We had visitors from as far as India, Israel, Uruguay and Australia – a total of 22 nationalities (and another 15 or so if you include Unity employees). And although these people are all working on different things – from MMOs to mobile games to a host of projects outside of gaming – they’re all remarkably similar in their passion, creativity and intelligence.

At Unite, we also did something we haven’t done since 2005: we launched a new way of doing business. And we did it twice during the Unite keynote (watch it here), which feels kind of wild for us.

The first is the Unity Asset Store, the flagship feature of Unity 3.1 which we launched (as a free update) during the Unite keynote. The Unity Asset Store is accessed from within Unity and is a way to download and buy Unity assets without leaving the app. It’s cool as it launched with around 70 cool packages in it, and from now on, it’ll be the prime repository for Unity assets, whether these are art packages, tutorials, scripts and libraries, or even whole new features for Unity (using the editor extensibility). I promise you that this is going to be big, and with more than 2000 developers having signed up days after it launched, it seems that many agree!

The second is Union – our new business unit created to help you get your titles on new and/or closed platforms to earn additional revenue. We are already accepting submissions of finished mobile games into Union and are really excited about where this will go during 2011.

We’ll post video and presentations from Unite over the next few weeks but you’ll have to go to our Facebook page to see the pics from the conference, including the ones of us dancing on the catwalk at the best-ever Unite party

As we look ahead, we’re all laser focused on innovating to expand usability, power and platform reach so we can deliver on our vision of democratizing interactive 3D technology. And with the continued upgrades to the Unity platform as well as the launch of the Unity Asset Store and Union, we’re going broader with that laser sharp vision than ever before!

If we don’t see you before, we hope to get to see you at GDC 2011 in San Francisco – and thank you again for the love and support!

We were off to a fantastic start of Unite yesterday! We sold out with 650 participants – nearly double the size of last year’s conference but were able to make space for everyone (though the keynote session ended up being standing room only for the latecomers!)

The live stream of the keynote did work for many, but for many others it didn’t. We’re so sorry about that, but now it’s been posted here: http://unity3d.com/unite/keynote

We made two gigantic announcements here. First, we announced the Unity Asset Store, a digital store so you can share and trade assets – and monetize your skills in a new way. The Unity Asset Store is embedded inside the Unity editor and will act as a hub for you to find free and commercial independently created assets for use in your games and other interactive 3D projects.

Second, we announced Union, a new business unit that will bring your Unity games to new platforms and channels and create new revenue streams for you. We have encountered a huge thirst for great games from a huge range of platforms, and a broad range of these opportunities are currently only being captured by large game publishers. With Union, we can help the smaller developers band together to approach these opportunities as one. We see Union as a further step on the road to the democratization of game development – a road that started with technology but can go much further.

And then Jesse Schell was our keynote guest speaker, and blew our mind with his fresh new talk about The Future of Virtual Characters. I’m so amazed by Jesse: yesterday was the third time I’ve heard him speak, and while his talks are always super dense and full of ideas and most amazingly I haven’t yet heard him repeat himself. Like, at all!

Gamasutra’s Chris Nutt did a great write-up here in case you missed and want to check out: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/31469/Unite_10_Jesse_Schell_And_The_Future_Of_Virtual_Characters.php

We’re so excited to see where you’re going to take this all and want to thank you for making all of this possible! Yay and double yay

This year’s Unite 2010 is less than two days away, and I can’t wait to see those of you who’re attending in Montreal! This will be our biggest and baddest conference so far, with some 600 of the coolest people from the Unity universe coming together for the usual three intense days of learning, sharing, and partying (in awesome Montreal, but that’s secondary).

We’re all but sold out, but we’ve worked hard to expand capacity, so you can still make it if you hurry – and don’t miss the sweet hotel deal too! More info and booking here.

The program contains over 25 sessions with over 50 speakers, including some of our top engineers and community experts; the Unity Awards will feature some of the best content created with Unity; the business speed dating aims to connect developers and opportunities; and much more! And of course, there will be a huge big party Thursday night!

