5 must-try new features in Unity Gaming Services, including Analytics custom dashboards

The Unity Gaming Services (UGS) team has been actively working to deliver the highly anticipated features that you want. In line with our 2023 roadmap, the latest updates to UGS solutions showcase our commitment to providing you with powerful tools to enhance your game development process.

From budget alerts and custom dashboards for Analytics to Unity DevOps and CCD Insights, each new feature enables you to create even more engaging gaming experiences. We’re excited to see how you’ll leverage the power of UGS to bring your games to the next level.

We’re committed to providing you with a worry-free experience when it comes to managing costs and data usage. We understand how frustrating it can be to receive unexpected bills, and that’s why we’re excited to introduce Budget Alerts for UGS. You now have greater visibility into your spending and receive alerts when you’re approaching or have reached your free-tier limits. You can also create a monthly budget directly in the Unity Dashboard to help you stay on top of your expenses. With budget alerts, you now have peace of mind while you focus on developing your game.

While out-of-the box dashboards provide valuable insights, we understand that some of you crave a deeper level of customization. Custom Dashboards is a powerful new feature of Unity Analytics that empowers you to create personalized dashboards using your own reports from Data Explorer, SQL Data Explorer, and Funnels. With Custom Dashboards, you can now take full control of your game analytics based on your specific needs and custom reports.

With our new Cloud Content Delivery (CCD) feature, CCD Insights, you have the power to effortlessly monitor the performance of content downloaded by your players directly within the Unity Dashboard. CCD Insights unlocks detailed analysis of downloads based on environments, buckets, releases, and badges. Using CCD Insights, you can view the top 50 errors, streamlining your debugging process and facilitating faster resolution of download issues. This feature improves your ability to provide elevated customer support to ensure an exceptional experience for your players.

Our Game Server Hosting now supports AWS S3 Bucket Uploads. This integration enables you to directly reference cloud storage buckets as a source of your game binaries from within the Game Server Hosting interface. From there, you can adopt Game Server Hosting without disrupting any existing infrastructure, pipelines, or CI/CD workflows that rely on an external cloud storage solution, such as Amazon S3 buckets. After linking an external bucket to a Game Server Hosting project, you can view, manage, and sync the build files from the Unity Dashboard.

Unity Build Automation now supports building and signing for Universal Windows Platform (UWP) targets, enabling customers to build for all platforms supported by UWP, including Xbox®. Also, within Unity Version Control, new cloud Mergebots can further automate your CI/CD pipeline by automatically checking for conflicts before triggering merges. Previously only available for on-prem customers, the highly requested Mergebots are now accessible to all Unity DevOps cloud customers.

We’re always improving and iterating on the UGS platform. You can access a detailed view of everything we launch in our release notes. Beyond the five we’ve already highlighted, here’s a quick overview of some additional updates:

• Cloud code C# push messages: You can now push custom messages over a web socket connection directly to game clients, either to individual players or to all players currently connected to your game.
• Push notifications: Improvements to the testing tool in the Unity Dashboard allow you to register test devices to validate Push Notifications integrations for Android and iOS apps.
• Coming soon: Player Accounts open beta. Player Accounts is an out-of-the-box sign-in and identity solution for Unity Gaming Services and Unity’s ecosystem, linking cross-platform and device accounts to power persistent experiences. Your players can sign up and sign in to your games across a range of platforms, including iOS, Android, Windows, and Mac.

We’re committed to creating the best tools for building live games, and we’re grateful for all of the people who take the time to reach out with feedback. If you have an idea or suggestion, join the conversation over at the UGS forum. We read every post and use your feedback to inform our roadmap. And, if you missed us at GDC this year, you can now catch up on all of our sessions on YouTube.