Unity at 10: For better—or worse—game development has never been easier

These days, one tool has essentially unlocked the world of game development for the masses.

Since it was introduced in 2005, Unity has tried to make creating video games possible for everyone regardless of technical know-how or budget. Upon hitting a stable release, Unity took home an award at Apple’s 2006 Worldwide Developer’s Conference after being showcased as the first fully powered game engine—a platform with basic graphics capabilities, physics calculations, and some game behaviors already coded in but extensible—for the iPhone. Unity stood largely uncontested on that platform for a couple of years and quickly became a well-known tool among developers.

But while Unity grew with the iPhone, today, games made with it are popular on all platforms. According to Unity, more than 6 million registered developers use the platform, and 770 million gamers enjoy Unity-made titles. The software has become to small-team game development what the Adobe suite is to creative professionals in many other lines of work.

As you might guess, many independent developers praise the tool—some even say it’s what made success possible. You could make a case that Unity is partially responsible for the boom of independent and artistic games over the past half-decade; everything from Firewatch to Pillars of Eternity came into existence with the help of Unity. Going forward, new improvements and technologies the company is working on could open the landscape up even further.

“Democratizing development—in our minds, we don’t think is the wrong thing, we think it’s the right thing,” says Marcos Sanchez, head of global communications for Unity. “You want more people understanding, and everyone’s gotta start somewhere.”

But at some conferences and online developer communities, a growing and vocal subset of content creators doesn’t share this enthusiasm. These denizens of Reddit and game development forums believe the democratization Unity works toward has an unanticipated side-effect—it lowers quality standards for gamers. And worse for those trying to earn a living in this world, the new glut of Unity-bred games makes earning a profit harder in an already difficult market.

“We have a family, we have a house,” said Rebekah Saltsman, the CEO and co-founder of Finji (a small studio behind some lesser-known indie favorites like Canabalt and Panoramical), at this year’s Game Developers Conference. “And I can’t destroy that because I work in a volatile market.”

A decade into the Unity era of game development, those in the industry have plenty of strong opinions about one of the most popular tools of the trade. So Ars spoke with developers to hear about the good and the bad: how is Unity (and other factors) making projects achievable that used to only be dreams? And what new challenges are arising for devs hoping to turn game-creation ideas into viable businesses?

“I wouldn’t be here if not for Unity.”

Chicago artist William Chyr’s game Manifold Garden breaks many rules—mostly laws of physical space. The game tasks players with solving enormously complicated puzzles in Escher-like environments by manipulating gravity. In making it, Chyr is also breaking a longstanding rule of game development: you need to be a highly technical software engineer to make a 3D game.

Instead, Chyr has worked for years as an installation artist and a sculptor. He calls himself “an artist working at the intersection of art and science.” Talking to him, it’s clear he’s a bright guy, and he can code. But Chyr says he doesn’t have the deep technical know-how required to program a graphics engine. Manifold Garden is his first game, and he chose Unity to close that knowledge gap for him.

“I would not be here if not for Unity,” he told Ars. Chyr praised Unity as a tool for prototyping. The ease of getting a working project rolling surpasses anything that the industry used before—at least for 3D games.

Milkbag Games co-founder Matt Rix, who previously released mobile game Disco Zoo and is currently working on a futuristic extreme sports game called FutureGrind, also went out of his way to credit Unity with making 3D game development accessible in ways it has never been before.

Game developers often get together for game jams, working in tandem on their own improvisational projects with a set timeline just to flex their design muscles, explore new ideas, and hone their chops. Rix says he’s seeing things in those jams he never thought possible before, and he believes Unity contributed to that reality.

“The idea of even making a game in 3D in like two or three days for a jam used to be basically something you would only be able to do if you had a 10-person triple-A team who knew exactly what they’re doing,” he recalls. “Now you see like a one-person team or two-person team just make a complete, fun game in 3D in a single weekend. Five years ago, there was probably like one 3D game out of 500 games in a game jam. And now it’s like more than half the games are 3D, and they actually start to look good, too.”

