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Feature Highlight: Unity Teams

June 28, 2017 in Games | 5 min. read
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Collaborate is out of beta and joins Cloud Build as part of a new offering called Unity Teams -- a single solution that provides Unity users a set of features to create together, faster. It will include all the features that help Unity creators work better together, regardless of discipline: engineers, artists, designers, QA, everyone.

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You can expect Unity Teams features to always be simple to use for the entire team and well-integrated in the Unity experience. In this post, we explain why we created Unity Teams, who can benefit from it and, how much it will cost for various types of users, plus some of the great features it will include.

Why have we created Unity Teams?

For the most part, games are created by teams of people, and both Collaborate and Cloud Build are fundamentally about helping teams work together. They accelerate the iteration process of trial and improvement. From a user experience perspective, they work markedly better when used together. For example, with Collaborate enabled, Cloud Build takes only a few clicks to set up.  

Though we’re all about teams, we recognize that many Unity users are hobbyists or just curious about game development.  This leads us to our next topic…

Are there any benefits for individual Unity users?

We recognize that a lot of our users create solo; especially in the earliest stages of ideation. Though Unity Teams is optimized for groups of users, we want to provide solo creators benefits too.  

As such, Unity Personal users can back up their own projects and history (up to 1GB for free), as well as upload and share builds easily (more on these later). Then, when a solo creator is ready, it’s easy and affordable to scale up to Unity Teams.

What does it cost, and why? Our pricing philosophy

Our goal is to make our features as accessible as possible; in line with our missions to democratize game development and enable success for game developers.   

With regard to enabling success, Unity Teams differs from other solutions in that it is designed first and foremost for game development with Unity. The features, design and UX are all optimized for who is on a Unity team and the kinds of projects they tend to create; for example, recognizing .meta files should never be separated from their files (due to risk of corruption) so we treat these as a single entity.

With regard to democratizing game development, we wanted to craft an offer that would satisfy the greatest number of people possible. So we listened to customer feedback. The offer we landed on reflects the behavior of our beta users, and their direct feedback via surveys and customer interviews.

With this pricing philosophy in mind, we arrived at the following structure:

What’s changed for Cloud Build?

If you’re an existing Cloud Build user, you’ll notice a few changes. First, we’ll soon be providing all Unity users with a brand new set of features for working with and sharing your local builds. All Unity users will also be able to push their games to app stores that have partnered with us.  

At the same time, automatic, cloud-created builds will only be available for those organizations with a Unity Teams plan - whether purchased or inherited through a Unity Plus or Pro subscription. The default Cloud Build limits will become a bit different than the current Cloud Build plans too, as we focus on the features that will be the most useful to the most teams.

What about students?

We know that students and educators really like using Collaborate for Unity Teams. A special offer to students and educators is in the works. If you’re an educator and you want your students to use Collaborate and Cloud Build features, contact us. We’re looking for feedback on some ideas we have for we have in mind.

Free* stuff!

*Don't you just love the word free? So do we! Until October 2017, all Unity users can try out all Unity Teams features for free.

If you are already using Collaborate and Cloud Build you can keep using them as you have been, with no change in cost for the next few months. If you haven’t yet tried Collaborate or Cloud Build, this is a good time to see what they can do for you! This will give you all plenty of time to decide if Unity Teams is right for you. During which time, we’re going to be busy cranking out more features, and listening to feedback, which you can provide on our forum.

What can I look forward to?

Our recent releases for Collaborate have been focused on getting the basics rock solid; basic features to share, save, and sync projects, and also nailing down stability. As we finish up on foundational work, we’ll be introducing new features that Beta customers have asked the most for, and also some new Unity-specific stuff. With the upcoming release of 2017.1,  you can look forward to better project-browser integration, selective sync, and a new “In Progress” feature, which lets you see when other team members are working on a project asset.

What do I next?

Unity 2017.1 is on the way shortly, and it will include the latest and greatest of Unity Teams. But you can try out all the features now in the latest beta.

And be sure to provide us feedback on your thoughts or experiences. Comment below or on the Collaborate forum.

June 28, 2017 in Games | 5 min. read

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