Unity: "If our only goal was to make an engine, I'd make myself redundant"

I think the work on the Passion Pictures ["Butterfly Effect"] demo. It's really cool to see that we're pushing Unity into the region where you can make quality CG animations with it. We haven't got to the point of chunking it up and really releasing it into the wild, but all the special effects you saw should be in people's hands - on the Asset Store, or whatever. It's not only that, but it's a good example of the really high-end work we're doing.

And also our globalisation strategy: going local and diving deep. I was just talking to someone who works with a studio in Thailand, and they get visits from Unity people. We're just everywhere.

We have more people now, and they're all super busy. The philosophy is that we want to be local, and that means speaking the local languages. We don't have that for Thailand yet, but we have local teams in China, Japan and Korea, and we have non-native local teams in Singapore and Malaysia now.

It's had a big difference. Sometimes it's hard to notice it in the day-to-day work, but if you look at our numbers a third of the business is in Asia now, and we're hiring a lot of extremely talented people out there.

The third thing is scaling the company. You don't see this from the outside, but really learning to work together in a much more complicated environment: making our marketing and sales more professional, organising globally, and that sort of stuff. It's probably taken more time than it should have, in the sense that it has taken up resources internally, but we're really getting streamlined now and I'm really excited to take some new leaps.

Exactly. We have always had this philosophy - and it has become crisper in a way, because we understand it better now - that we should not be a company that just delivers an engine, we should be a company that really asks, 'How can we make people more successful?'

It just kind of happened. Savvy people on the internet will always find the tools they need. But we're now getting teams together to focus on them, so, for instance, in the military simulation space we actually released a product, which is basically Unity with extra features that those guys need but are basically useless to normal game developers. It's a small team, but they understand all the three and four-word abbreviations that the military industrial complex likes to use.

We've also being addressing the embedded space. There's nothing we can announce yet, but Unity is being put into slot machines, car dashboards, and anywhere that elegant, stylish content that's easy to author is needed; it turns out that's quite a lot of places.

And for small teams people are actually overlapping.

No, no. The world has changed. At that time, the most efficient way to get something out was still to finish it and give it to a publisher. People had a lot of grief about that process, and there were bad publishers and bad things that happened, but they fundamentally added value. You were better off, most of the time, with a publisher than without one. That's not the case any more, so developers have to worry about these other things.

That's been clear to us for a few years, but we've been slow to understand. It isn't in the DNA of the company. We considered building some of it ourselves, and we may yet build some things, but the conclusion has been that it's better served by entirely focused teams that do each thing really well.

Exactly, by being the eyes and ears of our developers, and doing some of the leg-work, some of the research. Of course, there are services that are good that aren't in our category, but over time we hope to make sure that all of the good ones are listed there.

Well, it was announced two years ago.

A lot of it is that these new platforms are really slow moving. The companies behind them are really savvy - it's not like they're particularly stupid - but some of them really don't understand games, they don't know the space. We've had deals lined up where the hardware platform was basically cancelled.

There were a lot of those logistical challenges, and building the team and the processes. It was sort of like building an entirely new company. The Asset Store is also a bit like that... They're kind of own their own in many ways, and have the freedom to make their own decisions.

I love it. There's nothing wrong with making a great engine and just keeping at it - and we will keep at it - but if that was the only goal we ever had I'd probably make myself redundant, actually.

In some very abstract way we're a service provider, but a service provider that always wants to leverage technology. I don't see us as a normal publisher: funding games, doing all the leg-work. Union is technologically leveraged because we can do all the ports in a semi-automated way.

To some degree. It hasn't happened yet, but it might at some point. Often, the approach taken in the Asset Store is, for very good reasons, different from how we would do things. Nothing wrong with that.

And, actually, when we're working on a project that might compete with something on the Asset Store, we show it to the sellers who we would be competing with, basically telling them, 'Either get out of the way if you think you're going to lose to this' - a feature in Unity is usually free - 'or feel free to compete by making your product even better, and even ride on top of our stuff'. The good thing about competing with your community is that you don't really have to win.

We have the same problem that any established product company has, and that's the bar for what you can release becomes unreasonably high at some point: we can't add a feature that only really matters to a few people, because it just weights the whole thing dow; we can't add features that solve problems in a niche way instead of a general way. But sometimes the niche way is exactly what you need.

I think in some ways we already are. People are searching for growth and interesting markets, and interesting markets happen to be where we are really strong. It's natural that we'd meet other engine companies there, of which there are really only two or three, depending how you stretch it.

And it's not just them. The May issue of Game Developer published a survey to find out what engine mobile developers were using: Unity was number one with 53 per cent; the second engine, so to speak, with 39 per cent, was home-brew, so not really using an engine at all. That's actually our biggest competitor, people building their own stuff.

They didn't even make the list.