Rix’s partner, Owen Goss, was visibly thrilled when discussing these developments. “The more people you get from outside games coming in and realizing they can make games, the more interesting stuff we’re going to see,” he opined.

In a phone call with Ars, Unity Labs EVP Sylvio Drouin explained why he thinks Unity has this effect on many newer devs. “The thousands of game engines that appeared over the past 20 years are usually an engine where you have to start coding in C++ and call APIs and build the scaffolding yourself,” he said. “That makes it very targeted at engineers that understand what they’re doing, while Unity is very asset-driven.”

In other words, Unity takes care of a lot of the technical work so you can focus on creating content. Developers have run with it.

It’s got that Unity feeling

Despite its evident positives, there’s quite a bit of snark about Unity on game development forums and the /r/gamedev subreddit. For example, some critics argue that because Unity has become the de facto engine for indie game development, all these games start feeling the same. They use the same graphics techniques, the same foundational physics calculations, and so on.

Chyr wasn’t swayed by the argument. He believes people say Unity games look and feel the same because a lot of people aren’t customizing the engine beyond its default settings. “Unity comes with a game controller, it comes with default shaders. If you just apply those, then of course they’re all gonna look the same because everybody gets those,” he said. “It’s sort of like when you see people’s YouTube videos and they’re using the default transitions that Adobe Premiere or Final Cut comes with.”

As you might expect, Unity’s own people made the same point. “The Unity engine is so customizable,” according to Drouin. “You can replace the physics engine, you can replace everything you want in Unity, you can add your own scripting, you can have whatever you want. You can customize the editor—you can just do so much.”

You could also argue, as some have, that only developers and journalists would even notice these similarities between Unity games. But while most of the working industry figures we talked to brushed off this popular criticism of Unity, digital game marketplaces like Steam, Google Play, and the Apple App Store are flooded with low-quality games that don’t go that extra mile to be distinct. In Q2 of 2016 alone, Unity claims gamers downloaded 238,000 titles made using the development engine. With such a critical mass, some developers believe sheer volume threatens even the standout games that rely on Unity.

If you’ve been following this conversation, you’ll recognize its moniker. But “Indiepocalypse” is a ridiculous term. And everyone sitting on a GDC panel earlier this year agreed on that much. “There is no apocalypse,” Spiderweb Software founder Jeff Vogel declared.

Online, you will absolutely find a heap of sensational blog posts and forum threads heralding doom with this term. It refers to the extreme devaluation of indie game products due to saturation in the marketplace by poor-quality content. It’s a potential situation that came about due to a confluence of things—easier access to powerful development tools, because of markdown sales on distribution platforms like Steam, etc.

In theory, such concerns are based on numbers as well as anecdotal experiences. A website called SteamSpy collects open data on game sales made through PC gaming’s biggest digital marketplace, Steam. Many Unity creations land here both good and bad. According to that data, the number of indie games released each year on Steam rose from 66 to 2,173 between 2009 and 2015. However, demand didn’t rise in tandem.

Finji’s Saltsman believes some of her company’s titles were precluded from success by clones that were lower quality and faster to market. Again, ease of production made this possible. “The market’s not gonna get less crowded,” she said. “That’s just not gonna happen.”

Unity rep Sanchez seems to think that this whole question misses the benefits of democratization. He speculated about a future scenario to prove his point: “A person makes a game today that someone might not consider great,” he said. “But someone else might pick up the third or fifth game that person created and realize, ‘Holy cow, this is a pretty amazing thing.’”

Sanchez and Unity also have plans for devs like Saltsman who are worried about getting discovered among the noise Unity’s powerful tools make possible. “There’s a couple other things that we’ll be rolling out over the next 12-18 months that are also related to discovery,” he promised. These efforts will likely look a lot like the company’s Made With Unity campaign, a site dedicated solely to highlighting interesting projects in a similar way to Kickstarter’s Happening initiative. While such ideas generate millions of views for select projects, it takes time to see if this translates to a developer’s bottom line.

