

The bailout consists in us crediting subscription fees a Blade3D customer has paid towards any Unity license, up to 50% off its full price. Just forward your Blade3D invoice(s) to blade3dbailout@unity3d.com before September 28th, along with a note about which license you wish to purchase.

Unity is of course different from Blade3D, but we think you’ll like what you find.

Since Blade3D used C# for scripting just like Unity can, anyone well versed in Blade3D will be right at home in Unity.

Also, Unity is a more professional solution, with a user community of around 10,000 developers building everything from full-scale browser-based MMOs, through online casual games, iPhone games, and Nintendo Wii games, to hundreds of simulations, training experiences,virtual worlds, the works.

Welcome to all of you who decide to accept the offer.

PS. Depending on the volume, it might take a couple of days for us to handle requests, so please bear with us and use the free trial in the meantime.

But what is this all about anyway?

This summer I will be posting a handful of posts to share with you some of our thoughts about where this is all going. Not exactly a roadmap (our CTO Joachim Ante, as well as our lead iPhone developer Renaldas “ReJ” Zioma have been doing that), but to explain why we’re doing what we’re doing, and maybe to help us all know what we’re speaking about when we say “Unity”.

Democratization is the word

Giving everyone access to something that previously not everyone had access to. So we decided to do that.  This has several requirements:

1) Be simple, accessible

The first step to democratization is to provide a license that anyone can pick up.

Not everyone will go to the trouble to call up and inquire about pricing, so that has to be given away on the website.

Not everyone can afford $1499, so we offer a $199 license too.

We felt that a professional software model was the most powerful of models, offering a well understood setup where software is basically purchased from a website, rather than somehow pried away from the provider. To understand it, just think how Photoshop or Office is licensed and you’ve pretty much got it.

This then has to be offered in an accessible manner: all docs and tutorials are provided on the website;  no stupid NDAs to sign. And we offer our developer conference proceedings for free on the website too (some 30-odd hours of highly qualified tutorial content).

2) Robustness, polish

If you license a game engine for a million dollars, you’ll perhaps not mind too much to hire a full time supporter to go along with it. But if you buy something for $199 it better work the first time around! 

Think about it. As illogical as this sounds, having thousands of customers paying you just $199 each is an incredibly high bar, much higher than working in an enterprise licensing model where you have a complex and high-touch relationship with each customer.

3) Profit

While the previous two points are pretty obvious, this one is less so, but no less important. No matter how friendly a business model one adopts, if it’s not profitable, it’ll have to change. We however are proud that our business model is working incredibly well, and that we therefore are able to stay the course (more than can be said about some of our dear competitors).

But just for the record (we’re honest guys) we’re not just doing this to be nice. There is a kind of boiling point of openness and accessibility, at which a community can evolve and generate tremendous excitement and value. Which everyone who participates gets to share in.

And with you, we’ve hit it. Thanks, and here’s to many more years of cool Unity.

We’re also hosting a bar meetup on Wednesday night, done in conjunction with the Nordic Games folks. Whether you’re attending the conference or not, join us at Zoé 2 / Sofabar, Neuer Pferdemarkt 17, Hamburg. The event starts at 7:30pm until late.

http://europe.casualconnect.org/

I want to give you all a heads-up on a cool development at HQ. But let me first digress for a minute.

2008 was a wonderful year for Unity. We launched support for two major platforms (Wii, iPhone), our userbase tripled, there’s probably more than 10 times more games out with Unity now than in 2007, and some very hard-core teams started or announced they were doing extremely ambitious things with Unity (Cartoon Network, Funcom, Disney, loads of others in the woodworks). And with more business, we could afford to more than double the team: core development, platform development, and QA & support.

But another wonderful thing happened. On a trip to London in September, I was introduced to a guy called David Lau-Kee, and we decided to meet over coffee.

David had been co-founder and CEO of a company called Criterion Software, which some of you might know as the company behind the Burnout series of racing games. But more importantly Criterion developed the Renderware engine, which more than any other game engine established and ruled the game engine market for a decade. Eventually Electronic Arts took over, which by the way was seen by the industry as very damaging for Renderware… and which may have allowed Epic to finally establish a stranglehold on the AAA engine space. After that David stayed with EA as vice “president of worldwide development”, a sort of “head of game engines” at EA.

I didn’t really know what to expect, but set aside an hour in an otherwise tight schedule. I was worried that I would meet someone from a different era, that would tell me (interesting) stories of times past and, if I were able to convince him of how cool Unity is, perhaps be able to give me introductions to some key people in the industry.

