If you’re like me you’ve always wondered about making an iPhone game. What mad skillz do you need? What course in computer science will teach you how to vector a jet across the screen? Well, Nicholas Francis set out to solve that problem and came up with Unity, one of the most popular games development platforms for the iPhone and the iPod Touch.
CrunchGear: Tell me about your company?
Nicholas Francis: Unity Technologies is the company behind the Unity gaming middleware. We have 44 employees with our development HQ in Copenhagen, Denmark. Then we have a bunch of hardcore demoscene guys in Lithuania that have forgotten more about low-level optimizations than most developers will ever know, some developers in Brighton, UK and a few hotshots that work from their respective countries. Our corporate HQ is getting moved to San Francisco – there’s so much more business going on over there, that we figured it made the most sense to have business be over there but keep development in Europe.
We launched Unity 1.0 in 2005 and slowly grew it. We never had any VC backing or anything, so we’ve grown the company organically (by about 200% per year :-). these days we have over 9000 customers – pretty much spread through word-of-mouth. Basically, we’re a tool by developers, for developers. Quite simple really, but our tech packs a real punch :)
Tell me about yourself? What’s your background?
I’m Nicholas Francis – a 34 years old programmer, designer and ex-wannabe film-director. I started Unity in a basement some 7 years ago (back then it wasn’t even called Unity yet) and lived for two years in a basement with the 2 other co-founders. Basically we just sat there and worked every single day from when we got up ’til we went to bed. After a couple of years, we released GooBall on the Mac to prove that Unity could be used to make games and then went on to release the tools themselves.
I have a 7 year old son who I always feel I ought to be spending more time with (and not giving all my attention to my Unity child)
What is Unity?
Unity is an integrated development environment for making games. It consists of a powerful editor for assembling all art assets, attaching game code to make behavior, and tweaking your game until it plays just right. While building your game, you can test it simply by hitting a play button at the top of the app and you’ve got the exact game you’re making, running in our editor (complete with emulated graphic capabilities). While testing the game, you can change both art assets and code – and will see how it affects your game instantly.
Once you’re happy with your game, the finished project can be delivered to a browser through our custom plugin (which has around 15 million installs by now), PC / Mac standalone, Nintendo Wii and last but not least, the iPhone. We are working on bringing Unity games to more platforms – both mobile handsets as well as “some other major consoles ” *cough* :)
A really nice thing is our licensing structure. Unity for iPhone starts at $598 per developer. There’s no royalties, no catches, no NDAs. It’s just an app you buy and everything you make with it is yours. Just like with any normal app you buy. You buy Photoshop, and what you draw is yours. Same with Unity – which is so glaringly obvious, that I don’t understand how other people can cook up those weird NDA-required royalty-driven, really expensive licensing schemes.
Some of our biggest customers include Cartoon Networks. With Fusionfall (which around 5 million people have played) – they basically made a World-of-Warcraft quality MMO for kids and got it running in a browser, as well as EA’s upcoming Tiger Woods PGA Tour Online. On the iPhone, Unity has been a runaway hit for us – since people can just make and ship their games without telling us, we’re not sure how many have been published. There’s a thread on our forum where people list the Unity titles they have shipped, and yesterday that contained 258 games. Hits include Zombieville USA – that was done by two guys in their spare time and made the #1 in the Appstore. TouchKO just came out (published by Chillingo), as well as some other hits.
Chillingo are currently asking our users to submit Unity-made games to them so they can publish them.
What is programming for the iPhone like – is it like desktop programming? Mobile programming? A hybrid?
Apple did a really, really good API for the iPhone. So in a way it feels quite a bit like desktop programming – except you’ve got much less power than you’re used to. When using Unity, we handle all that for you. You can pretty much take a game that you’ve made for the Nintendo Wii or an in-browser game and just publish that to the iPhone. So from our user’s perspective, it’s a desktop where you have to be more careful with your CPU usage and how complex your meshes are. Apple’s new iPhone 3GS helps a lot with that – their new GPU basically lets you run really high-poly stuff.
Behind the scenes, we’ve done a bunch of custom VFP vectorized assembly code to squeeze out every bit of performance from the iPhone. We’ve reverse engineered Apple’s OpenGL drivers to get 30% more geometry throughput than any official benchmarks – basically lots of stuff that you normally wouldn’t care about when developing a game.
Why do you need middleware on the iPhone?
I think this ties into the above question quite a bit; the iPhone is a very desktop-like experience. So sure, for simple games some people prefer to just code directly to the metal. However, it’s desktop-like enough that you can actually do a lot; proper collision detection, physics, ragdolls, some shaders, 3D audio. This means that it pretty quickly begins to make sense to look for a tool that will actually let you leverage that.
