The early months of 2024 have seen Microsoft stepping up its efforts to bring its first-party Xbox titles to audiences on rival platforms, with Hi-Fi Rush having released for PS5 and Obsidian duo Pentiment and Grounded both having launched for PS5 and Switch. Sea of Thieves arrives for PS5 later this month, and though Microsoft hasn’t officially announced further plans to bring any other of its games to rival consoles beyond that, reports continue to insist that there’s more stuff in the pipeline.
Unity: "The more places your games are, the more opportunity for discovery"
18.03.2024 - 14:41 / gamesindustry.biz / Marc Whitten
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With this year's Game Developers Conference kicking off in San Francisco today, it's a good time to take stock of some of the biggest challenges developers face, from rising costs to the ever-changing obstacles between your game and potential players – both of which are harder to reduce than ever.
"Gaming is a mature industry, and while it continues to disrupt, it's also just harder to break in with a new game," Marc Whitten, president and general manager of Unity Create (the tech firm's division that handles its titular game engine), tells GamesIndustry.biz.
"If everyone's playing a live game, maybe they're staying in that game longer which means it's harder for your game to break out and be discovered. [The challenge becomes] what can I make that's unique and pulls attention away from what people are currently playing? How do I get them to find my game and stick with it? It leads to bars going up for what it required [to be successful].
"The good thing is a cool new mechanic or an interesting, beautiful view of how play works still wins if you can build the rest of the pieces around it, but it's about players finding it."
We're speaking to Whitten ahead of today's release of the 2024 Unity Gaming Report, the engine firm's annual dive into what's happening in the development space. The report is compiled using data drawn from Unity's engine, cloud, and portfolio of products and services, encompassing approximately five million developers. Additional insight is gained via a survey, with 300 developers taking part this year.
The main takeaways from this year's report aren't too surprising. Unity identified five key trends, which were:
At the risk of oversimplifying, these all translate to developers seeking more money, more players, and more efficient processes. Whitten agrees that these are accelerating trends rather than new ones, but notes that they have accelerated to the point where, while each would have begun with larger studios, these have now broadened to affect indies and smaller studios too.
"As it accelerates, you can see a lot more of the smaller studios catching up to those," he says. "And obviously that comes with a lot of complexity as people figure out the best way to do things like multiplayer and so on.
"It's a challenging year, the economic environment continues to be challenging, and also you continue to see the evolution of the marketplace around games. As we've always seen, game creators are pretty agile. They're very focused on how to learn, so you see a lot of resilience in how they shift business models or mix them, or how they think about their platforms in a different way. These are trends that have been
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