Unity Technologies, the company behind the Unity game development platform, has closed a $5.5 million funding round led by Sequoia Capital. Unity is a powerful tool that allows developers to build 3D worlds for games running on a variety of platforms, including the iPhone, PC, Mac, and Nintendo’s Wii.
Unity has recently been seeing strong growth on the iPhone, where over 250 games are now using the toolset (the company says that these games see up to a 3x performance boost when they’re using Unity versus other solutions). Games built on the platform span a variety of genres, including boxing, driving, and even a Samurai game (all iTunes links).
Outside of the iPhone, games that were built using Unity include Cartoon Network’s MMO FusionFall, and EA Game’s Tiger Woods. TC50 finalist Hangout.net also uses Unity.
Here’s how CEO David Helgason describes some of the platform’s benefits:
Unity uses .NET (or rather Mono, Novell’s open source .NET implementation) for “scripting”, which sidesteps the whole classical conundrum of scripting-versus-native, since the code gets JIT or AOT compiled to native code while still being sandboxable and easy. Also, there’s lots of documentation and very rich libraries to work with.
The company has recently moved its home base from Copenhagen, where it has been operating for years, to San Francisco, though its core development team is still in Copenhagen. Below are a few screenshots from some of the games built on the platform (you can see a full gallery of them here).
Hopefully this means that Android will be their next target platfrom. They needed to raise money to port mono I suppose.
Indeed! And it’s HBMS certified!
Congrats to UT! I have been developing with the Unity engine for a few years and I can wholeheartly say its a great company. … and an awesome (fun) tool to use.
Yes, congrats to the Unity team! We’ve been happily developing on their platform since January, and have a few things built out at http://www.foop....com/fooniverse
Congratulations.
“Unity Technologies” seems a little close to “United Technologies”. Loads of UTC trademarks appear to be “DEAD” on the USPTO system, but a few are still live. Might get a letter.
Felicitaciones!!
David, Joachim, Tom and all the others: thanks for the great tech you created and best wishes for the next phase!
If you want to see a nice multiplayer Unity game, check out Paradise Paintball by Cmune (www.cmune.com) – 3D FPS in the browser:
Facebook | http://apps.fac...adisepaintball/
Portal | http://paradise...ball.cmune.com/
Widget | http://www.appl...epaintball.html (#1 on Apple.com)
Congrats to the Unity team for this big milestone. We are excited about its future.
Any penetration numbers on what percent of web browsers have Unity installed?
They need deals with big game sites to push games made with Unity thereby increasing their plugin install base.