Another part of the equation “use middleware or roll our own” is the art pipeline. With Unity, artists stay productive – we can import their meshes and animations directly out of 3DS Max, Maya, Blender and a bunch of others. This just works – and anybody who had to get proper character animation into their own engine knows that this alone can take months to get the code to be just right. Our internal development slogan is “we suffer, so you don’t have to”.
Another way of looking at it is how many fulltime engine coders can you buy for $600? With Unity you get around 15 fulltime developers just hacking away 50-60 hours/week on making the most powerful engine and coolest tools.
What kind of programmers use Unity?
Unity is used by programmers and artists alike – game code is written in C# or JavaScript – this means that there’s quite a large number of programmers from other fields. Traditional software developers pretty quickly grok C#, and anyone who has used Flash or done some DHTML/Ajax already know Javascript. To get maximum speed on the iPhone, we use static typing and precompile everything down to assembly code for maximum performance.
Which games have been written in Unity?
On the iPhone, some of the really cool titles are Zombieville USA – which held the coveted #1 AppStore position for quite a while. Touch KO just came out on Chillingo (who have done a number of Unity games), Fuel Industries did Vans Skate with Unity – so quite a bit.
On the web, we’ve got Cartoon Network’s Fusionfall, EA’s Tiger Woods Online coming out this autumn, plus some other big names. One team I’d like to give a shout to are the blurst.com guys. They’ve pumped out amazing games with Unity, and just shows how far you can get by bootstrapping a business and toughing it out.
Why Unity? Why not just a command line and a dream?
Well, if dreams are all you want, I guess a command line is fine. If you actually want to ship high-quality games, you typically want the best tools you can possibly get. (couldn’t resist :)
It’s an good news, thanks ; )
Whuh ne-in strange bout yo daddy…
It whuh strange what yo daddy had to deal with, but whuh ne-in strange bout yo daddy !!!
wow….incredible
So correct me if my math is a bit rusty, but they charge approx $600 per game and have around 248 games shipped so far….
That’s around $155K in revenues… can someone explain the business model behind this? Are they trying to bring developers onto the platform in order to get them to build games on platforms with more attractive royalty deals? If so, why not just give it away for free? That revenue hardly pays for two good quality developers…
You’re only focusing on iPhone, but Unity is used for other platforms also, with different pricing for those platforms. They also charge for major version upgrades. I’m not sure, but I’d guess they have paid customer support too, which would yeld big numbers alone.
and you pay extra for Wii development licence …
a HUGE extra at that. *nods*
9000 customers x $600 = 5.4 Mil, assuming everyone bought one copy of the base package.
With a head office in San Francisco, 44 developers on the payroll and (from the sounds of it) multiple offices with overhead to maintain (assuming the 9000 customer number is correct) $5.4 mil in revenue split over multiple years would barely keep the lights on, so that argument doesn’t really hold up.
@Willie, thanks for clearing up that the engine costs more on the Wii and other platforms. That makes their revenue position make more sense in the larger picture.
> 9000 customers x $600 = 5.4 Mil, assuming everyone bought one copy of the base package.
Their ‘indie’ package is $200 – probably most licenses sold were like that. So that is $1.8M.
But the 9,000 might be spread over a few years, so it really does seem like a viable business at these prices is quite borderline.
Bottom line, there are reasons why serious game engines, with dozens of developers behind them, end up costing a lot of money. But if these guys can disrupt the market, good for them.
if you read the differences between the different versions, there are some compelling reasons not to go with the cheap version.
I’d say a $600 average is too low, and would probably put the license avg at about $1600-2000.
mark, you are an idiot. i seriously hope you are not involved with any ACTUAL business.
dude, it was a question regarding the business model – i stated myself in the post that i was asking whether they have upgrades to higher royalty based licenses. chill out. relax. it’s friday.
Mark: They also make serious games for industy(not mentioned here) and also the costs mentioned are indie licences, The prices go up for more for pro versions and assets server and also iphone addon , training etc
I am a owner of unity and its a tidy peice of kit but my only complaint would be the lack of learning materials. I would love a professional screencast series and a book.
@Darren @the real deal @billyw All good points – thanks :)
Hey Darren, FYI:
http://www.packtpub.com/unity-game-development-essentials/book
And we’re working on learning materials, for now we have these:
http://unity3d.com/support/resources
Our demo team is working on more, next up is an iPhone specific tutorial that will be out when we release our Unity iPhone 1.1 update later this month.
