Unity plans to triple workforce in India by 2018

Unity Technologies is ramping up for a major expansion in one of the world's key growing games markets: India.

The firm has told The Economic Times that it intends to triple the number of employees it has in the region by the end of the year, Pocket Gamer reports.

Chief revenue officer Dave Rhodes claimed that the growing mobile games scene in India will add to Unity's 43% market share of smartphone games, adding that the firm is "pulling ahead of Epic Games across PC, console and mobile".

"People in India if given the right price of device and bandwidth, will buy more games," he said. "The developers have an outlet to make money and we want to be there to support them."

However, he also noted that it will "take many years" before India's games market is more comparable to that of Japan or Europe.

As part of its Indian expansion, Unity also plans to collaborate with IT firms in the region on various augemented and virtual reality projects. Quentin Staes-Polet - the compnay's director for South Asia, Australia and New Zealand - stated that 70% of virtual reality development around the world is built with Unity.

"People in automobile and manufacturing have raised a demand for interactive and immersive platforms for their customers and internal work," he said. "This high fidelity visualisation cannot be achieved with 3D design tools. Therefore, we are consorting with IT integration firms that are building up augmented and virtual reality practises."

Unity's biggest competitor, Unreal creator Epic Games, already highlights the work it does with non-games ventures - from photo-realistic rendering for car commercials to providing some of the special effects for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.

But, speaking to GamesIndustry.biz at GDC 2017, Unity CEO John Riccitiello said his firm has also been exploring opportunities in other industries for a long time.

"We tend not to talk about it a lot, but there are plenty of examples," he tells us. "Jet Propulsion Lab uses us for the Mars Rover, CERN uses us for the Large Hadron Collider. Almost anyone that uses VR for architecture uses us. The gambling industry is pretty much centred on using Unity.

"My view was that until we were perfect at nailing the gaming, AR and VR business, I was going to keep our concentration on that so we didn't dilute our efforts. But there is huge number of folks that use our product outside of the games industry - we just try to keep our focus tight."

You can read more in our full interview later this week.