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Unite 2015 in Boston is Unity’s flagship developer conference and this year with over 1600 attendees hailing from 41 different countries, Unity kicked off with the keynote address that saw a number of announcements, great technical demos, and several guest speakers from the developer community.
Following a highlight reel showing off some amazing games made and being made with Unity, John Riccitiello took the stage to highlight Unity’s three guiding principles: 1) democratize game development; 2) solve hard problems; and 3) help developers succeed. John also provided an overview of the ”By the Numbers” report published yesterday by Unity. Leveraging user data from millions of daily Unity game installations, Unity are able to show market, device and user trends. All of this data can provide critical insights into the mobile landscape for developers testing the market. If you look inside the report, you’ll find some pretty compelling numbers, here are just a few of the standout statistics:
- 174 thousand unique games are made with Unity
- 25 billion installs of games are made with Unity
- 1.1 billion unique devices with games are made with Unity
Joachim Ante, Lucas Meijer, and Pete Moss led the technical engine talks for the day including demos of Enlighten real time global illumination system and SSRR, the powerful and ever evolving tools to make VR and AR development painless, and the dedicated 2D tools that our dedicated 2D team has been busy improving.
To view the Unity 5 Lighting demo: The Courtyard view:
Patrick Curry visited the stage to talk about big improvements to Unity Cloud Build, including support for Windows desktop, Mac OS and Linux build targets, and the news that all Cloud Build features — Desktop builds, build targets, all the source control systems, all the customization features — are now included with Unity Personal Edition for free.
Lucas also invited John Cheng, General Manager of Unity Analytics, to discuss upcoming analytics features include a suite of IAP tools that include a unified programing interface for multi store IAP, universal reporting, receipt validation, and inventory management. More details about that can be found here.
Finally three developer guests take the stage and highlight three very different types of games and studios. Guests included Louis Castle, Creative Director at Kixeye to announce and show off their new mobile strategy game War Commander: Rogue Assault; Tony Coculuzzi, Lead Designer of StudioMDHR to talk about their beautifully animated and ridiculously fun looking Cuphead; and Patrick Naud, Studio Director at Square Enix Montreal to talk about Montreal’s commitment to creating premium games including recently released Lara Croft GO. The guests were on hand to help announce Made with Unity, a new program designed to celebrate Unity developers and their amazing work. The first stage of the program launched today in the form of a new content and editorial website – madewith.unity.com – dedicated to showcasing all the creative developer projects from around the world. Finally industry legend Rob Pardo wrapped up with the day’s guest keynote address.
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