Unity 6 is the "most stable and performant version of Unity ever"
VP Product at Unity Ryan Ellis takes us through what's new in the transformative Unity 6
Unity 6 was built, tested, and refined in partnership with – and for – the developers who use it.
As the world’s leading platform for creating and growing games, Unity 6 is the most stable version of Unity, offering extended support and dedicated product and engineering resources post-launch.
With faster rendering, advanced lighting options, seamless multiplayer workflows, enhanced AI capabilities, and improved support for mobile web runtimes, Unity is committed to providing a solid, stable engine that lets developers accelerate their pace of development, freeing up creatives to focus on what they do best – making games.
"We really believe that it is the best version of Unity ever," says Ryan Ellis, VP Product at Unity. "It is the most stable and most performant version of Unity, and really delivers.
"One of the things that we've tried to do here is provide a lot more support around Unity 6," he adds. "More content samples, a lot more engagement through our discussion forums, our Discord server, to help the community better understand and adopt the new version. And that seems to have been paying off in terms of more interest, more engagement, and earlier adoption."
It's because of this early adoption that Unity 6 has strengthened with every iteration. Alpha, beta, and then preview testers have been putting Unity 6 through its paces in studios across the world for almost a year now, with more participants providing essential feedback in every wave of testing.
But why call it Unity 6? And why now?
"We are changing how we do releases," Ellis explains. "In wanting Unity 6 to be the best version of Unity ever, we decided it was time to change how we think about releases.
"This is, in part, due to feedback from our customers around some of our previous naming conventions. But it is also dedicated to the long-lived nature of Unity 6. We intend to support Unity 6 for a long time – not just two years, [like] our previous annual naming convention.
"We'll be supporting Unity 6 for a long time – many years."
Unity knows that the last thing you want when you have a game in production is to have engine changes introduce unknown variables. That's why it's shifting from major annual releases to better accommodate longer-lived productions that are some of the world's most successful games.
It's these conversations with its customers that has driven Unity's commitment to a generational product that works fluently and fluidly for games, studios, and workflows of all sizes and scopes.
As well as a generational approach (e.g. Unity 6, Unity 7), there will be production-ready Updates, too, (Unity 6.1, Unity 6.2) to ensure releases are stable, minimising the cost – and risk – of upgrading with minimum disruption to developers' ongoing projects.
"Unity's been doubling down on our connection to the community, really listening to them," Ellis explains. "We've had our team sit with their teams to better understand them. We've great opportunities to do that at events like Unite, but we also have dedicated days where we go to a studio and spend time with them to really understand what their challenges are.
"Games are becoming more and more long-lived, right? It is not unusual to have 10-year-old games now that are still incredibly popular with players, and to have moved to a model of not introducing a new game every year, or every season, but rather introducing updates to an existing game."
Ellis says customers consistently fed back that when they have a big game in production, they want to be able to evolve it, but don't necessarily want to make changes to complex underlying systems with every annual release.
"We're trying to work with our customers and help adapt to [new ways of working]. The underlying platforms are changing all the time, and we need a good way to deliver those changes to our users, as well as new optional features that they could take advantage of," Ellis adds.
And then there's the increasing demand for multiplayer games, too, and the ubiquitous need for seamless web integration. That's why Unity's worked with Meta to help devs to deliver their games to "even more platforms, and more places to find their players."
"With Unity 6, we make it much easier for people to build, deliver, and operate these multiplayer games," Ellis says. "It is also growing in its importance in terms of gaming, and especially with advancements that have happened more recently in web browsers, web technology. It's enabled us to make gaming on the web much more performant than before."
"I think we're just very much on the tip of the iceberg of seeing how AI is going to transform the types of gaming experiences that people build"
And then there's Unity Sentis, Unity' native AI engine that unlocks new capabilities in the Unity Runtime that is hoping to innovate game development.
"I think we're just very much on the tip of the iceberg of seeing how AI is going to transform the types of gaming experiences that people build," Ellis says, "So it's very exciting to see where we are at that. Unity 6 is a first step in enabling people to explore that level of creativity.
"AI is so transformative. Yeah, it's a topic [we] need to be careful about how we think about it and how we roll it out, [but it's] actually a core part of how we, at Unity, think.
"The sensitivity people have here is, is this going to replace my job? Or is it going to use my art, my creation, in a way that I don't like, right? Or in a way that I'm not compensated for, or was not my intent?
"The beautiful thing about Sentis and our approach to that is the control is entirely with the creator there. This in no way supplants the creator. It gives them additional tools to be able to deliver new levels of creativity in games. And actually, in some senses, it expands their work of opportunity.
"It's really about assistance more than anything else. How do we help accelerate workflows that are drudgery? Can [designers] make an asset and then allow a machine to create nine levels of detail for them automatically? That's how we think about it. How can we provide tools that will assist developers, that will help reduce costs, help accelerate the pace of prototyping and development, and ultimately, allow [devs] to focus on the creative?"
Ellis says Unity "prides itself" on innovations like its AI model, Sentis. Helping developers navigate the continuously shifting landscape of game design sits not only at the heart of all it has done over the last 20 years, but also drives its passion and commitment to the future of game development, too.
"We want developers to be able to create, to meet their ambitions," Ellis adds. "And we want them to be able to adapt to this shifting world of demands from consumers and hardware changes and economic conditions. We see ourselves as trying to ease that transition for them. And so it's partly listening to them, and it's partly looking at these trends and bringing these things together.
"We are trying to [help developers] focus on their creation, focus on connecting with their users and their players, and making sure they're delivering the best possible experience for them," Ellis concludes. "We are trying to get out of the way of the creative flow.
"We want to make these tools evaporate into the background so that you can stay focused in the moment of creation."
Unity 6 is available now. The first update in the Unity 6 generation, Unity 6.1, will be released in April 2025, with another update scheduled for the second half of 2025. Unity 6.1 will build on the core Unity 6 capabilities and include new features such as support for foldable and larger screen formats, Deferred+ rendering in GPU Resident Drawer, and new build targets and build profiles.
Want to know more about Unity 6? Join Unity’s Community and Product teams on Twitch today, October 17, 2024, from 8 AM to 2 PM PT.