If you can’t attend the event, you can still be a part of Unite 2010 experience by viewing our keynote, where renowned visionary and game designer (and Unity developer) Jesse Schell will be this year’s guest speaker. The keynote will be streamed live at 10am EST (GMT-5) on our front-page. We got some pretty wild announcements to share, so stay tuned!

View the keynote here! (but not until Wednesday)

Finally I wanted to give special thanks to our sponsors, including Intel, NVidia, Design3, Electrotank, Exit Games, Mixamo, and the Panasonic Cloud Entertainment Company – it’s really important for us to have good friends that support the cause.

Yet another wonderful thing has befallen us – Unity has been nominated for the Game Developer’s 2010 Frontline Awards in the category “Best Engine”. We were a runner up last year, but since then we’ve released Unity 3, soft-launched Unity for Android, and are coming well along with both Xbox 360 and PS3 support. So we think we might have a chance.

The decision is made by a voting system so in the end it’s up to you, the developers! Feel free to make your voice be heard: may whichever engine you think deserves to win, win!

Speak up right here: Frontline Awards Voting Page.

(… I’ll wait …)

Lot’s of love and thank you so much. See you out there in the community – some of you even at the Unite conference, just a week from now!

As you can see, we released Unity 3 to the world today. It’s a an incredibly awesome release: both in and by itself, but also in what it means in terms of our broad vision of bringing the best game technology to everyone. And you are part of that group… well, we all are!

There’s loads more to say, but today I’ll make it short: as the release came out of the blue this morning at 8.30am California time (GMT+8), we are extending the “pre order” rebate for 24 hours. So it’ll expire at 9am California time tomorrow.

So if you were planning to make use of the pre order rebate then hurry on over and order Unity 3 now: https://store.unity3d.com/shop/

Lots of love!

It’s been 5 months since Apple announced the new iOS 4.0 Terms of Service which seemed like they might block out Unity (as well as similar technologies) from their AppStore.

We commented on this right away (in a first, second, and third installment), and after some deliberation we even invented a workaround that we might employ in case Apple ever stopped approving Unity-base apps.

All along Apple kept approving every single Unity game submitted to the AppStore – several per day – and even featuring some of them highly, so it was clear that Apple never stopped liking the results of what Unity developers have been doing. And neither did the gamers by the way: they’ve downloaded tens of millions of copies of Unity-based games, more often than not without knowing or caring if tools or middleware had been used or not.

We never felt it right to shout out complaints, even if many of our friends and customers asked us to. We were after all in a precarious situation where Apple could have started banning Unity apps any day, and our responsibility for our thousands of customers weighed heavily on our shoulders. But it felt weird to speak in such a soft voice while under pressure, and we say sorry to those that felt we weren’t being proactive enough.

Now we couldn’t discuss publicly during the last months that Apple stayed in touch with us all along, and that we had conversations with them every few weeks. And after what we must assume has been deep deliberation and soul-seeking inside Apple, they finally came out with a response early this morning California time: they’ve simply decided to stop worrying about how applications are made.

We think this is exactly the right approach: it’s possible to make incredibly bad applications using just Xcode, and it’s possible to make just as amazingly excellent applications with a tool like Unity. The focus of a platform owner should obviously be on enabling its developers to do great work and so to give millions of users fun, thrilling, cute, enlightening and lovely experiences… wherever they may find themselves and whenever they want.

Apple has been in an accelerated learning process, and even though they’re some of the smartest people we know, figuring out how to operate the world’s most successful online marketplace can’t be easy. We have been frustrated with them along the way (and we have told them so, in a few more words), but we kept the channels open to work on a positive result. Today we respect them for coming to the right conclusion and in our eyes it’s best to let bygones be bygones!

So from all us in Unity Technologies to all of you: feel free to keep doing awesome work!