Defining one medium by all media past

Almost every industry figure we listened to compared the somewhat nascent indie gaming landscape with some artistic frontier of decades past. Unity’s own Sanchez compared it to both the Web of the early ’90s and the Sundance Film Festival. Chyr likened it to the advent of digital cameras. Smith drew a comparison in his GDC presentation to the indie music scene because of the big role of hobbyists.

It’s a curiosity that those working on video games, now a medium with nearly 60 years of history, are continually contextualizing their work and business by other forms.

The Unity comparison that hit closest to home was made by FutureGrind’s Rix: flash games. Rix has a background building products in Flash. That technology took the Internet by storm in a time when the HTML standard was lagging behind consumer and producer demand for a richer, more interactive Web. Flash is “making it too easy now,” people would say 10 years ago, according to Rix. “The Internet’s flooded with Flash games. No one’s going to be able to make games anymore,” he recalled.

But the reality? “What you ended up with was just a whole bunch of games that were unique and interesting,” Rix said. He pointed to the popularization of the tower defense genre and to The Binding of Isaac, an indie darling that is still cited among the great games of today. It’s also evidence that Flash games proved more exciting than naysayers feared.

Devs of this mindset all make the same point: this has all been said before, and it will all be said again.

That said, the process of easing entry to game development might still be in its genesis. Unity only turned 10 years old this summer, after all. New tweaks to the platform are coming, and Drouin was enthusiastic about methodologies and technologies his Unity Labs team and others in the company are planning to roll out in coming months and years.

The goal for the next five to 10 years, he said, “is to be able to get to the point where the storyteller will be able to focus on the story. And if we can do that, if we can give them those tools, you’ll start seeing more and more and more interesting games.”

His hope is based in reality. Chyr is already doing this with the features Unity offers today. “I just opened up Unity and started playing with it,” he said about his earliest moments working on Manifold Garden. He said he didn’t bother with the classic paper prototyping design phase advocated in popular game school textbooks like Brenda Brathwaite and Ian Schreiber’s Challenges for Game Designers. Since Unity was so easy to work with, he could instead quickly iterate and try new things from the first stages of development.

Unsurprisingly, virtual reality plays a role in Drouin’s future vision for Unity. Though gamers are still sussing out the value proposition of VR on the consumer end, the potential of VR for those creating 3D spaces is unquestionably compelling. So while Unity isn’t the only company thinking seriously about creating content in a VR space, Drouin’s lab is already deep into implementation. A VR editing interface for Unity was demonstrated on stage at this year’s Vision Summit conference. That project originated with Drouin’s team.

In the final product, people could put the headset on, select assets in the Unity Asset Store, and drag and drop the components of a scene into place within the virtual space. “So you could be entirely in VR without ever touching the Editor, without ever setting any texture, shader, or global illumination parameters, and you would start to be able to assemble a game,” Drouin said.

Outside of the more blue-sky Labs group, Unity is working on other ways to improve workflows for inexperienced creators. Drouin described a Final Cut Pro-like visual editing strip for game behavior called “visual scripting.” To make a fully functional game in Unity today, you still need to be able to do some basic scripting in C#, Boo, or a variation of JavaScript. Visual scripting could potentially lessen or remove even that barrier, and it could have exciting applications in prototyping.

The gods of game space

There’s an ideal picture of the future here. In it, a creative person could step into a virtual space and mold it around her as if she was sculpting the world from clay, but she could also dictate each sculpture’s behavior, creating the game logic and component behaviors that make up a compelling game. All of this could happen without writing a single line of code. If achieved, the artist in this vision is almost godlike within her own space.

The Unity tool as it exists today is, for all its power for the uninitiated, not yet close to that ideal. Democratization takes time, ripe conditions, and victory over hearts and minds. As these continue to coalesce, though, effects of the effort are already being felt.

Unity is not the only factor in the boom of indie games on the marketplace. Digital distribution and new business models play roles that are at least as significant. And as we’ve seen, the confluence of these things has led to an unprecedented boom in the creation and sharing of interactive experiences.