All Unity fans and fans had a real celebration yesterday. At the opening of the Unity 2014 conference, the authors of the engine of the same name pleased the developers with a whole bouquet of news.
We’ll start with the numbers.
So, the total downloads of Unity-based applications amounted to 8.7 billion. Moreover, as noted by David Helgason, CEO of the company, this figure is greatly underestimated. The fact is that it is based only on reports sent by Unity game developers, which is not always necessary to do.
As for the popularity of the platform itself, 45% of mobile games that were created using third-party software solutions were made on the basis of Unity.
The total number of users of the platform today is 3 million people worldwide. However, this is for the whole time. MAU Unity is slightly smaller – 600 thousand. For comparison, three years ago the number of monthly users of the engine reached “only” 120 thousand. Plus, not so long ago Apple announced that it had created 629,000 jobs in Europe alone.
Unity also found that they help the industry save about $1.4 billion a year. At the same time, the guys started from the fact that the average salary in our industry is $ 50 thousand a year (we look into our wallet together).
The company also announced the purchase of the Austin startup Tsugi, which developed a solution of the same name for easy build collection, testing and uploading to the store. A funny video posted on the Tsugi website shows that a girl relaxing over a cup of tea can cope with all this with the help of a solution in a couple of clicks.
Unity is going to use Tsugi’s experience to launch Unity Cloud Build. The latter, according to an official press release, will give developers “access to a powerful service that allows you to build, test and share new game projects much faster.” The purpose of the service is to solve the problem with the production and maintenance of successful cross-platform games. This will happen due to the transfer of the production process to the cloud.
It is not reported how much Tsugi cost Unity.
Well, the most important news with Unity 2014 is, of course, the announcement of the opening of the source code of a number of engine components. The company will start by opening the code of its test tools, as well as the UI.
Just below is a full two-hour presentation. By the way, we were pleasantly surprised that the number of views of such a narrowly specialized event reached 13 thousand in less than a day and continues to grow.
Unity is a very popular engine among mobile app developers, allowing you to develop games for most existing platforms, including PC, Facebook, iOS, Android, portable and home consoles. One of the key features of the toolkit since its release has been a user-friendly editor.