Unity | Code Like It's 198x

In 2011 two students, Matthew Thomas Woolven and Marco Marino, told Edge how their game GLiD had started: “a little experiment over the summer holidays with Unity, because I found out it was free.” Neither of them, Marino said, “really had any coding knowledge before Unity, so it’s taught us, basically”. The game won a prize at the Independent Games Festival, and the pair dropped out of university to make games.

That was the change Unity made. Before it, a small team that wanted a 3D engine had to write one or pay for one. Unity’s founders had faced the same choice. “We actually started out as a game company,” its chief executive, David Helgason, told Edge, “and we just remembered how we couldn’t afford anything on the market apart from GarageGames, which we didn’t really like. So we had to build something ourselves!” They turned the engine into the product, and in 2009 they began giving it away.

Fast facts

Made by: Unity Technologies, founded in Copenhagen by David Helgason, Joachim Ante and Nicholas Francis.
First release: June 2005, at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference; it could publish games only for Mac OS X.
Free version: from October 2009, with version 2.6.
Scripting: C#, and in its early years also UnityScript, a language close to JavaScript.
Users: 13,000 before the free version; 250,000 by late 2010; 1.9 million registered developers, 400,000 of them active each month, by 2013.
Games made with it include: Thomas Was Alone, Inside, Cuphead and Gris.

From the Mac to the iPhone

The founders met online and settled in Copenhagen. Work on the engine began in the early 2000s, and Helgason dated the company’s first business plan to 2004. Their own game, GooBall, made little impression, but the engine they had built for it went on stage at Apple’s developer conference in June 2005. For its first year it could make games only for Mac OS X. Windows and web browsers followed, and Edge described the company in 2013 as having grown “from a focused OS X game creation tool to one of the most widely used engines in existence today”.

The iPhone made it. Unity released a version for Apple’s phone in 2008, soon after the App Store opened, and by early 2010 Helgason was calling it the most popular engine for iPhone games, used in more than 350 of them. It cost $399 for a basic licence and $1,499 for an advanced one, per seat. “The business opportunity turned out to be better than anyone had expected,” he told Edge, “and not only did the iPhone’s PowerVR graphics chip take really well to Unity, but the iPhone has overall become a truly great gaming device.” The company had just raised $5.5 million in its first round of venture funding.

Giving it away

Until 2009 the cheapest version cost $200. “It seemed like a really low price point for people that are really committed,” Helgason said, “but there are a lot of people in the world for whom $200 isn’t a small amount at all, and a lot of students that can’t really afford $200 out of their budget.” In October 2009, with version 2.6, Unity made its basic version free. The only condition was that the user’s company had earned less than $100,000 in the previous year, and games made with it paid no royalties.

The users came quickly. Unity had about 13,000 users before the free version, over 100,000 by the spring of 2010 and 250,000 by the end of that year. By mid-2011 Helgason counted 450,000 developers. In 2013 the company claimed 1.9 million registered developers, 400,000 of them active each month, and announced that basic publishing to mobile phones would be free too. Its development director, Erik Juhl, described how it spread inside big studios: programmers at “EA or Activision or whatever” went home and tinkered with Unity, and at the next project meeting asked, “Hey, why aren’t we using Unity?”

Unity 3, released in 2010, could export one project to the web, iOS, Android, PC, Mac and the three big consoles. The paid Pro version, at €1,100, added features such as real-time shadows and deferred rendering. “We’ve always wanted it so that you can bootstrap a game company or career using the free version,” said Nicholas Francis, one of the founders. Late in 2010 Unity opened its Asset Store, where developers sold each other models, tools and plug-ins, with Unity taking 30 per cent. By 2011 the National Film and Television School was planning to teach it, and Helgason called it “almost a common language in the production groups”.

How it works

A Unity game is built in an editor. In a beginner’s tutorial for Wireframe in 2018, the starting point is a scene with a camera and a light. The developer adds objects, here a capsule from the GameObject menu to stand in for the player, and gives each one behaviour by attaching components to it in a panel called the Inspector. A script is one more component: a short program, usually written in C#, attached to the object it controls. Pressing the play button runs the game inside the editor, so the developer can try a change at once. “Being able to just hit the play button and try your game, that’s insanely helpful,” said Woolven.

