{"id":4421,"date":"2017-03-06T12:01:37","date_gmt":"2017-03-06T19:01:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.taterboy.com\/blog\/2017\/03\/unitys-quest-to-make-the-lives-of-game-developers-easier\/"},"modified":"2017-03-06T12:01:37","modified_gmt":"2017-03-06T19:01:37","slug":"unitys-quest-to-make-the-lives-of-game-developers-easier","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.taterboy.com\/blog\/2017\/03\/unitys-quest-to-make-the-lives-of-game-developers-easier\/","title":{"rendered":"Unity\u2019s quest to make the lives of game developers easier"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Johnsildenafil<\/a> http:\/\/1u88jj3r4db2x4txp44yqfj1.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/john-riccitiello-3-285×180.jpg 285w, http:\/\/1u88jj3r4db2x4txp44yqfj1.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/john-riccitiello-3-300×190.jpg 300w, http:\/\/1u88jj3r4db2x4txp44yqfj1.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/john-riccitiello-3-768×486.jpg 768w, http:\/\/1u88jj3r4db2x4txp44yqfj1.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/john-riccitiello-3-800×507.jpg 800w, http:\/\/1u88jj3r4db2x4txp44yqfj1.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/john-riccitiello-3-780×494.jpg 780w, http:\/\/1u88jj3r4db2x4txp44yqfj1.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/john-riccitiello-3-930×589.jpg 930w, http:\/\/1u88jj3r4db2x4txp44yqfj1.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/john-riccitiello-3.jpg 1200w” sizes=”(max-width: 578px) 100vw, 578px”><\/p>\n

\n

Unity Technologies<\/a> CEO John Riccitiello threw out some impressive numbers last week at an event<\/a> at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.<\/p>\n

He said that games built with the Unity game engine were\u00a0downloaded more than 16 billion times in 2016, up 31 percent from the year before. A\u00a0couple of million users of Unity make it the most popular engine in the world. And more than 59 percent of VR developers use Unity.<\/p>\n

Those are impressive numbers in the\u00a0San Francisco company\u2019s battle with arch rival Epic Games<\/a>, which claims that it still has double the revenue of its closest rival. In this competition, Epic is coming down from the high end of Triple-A games while Unity is rising from the low end of game development from mobile and lighter projects.<\/p>\n

But Riccitiello\u00a0said that Unity is still moving forward. The Unity 5.6 release coming on March 31 will be the final installment of Unity 5. After that, the beta version of Unity 2017 will be available. And the goal of that version will be to put game designers and artists on an equal footing with programmers in making games. It\u2019s all part of a larger mission of making the lives of game developers easier, Riccitiello said.<\/p>\n

After the press event, I caught up with Riccitiello for a wide-ranging interview at his company\u2019s new headquarters in San Francisco. Here\u2019s an edited transcript of our interview.<\/p>\n

\"John<\/p>\n

Above: John Riccitiello, CEO of Unity Technologies.<\/p>\n

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi<\/em><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

GB: Are game engines strategic? I think of them as analogous to other strategic assets. It seems like for a while every big company wanted to have some kind of cloud, some reason to build up their cloud. If the other guy\u2019s building a cloud, I have to get one. I see game engines in the same way.<\/strong><\/p>\n

John Riccitiello:<\/strong> When I showed up here I might have said yes. We were just a tool. But Unity isn\u2019t just that anymore. We\u2019re close to half the world\u2019s content now<\/a>. 38 percent of mobile, 70 percent of VR and AR, half of all console, close to half of PC. We\u2019re picking up four or five points of market share every year in the last three years. From an influence standpoint \u2014 strategic implies leverage. I\u2019m not sure of that yet. I think we hustle.<\/p>\n

The next largest game engine in the west \u2014 our growth last year was three times their business. I\u2019m not so sure you can lump it all together into \u201cgame engines.\u201d I love Amazon, but they have maybe something in single digits, maybe six games being built? I don\u2019t think that\u2019s strategic. Our position in the market is that more people build on Apple using Unity than any other system by far. Ditto Google and ditto Microsoft. At that level it\u2019s interesting, at a bare minimum, whether \u201cstrategic\u201d is the right word or not. But it\u2019s all a maniacal focus on making life easier for developers.<\/p>\n