Three hours later I was still there, in intense discussions. At some point I had decided to just not look at my watch (and risk missing my plane back to Denmark). He really got it, often ahead of me explaining. And he was voicing ideas that we had just barely started thinking about. We didn’t agree on everything (still don’t), but it was intense and creative disagreement. It was reminiscent of when Tom Higgins joined us: a person with a very deep experience of a similar product yet having a different and with interesting angle. Additionally this guy had the experience of building a company from 2 people (in a closet, reminding me of our own story) to a team of 400 across multiple geographies and the works.

David was looking for the “next big thing” to apply his skills and experience to. And we were looking for a veteran like David to vet our crazy ideas with, and to advice our strategy and growth plans. 

I did make that plane, and then one thing took another. David was sneaking around at Unite, and has made several trips to Copenhagen. And now, we are finally ready take on David Lau-Kee as non-executive chairman. He’s smart, knowledgable, and him being able to call every senior game industry exec won’t hurt either

David believes in what we’re doing just as much as we do, and his strong support can only make us more bold in executing a plan to be a very serious player in this industry, to be a new kind of software company, and to make Unity into a growing and well supported package for a long long time to come. 

I’m thrilled.

If course I’ll take the time to meet with a few interesting companies while I’m there – amongst others, people doing hardware instead of software… I’ve met so few of those, it’s going to be exciting to learn about their no-doubt very different business models, and see where Unity can be a fit.

So, anyone else I should be meeting up with? As I’ve written before, the authorized way to meet up in foreign cities is dopplr.com.

Okay, what can I tell you? How about:

– 2 x full blown MMO being made with Unity
– 5 x virtual worlds being made with Unity
– 3 x well funded game portals being made with Unity
– several VC funded projects that we haven’t even been told what are about
– And of course thousands of Unity licenses being used for things that we know nothing of

… and that’s not mentioning all the evaluation projects and projects pending funding. 2008 will be a wild ride.

There’s several ways to answer that question. It’s in the millions. It’s also growing, and the rate of growth is increasing. And this year there’s a long line of very major and high-profile game releases planned, which will accelerate this even more. But while the future may be good (and with Unity, the future is good), it’s not now.

But why did you ask that question? Most likely it is to figure out the risk of using Unity content on your site. That you’ll have lots of visitors, many of which who don’t have and won’t install the plugin and leave for somewhere else.

Of course plugin penetration is very important to this, but if a technology doesn’t have >95% ubiquity, the plugin installation process is just as important.

We spent a lot of effort figuring out how to make the plugin install process for Unity as simple as possible. And it’s a lot easier than that of the Shockwave player (not to mention other sub-par technologies). Well, parts of the install process took effort and thinking… but how much effort goes into not requiring registration and pushing adware?

– The whole plugin is 3MB download for everything
– And it is delivered from a Content Delivery Network so all users get a fast download
– The installation doesn’t require a browser restart on any platform
– And it even keeps the user on same the site without even a page reload
– There’s no user registration required
– And no Google toolbar or other adware
– Unity supports Microsoft Vista and Intel based Macs
– And doesn’t crash on old/ancient graphics card and driver combinations

Our statistics tell us that for people who don’t have the plugin already installed, over 60% complete the plugin installation (this differs between different types of content, and just as importantly, based on the presentation of your content… that is material for another blog post).

Depending on where you deploy Shockwave content, it is commonly believed that 50% of your visitors have the plugin installed already. Of the remaining 50%, you’ll lose some because of the plugin installation process. Because of the reasons outlined above, for Shockwave we believe it is around 40%. So do the math:

Shockwave:
Preinstalled: ~50%
Successful plugin installs: ~20% (50% x 40% success rate)
Total successful views: ~70%

Unity:
Preinstalled: ~1%
Successful plugin installs: ~59% (99% * 60% success rate)
Total successful view: ~60%

As a solid proof, R/C Laser Warrior recently was the most played game on shockwave.com for 2 weeks straight, with up 40.000 simultaneous players, and is still listed as a Top Online game there. And that’s on a site dominated by Shockwave games.

Still, you might worry that using the Unity technology is a bit daring, and early-adopter-ish. A couple of weeks ago, a Massive Media Conglomerate called Disney released a Unity-based game online game, Sooga Mountain. So I ask you, can you be as agile and daring as those guys?

During GDC this year I met up with John Swords III, business developer at ESC (and a really impressive guy). He did an impromptu interview with me there (we had to hide in a corner next to a garbage-can to get a sufficiently quiet spot to do the recording), which I think gives a good image of my thoughts about Unity this spring… with a sprinkling of history in between.

Listen in: http://blogs.electricsheepcompany.com/sheep/?cat=71

The concept is simple: it’s a lightweight social network where you enter your travel itineraries, and voilà! dopplr tells you who’ll be in the same city as you at the same time. No “applications”, games, dating, advertising, or in fact anything else.

Just go here, sign-up, add me as a contact, and we’re all set! I mean it, right now: sign up

See you … wherever.