Like everyone else who’s excited about mobile development, and in particular using Unity to create awesome games for the iPhone, we’ve been following the development of the iOS 4.0 Terms of Service closely. While we’ve had some reason to believe Unity using C# and JavaScript would be okay, Apple has not confirmed anything and in general very little information has been forthcoming. However, as of today Apple is still approving every game we know of and Apple has recently featured several excellent Unity games in the App Store. And all along we’ve continued to invest heavily in our Unity iPhone line, including a number of new features that will be coming soon in the Unity 3.0 release. But as soon as the new terms of service were revealed we also started working on a contingency plan, just in case Apple decides to stop approving Unity-based games. Allow me to explain that contingency plan so everyone out there knows what “plan B” looks like.

As you probably know, Unity is mostly written in optimized C++ with assembly optimizations and Objective-C wrappers thrown in for good measure. Game logic is written by the developer, using C# and JavaScript, both of which are running on top of .NET. The beauty of this scheme is that we’ve been able to sidestep the old scripting-versus-native question as .NET provides for very rapid development (and almost near-instant compilation), while at the same time generating highly optimized code. And on the iPhone we actually ahead-of-time compile .NET to completely static machine code for speed and conformance with the old iOS Terms of Service. Also, on the iPhone it’s easy to drop into Objective-C code to access fresh APIs like the Game Center, Core Motion, etc. This is truly a case of best of both worlds.

Since Unity’s .NET support may conflict with the new terms of service, we are working on a solution where entire games can be created without any .NET code. In this proposed scenario all the scripting APIs will be exposed to and can be manipulated from C++. This is of course not ideal as there are thousands of code examples, snippets, and extensions created by the community can no longer be copied into your project, .NET assemblies can’t simply be dropped in, and C++ is more complex than JavaScript or even C#.

But honestly, it’s not as bad as one might imagine. One still has the full benefit of the asset pipeline, the shader language, an array of tools and of course the engine and its optimizations. We are also working on maintaining the elegant workflows of the JavaScript and C# in Unity: “scripts” will still be able to be edited live, variables will still be shown in the inspector, and a number of other sweet features that one doesn’t usually associate with C++ development. Essentially we are creating a .NET based C++ compiler that will allow us to write purely managed C++ code in the Web Player and other Platforms. On iOS C++ code will be compiled by Apple’s Xcode tools. This indeed is a very powerful combination. In the Unity Editor, you have fast compilation times and a completely sandboxed environment. On the device you have native C++ performance and low memory overhead. This combines the key strength of scripting languages and C++ code.

When you combine those with the fact that when it comes to straightforward game logic, C++ really isn’t as complex as it’s often made out to be (and as it can be) hopefully you can see that life won’t be so bad after all. To help demonstrate my point, let’s look at a few different examples.

Here is a simple JavaScript function to rotate an object around the world origin:

And now here is that same bit of code written in C++:

As you can see the code required isn’t all that different in simple case scenarios, but what about a more complex example?

Here is a bit of JavaScript that peeks accelerometer and looks for user touch input on an iOS device, then uses that to fly a craft and fire a missile in the game:

And again, here is that same set of code in C++:

Again, the code doesn’t get that much more complicated just by writing it in C++ versus JavaScript, and the difference is even smaller compared to C#.

We continue to be excited about the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad as platform targets for Unity developers. While we don’t think C++ is the best language to write game code, using C++ as a scripting language has memory and performance advantages on low-end devices. This is a great feature to have for developers who want to squeeze the last ounce of memory & performance out of their games.

We still can’t believe Apple will force developers into choosing a specific language for development. And as mentioned, Apple is still approving every Unity-based game we know of. In case the situation changes, rest assured that we are working this Plan B.

We’ll be ready to talk more about this as well as share some time-line information with you soon, while of course waiting to find out if any of this will actually be necessary.

First I want to thank all of you who have expressed support for us in the past weeks. While we can’t yet say exactly how the ToS 3.3.1 will play out, Unity is very different from Flash and we strongly believe that Unity developers will be unharmed. Oh, and awesome Unity games such as Armada: Galactic War, RPG Snake, Roswell Fighter HD, and Zombieville HD are still being accepted into and promoted in  the AppStore  (even after accepting the new ToS). Therefore we are continuing and renewing our investment into the platform, while also researching contingency plans in case we need to modify Unity to keep it compliant.

