At its annual “Unite” developer conference in Barcelona, Unity announced that its Unity 6 game engine will launch globally on October 17.
Unity said it will be its “most stable and performant” version of the engine, which is used to make everything from games to movies and interactive experiences.
Unite 2024 is expected to bring together over 2,000 developers for technical sessions, networking and learning opportunities, as well as listening roundtables with the Unity leadership team.
Those developers got some good news last week as Unity said it was getting rid of the Runtime Fee — much hated for its unpredictable fees based on how well a game performs with its audience — opting instead for more conventional price increases in January 2025. That removes a barrier to adoption of Unity 6, said Matthew Bromberg, CEO of Unity, in an interview this week with GamesBeat.
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“It’s exciting to kind of reconnect with partners. And there’s a lot of enthusiasm coming off of last week. It was overwhelmingly positive,” regarding the reaction to the end of the Runtime Fee, Bromberg said to me. “I heard from literally hundreds of people, and they’re just appreciating the way we communicated and, and the simplicity of the direction and and the way we validated the approach with them in advance. So it was very reassuring. And I thought a great, a great kickoff to Unite.”
Regarding Unity 6, he added, “The real message is that it’s the most stable, best performing, best supported version of Unity we’ve ever had and and that’s really the commitment we’re making to customers,” Bromberg said. “We know that for game developers, those are the most important things — that you may be stable, that perform well, and that we support it correctly.”
Early reports suggest that crashes are down meaningfully and and performance is is greatly enhanced, Bromberg said. He said that GPU testing shows that the performance is up dramatically. He said that the updates will happen on a schedule and Unity will support them.
“It’s really our opportunity and our intention to put our arms around folks and prove the stability in those ways,” he said.
Bromberg said there will be cool games on stage that show off features like multiplayer.
The Runtime Fee relief
The Runtime Fee controversy had game developers saying they were searching for new game engines like the open-source Godot or the rival Unreal game engine. I did a podcast not long after it was announced and more than 1,500 people watched it.
“Now that the Runtime Fee is no more, it’s completely straightforward” for upgrading, he said. “You can adopt Unity 6 wherever you want. If you’ve got an existing contract, then you know when that contract is up and you upgrade then. The best part, from our perspective, is this completely removes the barriers.”
I pointed out that one developer said he was returning to Unity instead of searching for a new game engine. But that developer wondered if Unity would change its mind.
“I mean, listen. We’ve made a commitment, and we plan to live our commitment, and it was very public, and I expressed it in great detail. We’re committed to operating as a stable platform that our partners can trust. And that’s our intention.”
There are three full days of programming and more than 50 deep dives into game development. Bromberg noted that Unity’s base is about 50% mobile game developers and about 50% console and PC.
The original announcement of the Runtime Fee in September 2023 under the former regime; the result was anger over the unpredictability of a fee varying based on game popularity. Customers with billions of installs — as well as many small devs — revolted and vowed to boycott Unity. The fee Former CEO John Riccitiello had to resign after the firestorm of complaints and Unity modified the fee but did not entirely get rid of it. Bromberg, former COO of Zynga, was named as the replacement, and now he’s taking further action. Bromberg has been CEO slightly more than 110 days.
Unity 6 features
Unity 6 will offer developers customizable graphics rendering for greater control over their games’ visuals; simplified multiplayer game development to accelerate their journey through the entire game development lifecycle; and robust tools to build rich games optimized for web browsers.
“Developers have been telling us for a long time that they want more stability and more performance, which we are addressing with Unity 6. We’re bringing them the best version of Unity yet, backed by deeper, long-term support and dedicated product and engineering resources post launch. They will also get frequent updates with new features, performance boosts, and bug fixes, all informed by their feedback and with minimal disruption to their ongoing projects,” said Bromberg in a statement. “We couldn’t be more excited to celebrate Unity developers at Unite today and tomorrow and showcase, in particular, how some of them have been using Unity 6 to create amazing games.”
10 Chambers, creators of GTFO, is one the Unity game developers which adopted Unity 6 following its preview release earlier this year. The developer will unveil, on the Unite stage, a never-before-seen environment from their highly anticipated title, Den of Wolves, lit and optimized using the latest graphics features from Unity 6.
“Den of Wolves was originally built on Unity 2022 LTS but after seeing the improvements in Unity 6, both in terms of performance and rendering quality, the team decided to upgrade to Unity 6 mid-development,” said Svante Vinternatt, COO of 10 Chambers, in a statement. “We needed a rendering tech stack that was both flexible and efficient to allow us to iterate quickly, scale rapidly, and not compromise on quality. And Unity 6 delivered.”
Other updates
Unity also said the first update in the Unity 6 generation, Unity 6.1, will ship in April 2025. Unity 6.1 will build on the core Unity 6 capabilities and include new features like support for foldable and larger screen formats, Deferred+ rendering in GPU Resident Drawer, and new build targets and build profiles.
Unity’s internal demo team showed of Time Ghost, a new demo that shows the type of realistic world that developers can build on Unity 6 using multiple Unity 6 features including Entity Component System (ECS), Adaptive Probe Volumes, Scenario Blending, and SpeedTree vegetation. The two scenes from Time Ghost showcasing Unity’s ECS for environments and cloth deformation with Unity Sentis will be released alongside Unity 6 next month.
The existing Fantasy Kingdom demo built using Unity 6 is now optimized for mobile using URP; additionally, the Fantasy Kingdom project and assets will be available on the Unity Asset Store, free for non-commercial use, when Unity 6 launches next month.
Google Cloud will showcase how to build and scale successful live service games using Google Cloud. With the introduction of generative AI, Google Cloud is helping game developers evolve live service games into living games, where the virtual worlds themselves adapt and grow in response to player choices.
Lastly, the nominees for the 16th Annual Unity Awards will be announced at the event. The community has until October 4, 2024, to cast their votes for their favorite games, influencers, and more. The winners will be revealed during a first-ever virtual showcase that will air on Unity’s Twitch channel on October 23, 2024, at 7pm CEST (10 a.m. Pacific time).
All the technical sessions will be recorded and made available to Unity’s community of developers in the coming weeks.
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