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Unity and Valve have jointly announced that in addition to bringing native support for SteamVR to Unity, Valve will be sending every developer home with an HTC Vive Pre development kit.

So now we know why Valve’s Gabe Newell decided to make an appearance at the Vision Summit.

Announced during the keynote via video, Valve chief Gabe Newell’s brief appearance consisted of three simple announcements:

Native support for SteamVR and the HTC Vive in Unity

An “advanced SteamVR rendering plugin for Unity that allows for enhanced fidelity and performance”

And, that every developer at Vision Summit would walk home with the HTC Vive Pre, the latest development kit for the SteamVR platform

“We made many of our Vive demos using Unity, and continue to use it today in VR development”, says Newell. “Through that process, and in working with VR developers, we found some opportunities to make Unity even more robust and powerful for us and really want to share those benefits with all VR content creators.”

Native SteamVR support for Unity means a plug-and-play experience for VR developers using the HTC Vive, with no need to download additional plugins or tools.

It seems that Valve has also bestowed some major rendering optimizations that Unity will be integrating for big performance gains in future versions.