The whole company is still manically focused, putting all our efforts into making Unity 3 our best release ever. Unity 3 is very much about major new features, big ticket items like live debugging, deferred rendering, a built-in lightmapper, and things like that. But then we’re also obsessed about polish, so we are also adding features like vertex snapping. Small and large, these features most Unity developers will benefit from regardless of which platform(s) they’re targeting.

A major focus of this effort is Unity iPhone 3, where we’re rolling out some very specific (and cool) improvements for iPhone and iPad developers.

If you visited us at GDC 2010, you might have seen this very cool looking platformer game running on the iPhone 3GS. Our awesome demo team put this together to show what’s possible with Unity iPhone 3′s upcoming OpenGL ES 2.0 support — shaders add so much visual fidelity to your games — and as always Unity gracefully handles fallbacks to previous hardware generations.

For “cross-resolution” development as when creating a game for both the iPhone and iPad, Unity 3 makes it really easy to create differentiated builds, where different resolutions of textures are included.

Another cool feature is that we’re making it even easier to call into the iPhone OS, and making the native calls feature available to both Unity iPhone licensees as well as Unity iPhone Pro licensees. Thus you can call into all of iPhone OS 4.0′s new APIs such as the GameCenter, and to drop into ObjectiveC when it makes sense.

And of course there’s going to be lots more

If you haven’t done so yet, have a look at the Unity 3 preview page. And there’s a lot more feature previews coming in these blogs, so stay tuned!

I wanted to take a moment today to follow up on my blog post last Friday regarding the recent controversial changes in the the iPhone OS 4.0 beta ToS. The news about this change from Apple has drawn a lot of attention and stirred up very strong emotions in many developer communities, including ours. There’s also been a great deal of commentary about how these changes will be interpreted and applied by Apple and still more discussion about Apple’s intent with these changes. Unity learned of these changes with the rest of you just last Thursday and today, there remains a great deal of uncertainty about these changes being final and what we may need to do to comply.

We’re meeting with Apple next week to discuss the matter, and our engineers have been discussing possible technical solutions as well. Of course, we’ll provide you with immediate updates as soon as we have any new information.

Just in case the ToS changes do end up being a problem, we’re already working hard to find and implement solutions to maintain uninterrupted compliance with Apple’s ToS.

Though any uncertainly about Unity’s future on this platform is unpleasant, our feeling is that we’ll be okay. We remain firmly committed to providing you with the very best game engine for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. Thank you all so much for your patience and support. It means everything to us.

Update: Unity and the iPhone OS 4.0, update II

First I would like to thank our forum users for their support and thoughtful analyses about Apple’s new ToS (terms of service) for iPhone OS 4.0, due to be released this summer.  As you are probably all aware by now, the new ToS has led to widespread speculation on blogs and in the press about how the change in wording could affect apps sold on Apple’s App Store.

As is so often the case with “legalese,” the new ToS are difficult to parse with certainty and open to broad interpretation – not least by Apple itself. Some have noted that the strictest possible interpretation could prohibit many products from being marketed on the App Store. Others have argued that under more benign interpretations of the new terms, Unity and others will be just fine.

Apple has built a tremendous marketplace for all of us, and it’s great for those who successfully take advantage of it. The flipside, of course, is that the power there so clearly resides with Apple.

This is certainly not the first time that developers of all types of apps have faced sometimes confusing changes in rules, or their interpretation. It’s a risk we all run in basing parts of our businesses on Apple.

Here at Unity, we are working hard on getting good information, and working to understand whether – or how – the new changes could affect the developer community and others.  We have reached out to both official and unofficial contacts at Apple, we are talking to other companies in a similar situation to us, and we’ve been diligent in reading the ToS to get to the best legal (and business-wise) analysis of it.

