Today’s Unite event in Boston was dominated by one major announcement from Unity. Unity chief executive John Riccitiello, during his keynote address today, stated that the game engine’s usage has gone up to a million users as of this August from last year’s peak which was 60,000.
According to Riccitiello, the number of current developers is equivalent to 125 Electronic Arts in terms of people working on Unity games.
Democratization is the founding idea of the company, he said. We put power in the hands of developers. The key idea we want to see is more people creating content than ever before. Game production is a fundamentally hard thing to do. Getting those games to work on multiple platforms is a very hard thing to do.
As hard as it is to build a game, it’s harder to have that game monetized and hard to have that game discovered, Riccitiello added.
Played on more that 1.1 billion handsets, according to the chief executive of the company, more than 174,000 games were built on Unity’s game engine last month. Stats also show that these games were downloaded more than 1.2 billion times. Surprising? I think not, considering how effective Unity is in development and user friendliness.
Riccitiello said that Unity will not only help developers create new games, it will also assist them in making their games visible to their desired audiences. This means the game engine aims to make discovery of games easier. Smart, isn’t it? The latest version of the game engine, Unity 5, was released on March 5 and according to Riccitiello, it has been 180 days since the launch. From then, the engine has seen two updates, making it more developer friendly each time and there is another update scheduled for this December.
