The platform continues its aggressive offensive on the mobile sector: about 50% of Unity’s business is for iOS and Android development. However, the company does not intend to stop there, it is aiming higher.
Unity is becoming the new standard in mobile game development. This can be said based at least on the fact that of all the mobile games presented at GDC, two-thirds were developed on this engine.
“I would never dare to use the word standard in relation to my own engine, but to be honest, the more games are made on it, the better,” says David Helgason, executive director and one of the founders of Unity.
The platform, which allows you to develop high-quality three-dimensional games, currently has 1 million users (back in November 2011 there were 750 thousand of them). Moreover, in just 18 months, the number of active users of the platform has increased from 60 to 220 thousand.
With the growth of the company and the number of its users, ambitions also grow. Initially, the engine was aimed at small projects developed by small teams, but now Unity is also successful with large companies. Perhaps in the near future, this will allow the company to perform on the same field with Epic.
As for the financial side of the issue, everything is also smooth here: the Sequoia Capital venture fund invested $ 17.5 million in the company, in addition, Helgason said that the company’s revenues increased by 130% over the year. Considering that the engine in the basic version is absolutely free, and the license for its use in mobile applications costs a relatively insignificant $ 800, this is also a great success.
According to Helgason, the company’s growth was largely due to the attention of developers to the mobile capabilities of the engine. Despite the fact that the engine specializes not only in the mobile segment, Unity is very aggressively expanding its scope in it. For example, an action has recently begun that provides a free license to use the engine in iOS and Android applications (the action will last until April 8). This promotion allowed Unity to gain 20 thousand new users in just a week.
The largest market for Unity at the moment remains the American one. However, over the past year, the Asian market has grown by a significant 270%. So there is nothing surprising in the fact that in September Unity opened a new office in Japan and began cooperation with GREE, during which it provides free licenses to Japanese developers.
In total, Unity currently employs 170 people in 9 countries around the world.