The approach suited people learning as they went. Mike Bithell taught himself to program while making Thomas Was Alone, a platform game about coloured rectangles, in his evenings after work; its folder on his computer, he told Edge, was still called “Teaching Myself Unity”. The game looks two-dimensional, but Bithell built it in 3D “due to the way Unity worked at the time”. Playdead’s Inside was developed with the help of PlayMaker, a visual scripting add-on for Unity, and Wireframe described Gris as a platform game that, “like Cuphead”, used Unity “to striking effect”.

The runtime fee

On 12 September 2023 Unity announced that it would charge developers a fee for each installation of their games once those games passed certain thresholds. Developers were furious, and some well-known studios said they would stop using the engine. Unity’s chief executive, John Riccitiello, retired with immediate effect on 9 October 2023. On 12 September 2024 his successor, Matt Bromberg, cancelled the fee “effective immediately”. Unity went back to charging by subscription: the free Personal version became available to developers earning up to $200,000 a year, double the old limit, and Unity Pro rose by 8 per cent to $2,200 a seat.

Sources

Matthew Thomas Woolven and Marco Marino, interview, and “Grand unified theory”, Edge issue 229, July 2011, p. 198 onwards: GLiD; Helgason on the company’s origins, GarageGames, the 2004 business plan, the $200 indie version, the free version and its conditions, 13,000 and 450,000 users, the Asset Store and its 30 per cent, the National Film and Television School, “almost a common language”.
“How Unity built the world’s most popular game engine”, TechCrunch, 17 October 2019 (web, secondary): the founders, Copenhagen, GooBall, the launch at WWDC in June 2005 for Mac OS X only, Windows and web export a year later, the iPhone version, the free tier in October 2009. https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/17/how-unity-built-the-worlds-most-popular-game-engine/
“5 Years Later, Unity Used by 170,000 Developers and Available on 9 Different Devices”, TechCrunch, 7 June 2010 (web, secondary): the launch at WWDC in 2005; work begun in Copenhagen in 2001. https://techcrunch.com/2010/06/07/unity-3d-turns-5/
Edge issue 211, February 2010: Helgason on the iPhone (the SDK released “over 18 months ago”, $399 and $1,499 licences, more than 350 games, the $5.5 million funding round).
Edge issue 213, April 2010: Unity’s 100,000 users.
“Tracking developments in development”, Edge issue 222, Christmas 2010, p. 137: Unity 3, the €1,100 Pro version and its features, export platforms, 250,000 users, Nicholas Francis’s comments.
Edge issue 225, March 2011: a developer on Unity’s two languages, UnityScript (“a sort of hybrid JavaScript”) and C#.
Edge issue 244, September 2012: Unity “went free to use in October 2009 with version 2.6”.
Edge issue 257, September 2013, p. 146: interview with Erik Juhl (1.9 million registered developers, 400,000 monthly active, free mobile publishing, “why aren’t we using Unity?”); Unity “from a focused OS X game creation tool”.
“The making of Thomas Was Alone”, Edge issue 255, July 2013, p. 134: Mike Bithell and “Teaching Myself Unity”. Edge issue 261, Christmas 2013: Thomas Was Alone built in 3D.
Wireframe issue 1, November 2018: Gris and Cuphead. Wireframe issue 3, November 2018, pp. 34–37: “Build a simple first-person shooter in Unity” (the editor, GameObjects, the Inspector and components). Wireframe issue 6, January 2019: PlayMaker and Inside.
Unity, “Unity Announces Leadership Transition”, 9 October 2023 (web): Riccitiello’s retirement. https://unity.com/news/unity-announces-leadership-transition-0
Matt Bromberg, “Unity is Canceling the Runtime Fee”, Unity blog, 12 September 2024 (web): the cancellation, the $200,000 Personal threshold and the new Pro price. https://unity.com/blog/unity-is-canceling-the-runtime-fee
“Exclusive: Unity is killing its controversial Runtime Fee”, Game Developer, September 2024 (web, secondary): the per-install fee announced in September 2023, the developers’ reaction and the departures that followed. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/unity-is-killing-its-controversial-runtime-fee
Wikipedia, “Unity (game engine)” (web, secondary): the runtime fee announced on 12 September 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_(game_engine)