State of Unity 2020: In This Together

At this difficult time, we remain committed to making it easier and more intuitive for you to achieve your aspirations. We believe the world is a better place with more creators in it. Today we want to go beyond the normal, so we’re doing two distinct things to try and help: We’re providing three months of complimentary access to Unity Learn Premium so that you have access to resources to help you bring your ideas to life. We’re also delivering virtual classes through Create with Code Live, free for students, teachers, and anyone else interested in learning to code.

The last 12 months have been huge – both for your success and for the progress of our technology. We delivered thousands of new improvements and features, unlocked graphics capabilities through the Scriptable Render Pipelines, made major gains in the world of 2D, brought our first industrial product to market, and greatly enhanced production workflows. Adding to our Multiplay and Vivox services that help you operate your game, Unity welcomed deltaDNA, Furioos, ChilliConnect, Graphine, and Artomatix into our family, giving you additional proven solutions across the product development lifecycle.

It was also an amazing year for Unity creators, from indies to AAA studios, and to companies of all sizes. From the award-winning releases of Disco Elysium (four awards at The Game Awards, PC Gamer Game of the Year) and Untitled Goose Game (DICE Awards Game of the Year), to the record-breaking launches of Call of Duty: Mobile (100 million downloads in one week) and Mario Kart Tour (90 million downloads in the first week, and the most downloaded iPhone game of 2019), more creators are finding more success with Unity than ever before.

While our roots are in gaming, 2019 was, in many ways, the launch of a new phase for Unity and its creators in new business verticals such as Automotive, Transportation, Manufacturing and AEC (Architecture, Engineering, Construction). We introduced Unity Reflect, our first product dedicated to giving professionals in the AEC industry the power to see everything in context and quickly make design changes while improving collaboration and reducing costly mistakes. We saw companies like SHoP Architects and Skanska use Unity to take buildings to new heights, and Volvo break new ground in the automotive industry.

As the world continues to change, we are committed to helping all of you learn new skills and capabilities that can help bring your vision to life. We are pleased to announce that we are giving everyone complimentary access to Unity Learn Premium starting today through June 20. Just log in to access live sessions with Unity experts and more than 350 hours of bite-sized tutorials, hands-on projects, and in-depth courses for game developers and any creator that can benefit from the power of real-time technology. This includes everything from Game Mechanic Design Fundamentals to Getting Started with Post-Processing Stack for VR. Additionally, we are delivering Create with Code Live, live virtual classes taught by Unity experts for students, educators, and anyone who wants to learn how to code, starting on Monday, March 23.

While 2019 brought a lot of improvements and creator achievements, there’s still a lot of work to be done. We’ve heard you - that’s why in 2020 we are focused on delivering more stable releases, more intuitive workflows, and more capabilities, all validated with real-world productions so that you have the confidence to use them in your own projects. Our key areas of product focus are Reliability and Performance, Creative Workflows, Scalable Quality, and Reaching Your Audience.

You can learn more about this in the two roadmap sessions that we have planned for the coming weeks. Subscribe to the Unity YouTube channel, so you don’t miss them.

• Wednesday, March 25 – Core Engine & Creator Tools
• Wednesday, April 1 – Live Games

After the roadmap sessions, we want to hear from you. What questions do you have about what’s coming to Unity in 2020? Join Unity’s product experts for a Q&A on the Unity Forum where we’ll be answering all of your burning questions about topics like reliability, performance, workflows, how to reach new audiences, or how our Cloud team is making it easier for you to make connected games.

These are just the first of many pieces of on-demand content that we have planned for you. You’ll be able to tune into all of this on Unity.com.

