You’ll probably have heard of Unity Technologies: despite being founded just nine years ago, the company’s mantra of democratising game development has seen Unity grow from a focused OS X game creation tool to one of the most widely used engines in existence today. The most recent figures claim 1.9 million registered developers, with a monthly active number of 400,000. We talk with development director Erik Juhl, who explains how the company is preparing for the next generation, and the importance of grassroots support.
How do you think your European conference, Unite Nordic, went?
We think it went very well. David [Helgason, co-founder]’s keynote address got people excited when we announced that basic mobile deployment is now free. But it may surprise you to hear that Unite China has practically become our main Unite event now, just in terms of numbers and interest. I think we saw something like three times the attendance in Shanghai than we did in Amsterdam last year, and San Francisco the year before.
How are you preparing for next-generation development?
We’ve taken the guys who are already supporting 360, PS3 and Wii and built teams around them to support Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony’s new consoles for the foreseeable future. And we’re going to become much more modular: because of all these different platforms, we want to do platform-specific updates that don’t require the full editor download. The other major change is how we’re growing internally. Obviously we have more people, and more people means we have to figure out how to maintain this flat structure and global communication.
Other than The Butterfly Effect, Unity tends to avoid showy demos. Do you think that air of pragmatism has contributed to your success?
That’s an interesting observation. You’re right, we do tend to err on the side of pragmatism, but at the same time we’ve also tried to address the needs of those who need to see something a little showier. So we did The Butterfly Effect demo to showcase DX11, but what we generally value is more direct feedback. It comes back to pragmatism – we like to provide a demo and tech examples for people, to say this is how you use Unity to do this, and start a conversation with developers. That being said, we’re also now building up a demo team in Stockholm because we’ve heard from our users that it makes it much easier for them to get their studio heads to accept Unity if they can show what it’s capable of!
We can’t imagine that appeals like those happen so much with Unreal Engine or CryEngine.
No, it’s usually the other way round. It’s the studio heads coming in and going, “This technology is for everyone.” I used to be at Midway Games in Chicago, and it was decided that every game would be made using Unreal 3. That was really difficult because at the time it didn’t even run on PS3; and we had a bunch of sports titles that had to run at 60fps, and Unreal didn’t run at 60fps. A lot of times we hear stories of guys going home from their day jobs at EA or Activision or whatever and firing up Unity to tinker around with their own game ideas and prototyping. Then for the next project at their company, they say, “Hey, why aren’t we using Unity?” And it just goes from there.
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