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Unity and Gambling

December 5, 2012 in Community | 4 min. read
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Note: For up-to-date information about how you can create real-money gambling games using Unity, visit our gambling solutions page.

Unity is a game engine. Right?

We've always worked on one big goal: making Unity the best game technology in the world and making it available to as many developers as possible.

That’s why we work so hard. That’s why we license expensive middleware and acquired an animation technology company. That's why we made a free version of Unity available in 2009. And that’s why the ecosystem around Unity is so fantastically vibrant. I just returned from a short trip to our  Shanghai office, and while I was there I saw 8 (!) textbooks written about Unity.

But it turns out that Unity finds many other uses: in serious games and training applications, in car showrooms, in architecture and city planning, in art and VJ’ing, and beyond. And now also in gambling.

We learned that gambling companies were using Unity when they started calling us a while ago, and we realized that Unity was extremely valuable to them – both because of all the obvious stuff like our tools and features being awesome, but also because we have an obsession with learning about our customers and engaging with them to help them further their goals. So we hired a small-but-stellar team and started working with some of the biggest companies in the space.

To protect us and our users from the ensuing complexities, to ensure that we could be in touch with anyone building real money gambling applications on Unity, and honestly to be able to build a business on this, we defined a set of new products and introduced a provision in the Unity 4 EULA requiring real money gambling companies to work with us directly.

The intent was clear enough to us, but it managed to create enough confusion that I realized that the wording wasn’t clear.  Sorry about that, and here’s the clarified language we're releasing in a moment:

You may not distribute or publish any Licensee Content in connection with any Gambling Activities without a separate license from Unity.

Gambling Activities means any gambling product or service offered in any market or application that is regulated by any local, state or national authority and requires a gambling license.

Yup, sorry about the legalese but this was not meant to be about virtual currencies (as it previously could be construed as), and of course will not impact 99.9% of the developers using Unity. It will help us engage with those (relatively few but large) companies who are building regulated real money gambling apps with Unity. Gambling is a very heavily regulated industry and the process of acquiring gambling license is generally long, arduous and expensive. In the long term this helps us build a sound business servicing these companies, which in turn makes it easier for us to invest heavily in Unity for all our customers and makes it easier to keep our game developer pricing low.

If you aren’t into gambling you can stop here. Otherwise, read on to learn more.

What we’re doing with the gambling industry

After receiving a lot of interest from key players in the gambling industry over the last four years, Unity began creating an engineering and support team to cater to this industry’s specific needs. We now have a team with nearly 25 years of industry experience to support gambling companies to implement Unity in gambling on all the various platforms (casino, web, mobile, etc.)  We have and will continue to invest in the gambling space to support it from all angles and meet our customers’ very complex and growing needs.

The premium gambling product license and support packages we offer provide professional gambling developers the technology and assistance they need to create a successful and technologically superior product in a very competitive market.  This highly regulated sector requires a high level of support, regardless of the size and experience of the company developing or producing the game.

Being a successful and trusted technology provider in the gambling industry will permit Unity to continue to invest in our product in a manner that contemplates the needs of this sector where we know we can provide a higher level of service and pretty advanced consultation.

In any case, good luck creating awesome things.

December 5, 2012 in Community | 4 min. read

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