What Developers Want

It has made us very happy. We had these complex emotions because we feel that we should be supporting the entire range [of our customers]. And now we feel that we have this energy as a company. We've learned to grow, we've learned to run a much bigger engineering team, we've learned to be multi-platform in a very efficient manner. Through that, we feel that we can broaden the reach of the types of products we support.

I don't know. We know how to do it, and we're doing it very rapidly. I just wish them luck with their efforts. They're good people, too.

A lot. One of the advantages of gathering [data] about the usage of Unity is that we can see, regionally, where it is being used. The US is by far our biggest market, but it turns out our number two market is actually China, and our number three market is actually South Korea - in fact, you could probably say that South Korea is our highest density market.

Last year Unity really started to take off as a business in Korea. We had been going through resellers and partners, like in most countries where... language is a barrier, but as the business grew it became clear that we needed to have direct relationships with those customers, because, in the end, nobody can support our customers better than we can.

If Unity isn't able to sell itself, then no amount of money will be able to, either

So we made the decision early this year, and then we did what we always do: we don't rush it, we go and look for people that really fit into our culture, and really understand and want to be part of how we do things... In a sense you could say that Korea is our strongest market; not in dollars, not in users, but in when you talk to users how much of a no-brainer they think using Unity is, and how much they respect it. Korea is really hot for us.

Exactly. And we've never been able to do anything else. If Unity isn't able to sell itself, then no amount of money will be able to, either. We've always relied on that.

Well, we're pretty entrenched in the US... And maybe its pointless in the end. For something to be bigger than something else doesn't really matter, but it's clear that Asia generally, and especially the three key markets China, Japan and Korea, have gone from practically no business two years ago, to a little bit of business last year, to something that's very significant this year. And we think that Asia may end up being 40 per cent of our business, so we're definitely moving as fast as we can to set up over there.

Of course, it's impossible to know the future, and to be honest we don't even try that much. We kind of let the future happen, and then follow it. We're a player in the ecosystem, not the creator of the ecosystem. It's actually kind of easy for us... We are a servants to the developer, first and foremost.

Actually, to give you a little peak inside the company, we live in a very complex world: all the different ecosystems, all the devices, all of the hardware form-factors, all of the different game developers, games and gamers. We work with all of the chip companies and OS companies to make Unity optimal and blah, blah, blah.

So in this very, very complex and rapidly changing ecosystem there is no one person in Unity, me included, that has the sort of brainpower to make all of these decisions. So we try as much as possible to set our people free to make these decisions, if not individually then in small groups and very organically. But the question that we tell them to always ask is, "What's good for the developer?"

Different teams have different focuses, so the developer might mean different things on different days of the week, but the answers are coming. Like, let's go into Flash, and now it's a staple thing, and it still seems like a good idea since we made the decision to put effort into it in January.

The only way to know what we'll be doing in five years is to know the situation in four years from now, and then ask what would make our developers happy, productive and successful in the near future.