Why Unity is a Big F*@#$ing Deal

by brian

Why Unity is a Big F*@#$ing Deal

or, Staying ahead of the curve in videogames

or, Why Unity is crushing the video game industry

or, How game developers (indie and professional) are working faster, better and smarter with Unity3D

Unity3D is a big fucking deal.

When I first heard about Unity3D I was nonplussed. Oh, it’s another “make games the easy way” toy, like Game Maker, Scratch, or Stencyl.

I was dead wrong.

Some shit is happening right now in the game industry, and Unity is the right place at the right time doing the right things.

Absurdly cross-platform (editing and publishing)

Unity’s games can be pushed to iOS, Android, OS X, Windows, Linux, Flash, Unity Web player, Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, Windows Phone 8, Blackberry and Google Chrome Web Player.

Unity’s game editor (and bare bones IDE, MonoDevelop) can be used on both OS X and Windows.

Game companies today need to target mobile. Games on portable devices will account for $20B revenue by 20181, so you can bet your ass any game company worth its salt is working on baking a piece of that pie.

Unity started out in 2000 as a way for Unity’s creators to build games for the Mac:

“The ridiculous and bizarre thing was literally the first and only platform we supported in the very first months was the Mac,” said Helgason, who is now based in San Francisco. This was before the Mac’s resurgence, and the Mac’s place in the gaming industry (especially compared to Windows) was even punier than it is today.2

Now they’re targeting mobile, web, and console.

The Death of Flash and Facebook-as-a-testbed

Adobe’s abandonment of Flash3 for mobile development and Facebook desktop’s general decline as an app consumption platform4 hit a lot of companies hard.

Facebook is now partnering closely with Unity and select gamedev outfits to drive adoption of the Unity web player on Facebook canvas.

Developers can now hit Facebook and mobile in one fell swoop. This is big:

Iterating on a game using A/B testing is simple on Facebook Canvas, a pain in the ass on mobile.

The Asset Store, or the first App Store for Code (and other game assets)

Unity’s asset store is perhaps the most important development in code re-usability since Perl’s CPAN.

Unity’s Asset Store : cpanm Module::

as

Apple’s App Store : apt-get

Unity3D game developers are happy to pay you for good work, and when you buy most modules you get the full source code. Write good code, get paid5.

Making Asset Store plugins pays more than making games

From the author of NGUI, a popular UI framework:

Meanwhile, NGUI was still earning me 3 times of my previous job’s pay… 11 months after its initial release.6

And from the game he was working on? Made $800, spent $71,000 and 8 months of his development time.

In the end, after 8 months of development and as of this writing, I have sunk about $71,000 into its development, not including my own time, and have sold around 100 copies at $7-$10 each, earning me roughly $800, with a final net loss of about $70,000.

And the game starter kits he threw together and put in the Asset Store? +$13,000.

Looking back at the stats (which I’ve tracked daily), even the simple Game Starter Kits that I’ve put up on the Asset Store over a year ago, and spent roughly 2 weeks of my time on, have been pulling in about $700 to $1500 a month. That’s a gain of roughly $13,000 for something I created over a year ago and barely spent any time on… versus a loss of $70,000 for 7 months of my time working 100 hours a week.

He gets paid more to refactor his code than the product you’re making. Maybe I’m naive, but I haven’t seen anything like this before.7

The Helpful, Huge Community

Have a problem with your game? Want to figure out how to make a crazy whirlpool camera effect?

Just fucking Google it8. Unity’s support and education community has hit terminal velocity, if you get a stack trace, JFGI, there’s a discussion about it already. If you want to do something you haven’t before, there’s a YouTube video, forum post about an asset store plugin that does it, and StackOverflow post about the 3 different ways to do it and their benefits and drawbacks.

In addition to a bustling IRC channel (irc.freenode.net #unity3d), there are Unity Answers (re-branded StackOverflow) and Unity Forums.


  1. DFC Intelligence » DFC Intelligence Forecasts Worldwide Online Game Market to Reach $79 Billion by 2017. at http://www.dfcint.com/wp/?p=353 

  2. How Unity3D Became a Game-Development Beast. at http://slashdot.org/topic/cloud/how-unity3d-become-a-game-development-beast/ 

  3. Isaac, M. Jobs Was Right: Adobe Abandons Mobile Flash, Backs HTML5 | Gadget Lab | Wired.com. at http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/11/adobe-kills-mobile-flash/ 

  4. [citation needed] 

  5. Unity: Devs can ‘make a living’ from Asset Store | GamesIndustry International. at http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2011-09-29-unity-devs-can-make-a-living-from-asset-store 

  6. Interesting year. at http://www.tasharen.com/forum/index.php?topic=2126.0 

  7. To be fair, ArenMook is likely Unity’s #1 most successful asset store author, and Unity’s 2D and GUI support was an especially egregious omission. ArenMook now works for Unity on their new GUI system (and isn’t fixing NGUI’s shitty atlasing/layering workflow!!@*(#!) 

  8. But search for Unity3D, not Unity. Unity still suffers from lexical competitors Ubuntu Unity