Unity Technologies Celebrates Six Years of Indie Game Development Goodness

The leading Indie game engine celebrates its sixth birthday.

PRESS RELEASE

SAN FRANCISCO, CA–(Marketwire – June 06, 2011) – Unity Technologies, provider of the Unity development platform for awesome games and interactive 3D on the web, iOS, Android, consoles and beyond, today celebrated Unity’s sixth anniversary.

Unity, launched onstage at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) in 2005, is commemorating six years of steadfast leadership and relentless innovation in democratizing game development and making it possible for everyone to create rich interactive 3D content.

“We bet on broad democratization of game development and have been aggressively coding and innovating to realize that vision,” said David Helgason, CEO of Unity Technologies. “We just surpassed the 500,000 user milestone, our customers continue to amaze us with their creations, and we are expanding our team at a rapid rate. It’s exciting to be both an instigator and a participant in this revolution.”

A few of the things that have happened in the last 12 months:

Unity was named the #1 Game Engine by Game Developer Magazine readers, received Develop Magazine’s coveted Grand Prix Award and won the prestigious Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Award Unity became the platform of choice for teaching students how to design and develop games

The company’s registered user base surpassed 500,000 users; 150,000 of these users are active monthly users representing well over a million hours of game development every month

The free Unity browser plugin for playing web games exceeded 60 million installs

Unity and the Unity Web Player were certified by the US Army and Air Force so they can be installed on their secure networks

The third generation of Unity, with dozens of major new features, 100+ additional enhancements and up to 10x performance improvements, and support for Android were released

The company teamed with Qualcomm to bring Augmented Reality (AR) to Android The number of Unity games in the Apple iOS App Store exceeded 1500 — “best of” and “top selling” games include Battleheart, Gears, Samurai II, Skee-Ball and Snuggle Truck

The company rocked Game Developers Conference (GDC) in a big way and won Best of Show The company announced a deep partnership Electronic Arts (EA)

The company launched the Unity Asset Store, a digital marketplace where developers can share and sell assets to accelerate development, and it’s quickly become the #1 marketplace for Unity developers

The company introduced Union, a business unit dedicated to distributing high quality 3D games on mobile phones, tablets, set-top boxes, connected TVs and other new platforms — Union announced a partnership with Sony Ericsson to enable rapid development and porting of Unity-based games to the new Sony Ericsson Xperia PLAY smartphone and a partnership with RIM to bring dozens of Unity-based games to the PlayBook

For the full list of awards and accolades, simply visit:
http://unity3d.com/company/fast-facts.