It’s hard to believe, but there’s less than a week left until Unite! We’re very excited to meet so many of you, and we’ll have more developers there than ever before to answer your questions. We have a number of announcements lined up for Unite, and a schedule packed with valuable information, but we’d like to share a few things with you in advance.

The past decade has seen an incredible transformation of Unity from a tool nobody knew about to the most popular way to create games for well over a dozen platforms, by developers in more than 100 countries, working with Unity for millions of hours each month. That’s so crazy amazing!

We got here by listening to our community, and we continue to do so.

One of the things our community has been wanting is an upgrade to our rendering quality. We have been working hard to build something to meet those needs, and lately we have been showing the graphical power of Unity 5, which raises the quality bar out-of-the-box across all supported platforms. This will empower many of you to bring your creative vision to life in new and interesting ways.

We also heard from you that the quality of our engine is equally important. Our sustained engineering initiative means that everybody gets a chance to download the newest patch release every week. We’re squashing bugs fast and we’re expanding our efforts to make this process even faster and more efficient. We’re not stopping there though, and we have a number of initiatives we’ll be rolling out in the coming months that will help further lower development risk while increasing the flexibility of Unity in your development pipeline. Stay tuned!

We also know that once your game is done you need to build an audience that believes in your business and your games. That is why we’re working hard to integrate the services of several recently acquired companies. For example, with services like Unity Ads and Everyplay we can help you attract the right players to your game and keep them playing, which increases your ability to succeed in a crowded market.

WebGL in Unity 5

Unity has been, and will continue to be, the leader at helping you reach your customers on whatever platform they’re on. We heard that many of you are interested in WebGL, but are unsure of what the WebGL market will become and whether it warrants an additional investment. So we have decided that with Unity 5.0 we’ll make the WebGL deployment option add-on available to both free users and Unity Pro customers without cost. You’ll be able to easily make games that run without plugins for the growing number of WebGL capable browsers.

Together with Windows, Mac, Linux, Web Player, iOS, Android, BlackBerry 10, Windows Phone 8, Windows Runtime, Wii U, Xbox One and PlayStation Mobile for Vita, that brings the number of platforms open to your game for free to 13. Nobody else has native support for so many platforms at no cost to you.

Value and pricing

In the past few months there have been active discussions about our value proposition in the forums and whether it was time for another change to our offering. We spent the past few months talking to many of you around the world about Unity and the value proposition we offer, and we discovered the overwhelming majority felt that we were providing excellent value across the board. In fact, many of you expressed concern over a race-to-the-bottom business model for tools that your livelihoods depend upon. And you also raised a strong voice against a royalty-based business model. In our many years as a startup, we’ve always re-invested our money back into our product. We believe that you should be able to do whatever you want with your money too.

We believe the business model and pricing we have now is one that will continue to provide us with the resources we need to ensure Unity is the most reliable and delightful way to build games for the majority of developers. Nothing remains static though, and we may revisit our business model and pricing at some point in the future.

We’re really looking forward to meeting so many of you and sharing so much more at Unite! If you can’t make it in person, you can still join us for the keynote, which will be live streaming on Wednesday, August 20 at 9 am PDT.