Here’s how we’re committed to you:

• Increasing stability. We’ve heard your feedback loud and clear – you want fewer major releases, but more timely package updates that improve the stability and quality of our tools. That’s why we are moving to two TECH stream releases this year (2020.1 and 2020.2). Furthermore, starting with our next release, the default version of Unity you download from the Hub will be the Long-Term Support (LTS) version. That way you can be sure that you are downloading the most stable version for projects in production. You will still be able to opt in to downloading our beta and alpha releases should you wish to give us feedback on them.
• Improving quality of life. We are modernizing Unity to be more flexible for your needs. We’re subtracting as many seconds standing between you and your creativity as possible, and we are planning to provide even more capabilities.
• Listening. We are revamping our Beta Program so that you have a more direct path to the Engineering team that is building and improving new and existing tools and technologies. We are thankful for our Beta community’s passion for better tools and technologies, and through this program, we are putting a higher priority on sourcing actionable feedback that will enable more transparency and help your production workflows. More information is coming soon.

It’s important that we support you through all stages of the game creation lifecycle. Once you’ve launched, we make it easy for you to operate and monetize your game. For example, we’re:

• Making Connected Games easier to achieve. Many of you have aspirations to create multiplayer games, and to that end, we’ve made major progress in the tools and services that you need to connect millions of players around the world. We recently worked with MADFINGER Games on Shadowgun War Games to pressure-test our new Transport Layer and Matchmaker. Those technologies will deliver low-latency netcode, and the tools you need to connect players together, all coming to you later this year.
• Maximizing server uptime and player joy. The server scaling and secure voice chat from our Multiplay and Vivox services connect hundreds of millions of players across games like League of Legends, PUBG, Apex Legends, and Rainbow Six: Siege. Our engine-agnostic services easily integrate with your games to deliver the best possible experience for your players.
• Giving you the power to do more. Unity Game Simulation (release in beta later this month) uses the power of cloud simulation to efficiently and accurately balance your game and accelerate time to soft-launch. We’re also launching ML-Agents 1.0 soon, which allows you to create non-player characters without having to invest heavily in engineering and development.
• Helping you find and keep new players after launch. Last year we welcomed two new companies to the family, both focused on helping you engage players and keep them playing your games. DeltaDNA brings powerful messaging, analytics, and player management features to give each player the best possible experience and develop long-term relationships. ChilliConnect has brought easy-to-instrument critical game components including cloud save, economy management, and leaderboards. Finally, our monetization network continues to fuel creator success on the millions of titles in the market and bring the right players into your game.

The real-time 3D technology that was forged in gaming is also changing how products and buildings are designed, engineered, made, sold, serviced, and maintained. Here’s how we’re helping our customers at every stage:

• Extending real-time 3D across the building lifecycle. As project timelines in the AEC industry become tighter, it becomes imperative for project stakeholders across the fields to collaborate effectively and make design iterations quickly. Our new AEC product Unity Reflect solves this hard problem by making it easy to create interactive experiences that are live-linked to the original designs. Together with our partner Autodesk, we are unlocking the value of BIM data by putting it directly in the hands of any AEC professional to explore design options, solve complex engineering issues, and accelerate construction projects through real-time immersive experiences.
• Extending real-time 3D across the product lifecycle. Unity Enterprise for Product Lifecycle and other offerings coming this year are making it easier for businesses to accelerate innovation, create immersive experiences at every stage of the lifecycle of their products, and engage with consumers in more interactive ways.
• Making products better, safer, and more reliable. Unity Simulation is a cloud service that runs multiple instances of Unity and enables you to test, train and validate all of your scenarios at once. This new offering will help more creators unlock the power of simulation to generate synthetic data at scale and train machine learning perception models much faster than ever before.

The world is truly a better place with more creators in it, and we want to know how we can unlock your inner creator. Everything we do at Unity is in service of you; we create with you, for you.

As we look forward to the rest of 2020, we’re excited to connect with you online and through the many upcoming games made with Unity. Amazing games such as Ori and the Will of the Wisps (Moon Studios), Wasteland 3 (inXile entertainment), League of Legends: Wild Rift (Riot Games), and Hardspace: Shipbreaker (Blackbird Interactive) are all arriving in the coming months. We’ve put together this trailer so you can see some of the great games coming later this year. We also want to hear about the games you are creating, so please share them in the comments so we can learn more about them!

From all of us at Unity, thank you. We are looking forward to another great year of building, creating, and growing, together.