The Unity game engine, now powering video game development from the iPhone to the Xbox, is yet another emerging platform set to open its own “App Store”.
User numbers have soared since David Helgason, Unity chief executive, announced at its developer conference in October that a $199 version of its software would be free.
“Meticulously, in four and half years, we’ve built up 13,000 users, and then in a month we’ve more than doubled that,” he told me this week.
Unity’s popularity is due to the helpful tools it provides to make the task of adapting a game engine easier – normally only the major publishers and developers can afford the steep learning curves that other engines create to power their games.
“Democratisation [of game development] is not just about price point, it ‘s about being accessible,” he says.
The $199 version of the software is intended for hobbyists and start-ups – as they grow, he hopes they will graduate to a $1,500 a seat version that adds more sophisticated features.
Even this is far cheaper than other engines, with no further licensing costs. Users have to rely on the growing Unity community though for tech support.
The community is also beginning to provide add-ons to the software that can make coding of particular parts easier.
“There’s already an ad-hoc marketplace for extensions, both free and commercial. One guy didn’t like how we built user interfaces in Unity, so he built his own version of how to do this and is selling it for about 200 bucks,” says Helgason.
“But yes there is a discovery problem [of how people find these apps], so definitely [we need an App Store] for the developers.”
More than 350 iPhone games are powered by the Unity engine, many more use it in browser-based games and for the Facebook platform.
Major projects using Unity include EA’s forthcoming online Tiger Woods golf game and a massively multiplayer online game from the Cartoon Network.
“They picked us not because we were the most optimised for this, but because we could work well on low-end hardware – it is a children’s game that can work on passed-down previous generation PCs.
Unity was founded in Denmark but now has its home in San Francisco’s SoMa start-up district, in the same building as Twitter, employing around 50 people. In October, it secured $5.5m in funding in a venture round led by Sequoia Capital.
In related news this week, Silicon Valley start-up Sibblingz launched a private beta of its cloud-based social gaming framework.
With Sibblingz, developers choose a social game design, develop it and plug it into a common framework for a Facebook, iPhone or Web game. They use this to access a common game back-end located in a cloud server farm, enabling the user’s social game to be shared across all the front-ends.
“Now we finally offer to game developers the holy grail of social gaming: develop game content once, and deploy across all the channels where users want to consume this content while providing the same social context and friends in the game,” said Peter Relan, co-founder and chairman of both Sibblingz and social gaming company CrowdStar.
