Development DirectorUnity Technologies in Eastern Europe Elena Zezulina told App2Top.ru how a year has passed for her and the company.
Elena Zezulina
How was 2017 for you?
This year began for me with an offer to change my position: I was offered to become the director of business Development of Unity in Eastern Europe. As you understand, I could not refuse.
The new position has completely changed all plans for the year, but I am very glad that I am now acting on behalf of Unity in a new capacity. Now, after all, I have the opportunity to conduct large–scale experiments and launch both internal and external projects.
A lot happened this year for the first time: I got an administrative check in the USA when getting another visa (it was resolved safely and in a timely manner), and also visited Bali (I wanted to for a long time), learned and felt what surfing is. And, of course, for the first time I am publishing with the results of the year on Ap2top.ru .
How was the year for the company?
This year we switched to a new engine update cycle and changed its monetization. Now we work by subscription and users always have the latest version of Unity.
We have implemented a lot of tools focused primarily on artists and game designers. Among them: Timeline, Cinemachine, 2D Tilemap Editor and Post Processing Stack.
There will be even more of them next year. We have just significantly (by almost two orders of magnitude) increased the development team.
An important event for Unity was the beginning of cooperation with Oats studios, the independent film studio of Neil Blomkamp, director of District No. 9. Blomkamp actually created the Adam universe, although initially this character was invented and created by our internal Unity Demo Team as a demonstration of the capabilities of our technologies. Like the first Adam demo, Blomkamp’s short films were made on Unity and, equally importantly, visualized in real time, which shows the relevance of using the engine in cinema.
We also signed a partnership agreement with Xiaomi, thanks to which it became easier for Western Unity developers to publish their projects in China.
What event of 2017 do you consider the most important for the industry?
I would single out two things.
First, the appearance of the Nintendo Switch. This is a new full-fledged gaming platform that is more accessible and interesting from the point of view of the form factor to users than its competitors.
Secondly, ARKit and ARCore releases. The appearance of their first release versions, which any developer can work with, suggests that perhaps we are already approaching the moment when augmented reality will become familiar. This opens up new opportunities for both developers and users.
What trends of the outgoing year would you note?
One of the main trends of 2016 from my point of view continues: the penetration and integration of gaming technologies into non-gaming industries.
It’s not just about actively borrowing UX solutions and working methods. I am also talking about the fact that more and more companies that are engaged in things far from games (car manufacturing, architecture, medicine, cinema) are using tools created for game development.
The consequence is the demand for some of the game development professionals in new industries that previously had nothing to do with the creation of games.
Name the third-party projects of this year that you liked the most.
I would like to mention several at once.
First of all, the Kefir studio was very pleased with the project Last Day on Earth: Survival. Only at the beta stage, the project received more than a million downloads.
This year, the continuation of the series proved that you can enter the same river twice, three times, sometimes for the tenth time: the new Assassins Creed is rated by many as the best in the series, after last year’s Battlefield 1 it turned out that the new Call of Duty was very able, the last Wolfenstein in the setting of the American post-shock collected almost 90% on Metacritic, and Divinity: Original Sin II left fans of the series absolutely happy.
And, of course, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the locomotive of the Nintendo Switch and the most worthy continuation of the series – an adventure game with an open world, amazing gameplay in many ways and a traditionally strong Japanese plot. There were a lot of jokes from the series “I bought Zelda with a console and I don’t regret it” – this is an unequivocal success. The fact that Nintendo has already sold more than 10 million devices tells us that the balance of power in the console market has already begun to change.