600$ per dev. not per game. some devs have not shipped a game yet. some have made several.
also unity pro on the iphone will run you 3000$ actually.
i’d see unity positioning itself has a games channel. something like steam. once they get enough quality games they could open their own store for pc games.
it is great tech btw. i am loyal dev myself (just for full disclosure)
Clever Coding got a Unity-based game into the top 100 apps which took less than a month development time. With well-priced marketing, that’s a great return.
unity good for game make.
I got to say that the post made me want to try it out, alas it seems there’s no trial version for the Unity for iPhone, and the pricing model for the iPhone isn’t clear either on their website.
Am I suppose to buy a $1000 for something I haven’t tried at all?
You can email support and ask for an iPhone trial. I would recommend using the desktop version to go through all of the learning materials before asking for the iPhone trial. Plus doing it that way you get 30 days for the desktop trial + another 30 days for the iPhone trial. 60 days was more than enough for me to get a good grip of Unity3D.
Gosh, a story about the iPhone that doesn’t involve some whiner talking about how they quit the platform.
I love Unity! We use it … and it rocks.
There is a trial but not for the iphone. I suggest get the pc trial and make something cool. then you can get the iphone version if you have the chops.
we used OpenGL for our game Popper but definitely want to look into doing Unity games – any devs out there looking for a freelance gig? :)
oh and here’s an interesting article on promoting your iPhone app using Hollrr: http://bit.ly/TGsTL
I’m a huge Unity fanboy and developer. I’m always open for freelance work.
Unity is great because it allows you to develop for multiple platforms with one consistent tool set. I haven’t bought it yet, but I have talked to people developing Serious Games who love it. Also, the team is very friendly – I had a few pre-sales questions, and they were extremely helpful.
If you need every last bit of processor power for high-end effects, you might want to code “to the metal”, though.
That being said … Dear TechCrunch, it’s 2009. Don’t you think it’s time to implement a rating system for comments? The first one on this story is a less-than-stellar “It’s an good news, thanks”, and that’s not the worst I have seen here today. I’d love to bury this and other link spam to hell… Thank you.
Hi David,
With regards to the high end effects, “to the metal” idea, unless you have real specific requirements, most people will actually get better performance using Unity than rolling their own tech.
Sounds bizarre I know, but the guys in Lithuania *reallY* know what they’re doing, and spent a whole load of time optimizing the hell out of the rendering code. They can quite literally turn math into ice-cream if they want to.
(Full disclosure – I *don’t* work for Unity, but am good friends with most of the guys…they’ll get the ice cream reference)
They are not only about games, They have good tools, not great, but good enough, they have a great browser plugin, they have an energetic and loyal community, they have a shot at making the 3D web happen someday, that’s impressive because even Google’s 3D web initiatives are languishing. I suspect that they will be acquired by someone with lots of cash someday, someone who might be thinking of going after the dream of a 3D web, maybe Adobe, Apple or Amazon … could be MS, GOOG or even CSCO, the 3D web will happen someday and Unity is sitting right there waiting for that day…
It won’t be Adobe. They have their own Web-based 3D technology called Shockwave 3D. It’s the hottest 3D technology on the Web, and is currently being updated for release next year: http://blogs.adobe.com/shockwaves/2009/06/how_hot_is_shockwave_3d.html
Here is a list of hundreds of Shockwave 3D games:
http://www.shockwave3d.com/
Unity is a nice product as far as I have read and heard about it.
One good question should have been asked to Nicholas which would have been diifferent from the [ast available info was.
What is the future of unity ?
Would we be able to make games on symbian, android, psp or other platforms also using Unity in near future?
I hope he reads this and comment.
Units is really good Nicholas. hats off to you and team.
Hey folks, I’m the Product Evangelist for Unity and I want to make sure some information is clear:
1. We license Unity on a per developer basis, once you have your license you are then free to make as many games as you like without any per-game or revenue share payments. The only exception to this is the Wii where we do charge per-title.
2. We have trials of all our products, but only a Unity Indie is available directly off the site. Anyone who wants to try out Unity Pro or our iPhone tools can request that by writing to us at sales@unity3d.com.
3. The future of Unity has a lot more in store for everyone. I can’t comment on other platforms in specific but I can say that we’re looking at additional mobile and gaming platforms (consoles). Keep an eye out as we’ll continue to grow our product.
Anyone interest in Unity can/should drop by our community forums:
http://forum.unity3d.com
I post under the name HiggyB, come say hi! Of course I’ll also check back here for additional comments/questions.