State Of Play: Unity Technologies

It is still a work in progress, but the simplicity of the Flash export function and the results it produces - detailed 3D graphics, realistic physics, complex lighting - is enough to draw spontaneous applause from the audience.

For Meijer, however, the best evidence of the demonstration's success could be found in the sheer volume of questions that followed.

"I felt great. I got the feeling that people were very happy with the answers to their questions, and there were a lot of questions. It took a very long time, but the questions were on such detailed stuff that it tells me we got the big picture very much right."

When Adobe announced it was adding native 3D support to Flash, Unity saw it as a gilt-edged opportunity to address the wildly variable conversion rates for its browser plug-in. All Adobe had done was add functionality; this was a chance for Unity to give its users access to a vastly expanded audience, while simultaneously opening up its tool to a new community of developers.

"What Unity does is being able to write three lines of script and throw a ball," says Hauwert, who compares the "vibe" of Unity to the early days of Flash development. "If you look at other ways of doing that, with 3D State and Flash, that's going to involve a lot more work and a lot more code for the developer."

"I mean, yes, there is Flash, but Flash is 2D, and being able to get the Unity iteration cycle, get the Unity way of scripting a game quickly, and not having to think too much about rendering unless you want to - I think that brings something truly new to Flash."

What our users can depend on is that when new platforms emerge that matter to them, we will be there

Lucas Meijer, Unity Technologies

"One thing I've learned is that people don't care too much about how technically cool it all is, but how it looks, how they can work with it, and that the tooling is right."

Both Hauwert and Meijer seem genuinely surprised at the results they are seeing from their work. Despite being more ambitious than almost anything attempted with Flash before, Hauwert says showcase games like Shadowgun and Angry Bots are running "an order of magnitude" better than expected.

"I mean, people are used to this performance from the Unity web player, but now you can offer it to audiences who really need a lot to reach," adds Meijer.

This seems like an opportune moment to summon the spectre of HTML-5, which prominent companies like Apple and Facebook are evangelising while simultaneously hinting at the eventual demise of Flash. Advocates don't come much bigger or more influential, but Meijer believes the rivalry between the two technologies has been blown out proportion.

"We make the product for our users, and one way users often get fried is that they put all of their eggs in one basket, for one specific platform," he says. "And then it turns out that, when their game is done, that platform is no longer the new kid on the block. The place where you can make money, the place that is popular, it changes a lot. In the App Store you could make a lot of money, but now we see that it has become much harder."

"The biggest thing that we care about is that our customers don't need to care about it. We think the first platform that will be viable for bringing 3D to a wide range is Flash. We also look at Web GL, but right now we don't see it as being as ready as Flash yet. If that changes we could look into it, and if we do depends on how everything goes with our users."

"What our users can depend on is that when new platforms emerge that matter to them, we will be there."

This dedication to giving developers access to as many platforms as possible is evident in Union - a service designed to introduce Unity games to places that its existing customers might struggle to reach. The App Store, the PlayStation Network, Steam, Xbox Live; these services are now valid and relatively accessible routes for any studio seeking an audience, but the sheer number of games being made has greatly reduced the chances of success.

Union addresses the problem by targeting nascent technologies like the Roku 2 set-top streaming box, and smaller competitors in established markets like the Blackberry Playbook, the Nokia N9, or Sony Ericsson's Xperia Play mobile phones. In a sense, Union closes the circle on Unity's mission to democratise the development process by allowing the company to act as a publisher, but vice president of business development Oren Tversky shrugs off the label.

"We don't think or ourselves as a publisher," he says. "We see ourselves as an aggregator, or a syndicator, or something like that."

"We have some advantages over other syndicators, one of which is that our games share the same code-base... If you think about a traditional publisher, they might have code-bases from ten different studios, internal, external, all sorts of things. Unity games share a code-base, so we have some really interesting efficiencies there."