Unity, used by nearly 50% of games developers worldwide, have announced that between April 1st and July 31st there were 2.5 billion installs of games, including 174,000 unique releases, made using their platform. These are very impressive figures when you consider the short window in which the figures are taken from. This represents, on average, about 20 million installs and in the region of 9 million new devices reached every day.
Unity's developer user base has been growing steadily since the platforms launch in 2001 and it recently reached over 1 million developers in 2015. Evolution has been key to the companies success with a move away from being a traditional middleware company to one that offers users a variety of services including an asset store, mobile advertising capabilities, analytics platform and video sharing mechanisms.
Apart from posting impressive user numbers, Unity has also made headlines in 2015 in part thanks to being one of the leading platforms for many game developers hoping to transfer their mobile, tablet and desktop game set to Apple TV's updated platform. Their success in helping Crossy Road transfer from their original environment to what could be one of the biggest platforms over the coming years has being built on its accessibility and cross-platform capabilities.
74% of games installed , that were built on Unity, were on an Android device while only 17% of installs were on an IOS device. Mobile and tablet devices from prominent manufactures Samsung and Apple accounted for 54% of app installs. There is no surprise in terms of the top two countries, China & USA, for installs. Both IOS and Android are popular in the two countries but interesting IOS is most popular in Japan while Android is the most popular in Brazil.
With the popularity of the development platform growing expodentially each year it is no surprise that the company is future proofing themselves by releasing the 3rd update this year to Unity 5 to take place inside the space of 180 days. During his keynote speech CEO John Riccitiello stated that a major reason behind this most recent update is because "we (Unity) want to see more people creating content than ever before".
Included among the forthcoming Unity 5.3 release will be a number of the following:
- Workflow improvements where developers can specify a reference frame for additive animation.
- Authoring for additive animation clips.
- Support for direct import and evaluation of Euler rotation curves.
- Ability to map the pose of a humanoid avatar into another avatar.
- A number of scheduled bug fixes.
- Multi-scene editior allowing developers to open and edit multiple scenes in the editor.
- Particle improvement.
- Billboard Improvement.
- Retina/HDPI support.