Unity strives to be the best game engine and much, much more

31.08.2023 - 09:59 / gamesindustry.biz / Marc Whitten / Best / Best Game

Gamescom may have only just finished, but there’s another tentpole developer event that’s fast approaching.

Unite, an annual celebration of Unity’s game developer community, returns to Amsterdam this November, taking place as a physical event for the first time since 2019.

“We're just really excited to get everybody back together,” says the president of Unity’s Create division Marc Whitten. “Unite is always this incredible opportunity to get some of our best and most passionate developers together with our teams… It's a jam-packed event with really great talks exploring what’s coming down our pipeline.”

At Unite 2023, Unity will show developers how it is bolstering its core product while still innovating for the future. Over the last year, it strengthened its multiplayer services to support smooth, high-concurrency, connected experiences; it launched the 2022 LTS which promises maximum stability and performance; and recently Unity announced a new suite of AI tools in closed beta that it hopes will revolutionize game content creation.

Starting with multiplayer, the demand for connected gaming experiences has never been greater, and Unity has been focused on delivering a suite of solutions to support the creation of multiplayer games spanning all genres and platforms - from networking stacks to dedicated hosting, friends list management and in-game voice chat.

Unity’s Game Server Hosting, in particular, is very popular and has been adopted by some of the biggest games in the world, such as Apex Legends and Among Us. It boasts robust high-concurrency servers with 99 percent uptime.

As such, it’s a part of Unity’s offering that receives a great deal of attention.

“We've really been focused on the self-serve feature for Game Server Hosting recently. This means that any studio, of any size, can immediately start making their multiplayer title,” Whitten says. “That’s on top of observability and the DevOps side of the pipeline to ensure developers have more control and have a better understanding of what's happening in the multiplayer sessions for their game.”

He continues: “Getting Game Server Hosting right is all about the data that comes back – are developers tuning their matches and matchmaking and the way sessions work? Do they understand the cost structure? Some minor modifications on the game side could actually have a significant impact on how much it costs to run sessions. We've been really investing to ensure that creators have that level of control over their games.”

The evolution of Unity’s Game Server Hosting service isn’t limited to technical improvements, either.

“Game Server Hosting is one part of a rich set of gaming services that are necessary to build modern live games,” he says.