We haven’t heard anything from Apple about this affecting us, and we believe that with hundreds of titles (or probably over a thousand by now), including a significant proportion of the best selling ones, we’re adding so much value to the iPhone ecosystem that Apple can’t possibly want to shut that down.

Our current best guess is that we’ll be fine. But it would obviously be irresponsible to guarantee that. What I can guarantee is that we’ll continue to do everything in our power to make this work, and that we will be here to inform you when we know more – as soon as we know more.

PS. In the ancient days of the App Store (July 2008), Apple changed the kernel to disallow JIT (just-in-time) compilation. We worked around this by changing Mono to AOT (ahead of time) compile scripts instead (this is why some dynamic constructs in our JavaScript doesn’t work on the iPhone). It was a lot of work, but we made it work to enable all these amazing Unity games to be sold in the App Store, many of which have gone on to be bestsellers and made their creators rich and famous. We’re so very proud of you.

Thanks again for your support.

In the Unite 2009 conference keynote we promised you that Unity would be picking up speed, and it has: Unity has become a powerhouse in the game industry and beyond. Nobody else is as active in democratizing sweet game technology to as many developers, and enabling them to target as many consumers. Unity has been used by well over 100,000 developers of all shapes and sizes to create thousands of games and other interactive 3D content that has touched over 40 million people.

We’re moving fast. Our engineering team now consists of 36 people (up from some 12 or so a year ago), and they are firing on all cylinders. We’ve continually released major updates with tons of features over the last years. We also started working on an Xbox 360 port, and recently blogged that our iPhone team is working on iPad support.

But those teams are just a handful of our people! So what else have we been up to? Thousands of code check ins have been done, many subsystems reworked, leading technologies integrated in Unity, and a massive automated testing suite implemented so that we can move as fast as we can.

In fact, here’s a historical graph of our code checkins:

As a project grows developers tend to check in less frequently, so the actual slope of work being done is much steeper.

Until today it was all hush-hush, but now we’re finally ready to announce our plans. Let it be known: for the last year we’ve been working on the next major release: the uber-cool Unity 3: unity3d.com/unity/coming-soon/unity-3

So far the only time frame we’ve promised is “summer 2010″, but we’ll be giving early beta access – and a discount – to anyone who pre-orders.

Also, we’ve just announced that Unity will add support for iPad, Android, Xbox 360, and PS3! That’s the kind of “author once, deploy anywhere” that has remained a developer’s wet dream for years. And not just from “one codebase”, but from one heck of a unified and polished IDE paired with the industry’s best asset pipeline!

I hope you’ll stick around with us, we’re only just getting started!

PS. Because we’re unifying the core Unity products with Unity iPhone (and all the other deployment targets too) the upgrade rules are a bit complicated and we haven’t done the best job at explaining them. We are working on this, please bear with us as we are inundated with questions – we will sort this all out and make it as clear as it can be in the near future.

Without further ado.

The Year of Gamification, Part 1
We call the adoption of game technology and game design methods outside of the games industry “gamification”, and this is a really broad trend.

Unity and other game technologies are being used across more than a dozen sectors that have little or nothing to do with games. Architectural visualization is an obvious and older example. But apart from that we have some of the world’s biggest engineering and manufacturing companies, as well as several actual armed forces as our customers. TV production companies use Unity and other game engines to produce live TV shows and Machinima videos. Big corporations make employee training and simulation applications using Unity, and some of our customers have gone into online meeting and collaboration. Game technology being applied to all these areas means that Unity users are valuable to many and not everyone has to make a living from games.

Action item: Sell your skills outside the games industry. With a knowledge of other industries, you can create new and innovative products or businesses servicing these industries. The sky’s the limit.

The Year of Gamification, Part 2
A second aspect of gamification is that game design methods and strategies are being used outside of games to design better products and user experiences. A boring site like Mint.com has experimented with turning personal finance into a game, social networking experiment FourSquare maintains high-score lists for people who bar-crawl, and natural-language search startup Siri hired an accomplished game designer to design their user experience.

