Unity today celebrated their 10 year anniversary and kicked off Unite Europe 2015 in Amsterdam at the Westergasfabriek, with over 1100 attendees from video games development, to share ideas, learn best practices, and help each other create fantastic new video game content.
CEO John Riccitiello opened Unite Europe 2015 to outline Unity’s three key guiding principles: democratize game development, solve hard problems, and help developers succeed. Unity EVP of Ads and Everyplay Jussi Laakkonen then discussed how Unity Ads is helping developers make revenue and drive user engagement and announced that Unity Ads would be integrated into the Unity engine with the release of 5.2 this autumn. Unity Analytics’ John Cheng also demonstrated how the massive amounts of data streaming into Unity analytics can be used to understand the greater market and will allow developers to make smart decisions.
As the presentation moved to the technology behind Unity, CTO Joachim Ante dived into The Blacksmith demo to show off its beautiful graphical features and announce that many of the assets from The Blacksmith are now available to use on the Asset Store. Additionally The Blacksmith runtime demo is now available for download. For more information on The Blacksmith project assets and demo visit: http://blogs.unity3d.com/2015/06/24/releasing-the-blacksmith/
Lucas Meijer continued with a rundown of the recent changes to Unity 5.1, showing off how the new Unity networking solution works, and how the new features will make Unity the best tool for developing VR and AR experiences. Finally, Lucas also had the pleasure of announcing that Unity has now has a Public Roadmap. For more information on that roadmap, visit the blog to read about it.
Guest speaker, Mariina Hallikainen, CEO and co-founder of Colossal Order, took center stage to talk about how a team of 9 built a game – Cities Skylines – that directly challenged one of the most venerable franchises in PC gaming. Finally, David Helgason took a look back at the first 10 years since Unity 1 launched at WWDC in 2005 by introducing a special 10 year anniversary highlight reel showcasing games from the past, present and future.
About Unity Technologies Unity Technologies is the creator of Unity, a flexible and high-performance end-to-end development platform used to create rich interactive 3D and 2D experiences. Unity’s powerful graphics engine and full-featured editor serve as the foundation to develop beautiful games or apps and easily bring them to multiple platforms: mobile devices, home entertainment systems, personal computers, and embedded systems. Unity also offers solutions and services for creating games, boosting productivity, and connecting with audiences including the Unity Asset Store, Unity Cloud Build, Unity Game Performance Reporting, Unity Ads, and Unity Everyplay. Unity Technologies serves over 700,000 monthly active developers including large publishers, indie studios, students and hobbyists around the globe. For more information, visit: http://unity3d.com.
