Unite Boston 2015 is Unity’s flagship developer conference and being able to host it in one of the most vibrant and innovative cities in the country makes it that much more memorable! With over 1600 attendees hailing from 41 different countries, we were excited to get things kicked off with today’s keynote address that saw a number of announcements, great technical demos, and several guest speakers from the developer community.

Following a games reel showing off some amazing games made and being made with Unity, John Riccitiello took the stage to highlight Unity’s three guiding principles: 1) democratize game development; 2) solve hard problems; and 3) help developers succeed. Everything we do at Unity is guided by these principles so you can continue focusing on making great games.

John also provided an overview of the ”By the Numbers” report published today by Unity. Leveraging user data from millions of daily Unity game installations, we’re able to show market, device and user trends. All of this data can provide critical insights into the mobile landscape for developers testing the market. If you look inside the report, you’ll find some pretty compelling numbers, here are just a few of the standout statistics:

174 thousand unique games are made with Unity

25 billion installs of games are made with Unity

1.1 billion unique devices with games are made with Unity

Joachim Ante, Lucas Meijer, and Pete Moss led the technical engine talks for the day including demos of real time global illumination and SSRR, our powerful and ever evolving tools to make VR and AR development painless, and the expanding suite of dedicated 2D tools that our 2D team has been busy improving.

Patrick Curry visited the stage to talk about big improvements to Unity Cloud Build, including support for Windows desktop, Mac OS and Linux build targets, and the news that all Cloud Build features — Desktop builds, build targets, all the source control systems, all the customization features — are now included with Unity Personal Edition for free.

Lucas also invited John Cheng, General Manager of Unity Analytics, to discuss upcoming analytics features include a suite of IAP tools that include a unified programing interface for multi store IAP, universal reporting, receipt validation, and inventory management. More details about that can be found here.

Today we were proud have three developer guests take the stage and highlight three very different types of games and studios. Guests included Louis Castle, Creative Director at Kixeye to announce and show off their new mobile strategy game War Commander: Rogue Assault; Tony Coculuzzi, Lead Designer of StudioMDHR to talk about their beautifully animated and ridiculously fun looking Cuphead; and Patrick Naud, Studio Director at Square Enix Montreal to talk about Montreal’s commitment to creating premium games including recently released Lara Croft GO.

The guests were on hand to help announce Made with Unity, a new program designed to celebrate all of you developers and your amazing work. The first stage of the program launched today in the form of a new content and editorial website – madewith.unity.com – dedicated to showcasing all the creative developer projects from around the world and provide a central collection for you all to tell your stories of development. Visit the site to read more about all three of these developers and their games right now and make sure to get signed up to tell your own story!

Last but certainly not least, industry legend Rob Pardo wrapped up with the day’s guest keynote address about multiplayer and how understanding and catering to the powerful idea of friendship can make games more compelling.

Unite Boston has only just begun and has many great sessions lined up for attendees to enjoy, a great expo area where partners are demonstrating their technologies, and the Made with Unity pavilion where many Unity community members are demonstrating their games. Also, don’t forget that tomorrow we’ll celebrate the best games made with Unity in the last year at the Unity Awards ceremony so make sure to check back in to see who won!