\"Adam<\/p>\n

Above: Adam demo, built with Unity engine.<\/p>\n

Image Credit: Unity<\/em><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

You saw me describe the delta between evolution and revolution. When we go from \u201cyou can make Adam in Unity\u201d \u2014 no one\u2019s made a better-looking bit of interactive content than that. And then we get to the point where we start pressing other buttons. We talked about removing all limitations from the renderer, which has never been done before, or about bringing C# job systems and CPU optimization on multi-threading to a small development house, which has never been possible before. Natalia talked about assisted content creation, which is not the same as procedural. It\u2019s fundamentally changing the way content is created.<\/p>\n

As a business, we\u2019re much bigger in analytics and revenue generation for our customers than we are as an engine. We\u2019re something different. Since no one marries even two out of those three things together, I\u2019m not sure you\u2019d point at a sector. Epic is building games. They built an engine to build games and then they sold their engine to other customers. That\u2019s a different business than the one we\u2019re in. It\u2019s probably strategic for them, in their own way.<\/p>\n

\"John<\/p>\n

Above: John Riccitiello, CEO of Unity Technologies, at GDC 2017.<\/p>\n

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi<\/em><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

GB: It seems like developers in the past have been \u2014 they can still be powerless in the face of things like platform owners. If they\u2019re at the mercy of platform owners, it\u2019s not a healthy thing for the industry. But it seems like game engines, and Unity in particular, help balance that out.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Riccitiello:<\/strong> We don\u2019t hurt platform owners. I don\u2019t know this to be true, but any given mobile platform would probably have half a million fewer games if we didn\u2019t exist. We help fill out their portfolio a lot. And on the other hand, you saw the presentation from Owlchemy<\/a> today. They didn\u2019t know what was going to work. They did a bit of everything, and weirdly enough it turned out to be VR that worked. They thought other platforms were going to generate their revenue.<\/p>\n

You don\u2019t need to build in Unity to build an Oculus game, but if you go back to Oculus Connect from last fall, it was either 22 or 23 out of 25 of their products were built in Unity. They didn\u2019t say that. We weren\u2019t at the event. Brendan\u2019s a good friend, but that\u2019s one we didn\u2019t get to. But I\u2019m very proud of the fact that we were \u2014 it\u2019s the majority at a bare minimum. It\u2019s a dominant majority.<\/p>\n

GB: It\u2019s still very important to think about how to make developers\u2019 lives easier, basically?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Riccitiello:<\/strong> We said that today. Blood, sweat, and no more tears. If \u201cstrategic\u201d means we \u2014 if we had a singular mission it would probably revolve around the idea of keeping developers alive, helping them to be successful. If there\u2019s an underpinning to that \u2014 I really do think it would be cool if there were more content creators in the world. Not just consumers. More technology developers. In the Valley everyone thinks they can do all this stuff, but in most of the world they don\u2019t think that way. We\u2019re changing that.<\/p>\n

GB: The Xiaomi deal (where Unity makes it easy to publish on Xiaomi\u2019s mobile platform in China) seemed interesting. How much of the Chinese market can you access? Is it still a very small crack into the market?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Riccitiello:<\/strong> Well, for us it\u2019s no longer a crack. It\u2019s not as if it\u2019s on the other side of Mars. It\u2019s just on the other side of an approval layer. Part of it\u2019s the regulatory regime. That\u2019s one reason we partnered with Xiaomi. They can work on getting games approved using their local relationships with various ministries that need to sign off. But from a technology perspective we\u2019re collapsing the distance. From a content deployment perspective we\u2019re collapsing the distance. And when it comes to the ability to monetize we\u2019re collapsing the distance.<\/p>\n

Even on a dollar revenue basis, it\u2019s the biggest market in the world. Our goal is to make it normal for a western game developer to generate revenue in China.<\/p>\n

\"GitHub<\/p>\n

Above: GitHub \u2013 Unity<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

GB: If you look at the stats now, I\u2019d assume that western developers have a tiny market share there.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Riccitiello:<\/strong> They do, but if you look at FIFA or World of Warcraft \u2014 Supercell\u2019s products are in the top 10. A number of games do well. But they had to get through a labyrinth of barriers. We\u2019re not magic. We can\u2019t just wave our hands and make all those challenges go away. But one by one we can knock them back.<\/p>\n

1<\/span> 2<\/span><\/a> 3<\/span><\/a> View All<\/a><\/span> <\/div>\n
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