Action item: Learn game design and apply it to everything – how people sign up for a website, how people “succeed” in using your product, how customers share it with their friends and become leaders of user groups/clans, etc. Game design can be used for all of this.

Another Golden Age for Garage Developers
We are definitely going to see even more quality games done by small teams in 2010. With very little risk and by mainly investing their own time, a small team of 1-2 people can make a hit game that will sell millions of units. More importantly (and what makes this different than 4 years ago), there are now many more channels through which to distribute and sell such a game. Many such games are receiving world-wide acclaim.

Action item: Find an awesome partner and go create!

Publishers Continue to be Valuable
With casual, online and mobile games requiring smaller production budgets and eschewing retail (and thus expensive and slow) distribution in exchange for digital, the game industry was expecting to get rid of the publisher as a concept.

But as the iPhone ecosystem clearly proves (as well as the web somewhat less clearly with portals like Shockwave.com and distribution companies like Zynga and RockYou), the publishers stay. Though they may not be forwarding cash and fully owning the game IPs, their expertise in marketing, game design and online distribution metrics and strategies make them a valuable, if no longer totally required, partner to the game developer.

Action item: Consider working with a publisher. Fortunately with publishers’ leverage lessened, they are typically less demanding with regards to what they have to own (IP, sequel rights, revenue share). Or become your own publisher by building that expertise. This is not a simple task, but has been done by some of the top online game developers.

Everything Becomes a “Console”
This one is somewhat controversial. It seemed that with the move towards mobile and web, the closed ecosystems of the console world would be under siege and eventually collapse. What game developer (except perhaps the ones most entrenched in with the Nintendos-Microsoft-Sony trinity) hasn’t fantasized about this walled garden having its walls rammed down?

Well, welcome to the new world. The iPhone has proven that given the right amount of “openness”, neither consumers nor developers really mind closed platforms.

Even on the anarchic web (regions of which remind one more of a Mad-Maxian post-apocalyptical cyberspace than an enlightened utopia), Facebook is in the process of creating a closed environment within which consumers and game developers can meet and exchange fun and money (more or less) safely.

This section could also have been labeled “the Rise of the AppStore Model”, since it’s more the App Store than the gaming console which inspires this megatrend. And framed like that, it might have made people happy. But this is a problematic trend (to say the least) that should make us stop to think.

Action item: Make use of this. Or if you’re brave, build your own!

Facebook Wallet, Apple Tablet, Unity on Facebook
And then are the obvious ones.

Of course Apple will launch its tablet. We even know the screen-size and CPU make. The only uncertainly left is what day it launches. And its price.

Surely Facebook will launch a payment platform which in tandem with Facebook Connect will dramatically transform the face of microtransactions on the internet. If they do this right, it will finally enable the web-wide microtransactions which we’ve been dreaming of since the dot-com era.

And of course Unity will be big on Facebook. Several major games will get launched on Facebook, offering awesome games to hundreds of millions of people (not to mention significantly moving the needle on adoption of the Unity plugin).

Action item: Left as an exercise for the reader

So, 2009 has been an amazing year. I won’t list out all our achievements, but they’ve been many, and some big enough that achieving just one of them would have made us very proud.

But just in time for the Holiday season, Unity Technologies has been selected as one of the 5 top gaming companies by Game Developer Magazine. According to them, this puts us in a pretty interesting family of Apple, Epic, Valve and Zynga. A cute detail is that we’re by far the smallest. And (apart from Zynga) also the youngest.

Without gushing too much I want to thank you my incredible colleagues (who worked so hard to make this all happen) and our users for this.

Both groups have more than tripled this year, so there’s a constant stream of new faces, new histories and backgrounds, and of course amazing new skills being added to the mix. I guess that part is what makes me love my job the most.

Thanks.

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.

Afterwards I booked tickets for me and Joachim to go to Vienna tonight (Thursday).We have a meeting most (or all) of Friday, but if someone local has time I would love to have lunch with someone from the Unity universe on Saturday.

In any case I have to see the Secession house in Friedrichstraße 12, where I haven’t been since 1997 or so.

d.