Unity engine over the last few years has seen a sizeable amount of growth, with the gaming industry reaching new heights and new experiences being developed in the entertainment industry using the engine. Seems like Unity engine was also used in the creation of the current mega successful game Pokemon Go.
The company recently announced that it had raised $181 million from investors led by DFJ Growth. Others in the round include the China Investment Corporation, FreeS Fund, Thrive Capital, the technology entrepreneur Max Levchin including the existing investors Sequoia Capital and WestSummit Capital. According to New York Times report, investors valued the company, which is based in San Francisco, at about $1.5 billion after the latest fundraising round.
“We continue to focus on helping developers in every way we can,” said Unity Technologies, CEO, John Riccitiello. “We do this by focusing on our three core principles; democratising development, solving hard problems and enabling developer success.”
With augmented reality and virtual reality, the new playing grounds for game developers, the engine maker is leaving no stone unturned to ready its arsenal to take on its competition heads on.
Currently the numbers are with Unity and the Unity’s game engine – Unity 3D which is especially common among mobile games, that are growing far more quickly than traditional console games. The company issued new statistics which reveal that more than 5.5 million developers have registered themselves on the Unity platform. Unity estimates that its engine is used in more than 31 per cent of the 1,000 top grossing mobile games. The game engine that comes closer to Unity is Epic Games’ Unreal Engine which has 2 million registered users; a huge difference considering how many games are spawned from each registered user.
Unity also claimed that 90 per cent of the content created on Samsung and Facebook’s Oculus virtual reality platform Gear VR is being developed using Unity engine and has a huge variety of its titles on PC, Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and others.
Unity does have a lead when it comes to game development but it certainly does not have a monopoly. China’s biggest internet company Tencent Holdings has a large stake in Epic’s Unreal Engine and is looking to lure in more developers to take a stronghold of the multibillion dollar industry. Jeff Bezos’s Amazon too released a game engine called ‘Lumberyard’ with code licensed from Crytek. With Amazon’s cloud computing might, its gaming platform ‘Amazon Underground’ and its games streaming service ‘Twitch’ the company is looking to provide the perfect package to encourage developers to use their services to promote their games.
“Unity’s platform has revolutionised the game industry by allowing any size studio from Indie to Triple-A to create beautiful and compelling games and experiences and monetise them with their advertising and analytics services,” said DFJ Growth, partner, Barry Schuler. “Now Unity is poised to accelerate the advance of AR/VR with their unique ‘write once/ publish many’ engine which allows studios to easily support all hardware platforms without having to attempt to choose a winner.”