Here's How Unity Cloud Helps in Solving Game Development Tasks

Introduction

I held various positions at different media, technology, and software companies in the early part of my career, including AOL, NewsCred, and my own start-up. My last gig before Unity was co-founding Parsec. The initial hypothesis was that we could use new technologies, like hardware encoders, to create a remote desktop product good enough to play games through.

My co-founder built the product, and I focused on the business. Over time, we realized people were not only using our software to play games, but they were also using it to make games and collaborate with people from anywhere. With Parsec, we built a business supporting the games and media industries, especially as they found ways to create experiences while supporting the transition to working from home and hybrid work.

The History of Unity Cloud

Game development is one of the most complex technology and creative endeavors anyone can work on. When someone first opens the engine to start building, they face the daunting and exciting task of creation while also having to think about how they plan to retain the users who start playing their game. Unity Cloud seeks to simplify this through cloud-connected data management and collaboration tools, as well as offering live services that help customers retain their users.

The story began four years ago when Unity began to work on and acquire technologies that help customers manage their live games. Games live on well beyond the moment of release. People who play a game become part of a creator’s community, and more and more games are monetizing that community through live updates, advertising, and in-app purchases. The collection of the tools to make that happen, Unity Gaming Services, launched in 2022. These live games require continuous iteration and development. That additional complexity added to the need to simplify the workflows and collaboration between teammates.

We spoke to more than 300 people with roles across studios of all sizes to understand their processes and their pain points. We heard that teams of all sizes need better ways to collaborate – programmers, artists, live ops managers, community managers, monetization managers – and they want to reduce manual tasks, improve project tracking, asset management, and versioning, and protect access to their IP. Unity has had cloud-enabled services for years, but it wasn’t enough to address the demands of modern game development.

While we’re just getting started with Unity Cloud, we’re proud of how these products and services come together with the engine and our advertising products to help customers create, manage, market, and monetize their games.

The Benefits of The Toolset

The games industry has had a couple of challenging years. Game Developers continue to create amazing experiences, but all of those incredible games are competing for the same total engagement because the time playing games hasn’t been growing.

In these turbulent times, game studios are looking for ways to reduce the complexity of their work, improve their efficiency, and retain the customers they acquire. With Unity Cloud bundled into your engine subscription, you get access to collaboration tools like Asset Management and Unity Version Control. Unlike more generic products, both of these are specifically designed to support the workflows of real-time 3D content creation; they’re integrated directly into our engine, and you can get started for free. 

Once a game is released and a game studio has acquired its first users, building a community and updating the game become the biggest drivers of retention. While not every game seeks to be operated with live services and online multiplayer, our Cloud products support those types of games from the beginning. We want to democratize the creation of live service and online multiplayer games in the same way our engine democratized game development a decade ago. We hope to make online multiplayer and voice chat as simple as adding a few lines of code and connecting it to a new player in a scene. We also want a game developer to be able to open our analytics product, find out how a segment of your audience is performing, and, based on that data, quickly make a tweak to the game through remote configuration changes and new content distribution (without an app update).

Content Management Features

One thing we repeatedly heard from customers is that they’ve lost control over their data. One customer even shared that their team bought the same 3D model of a city three times for tens of thousands of dollars because other people on the team didn’t know they already purchased it.

The challenge of content management at scale is only going to get more challenging with AI-assisted creative generation tools like Unity Muse. Unity Cloud users have access to Unity Asset Manager, a digital asset management system (DAM) tailored specifically for 3D content and game development. With Unity Asset Manager, customers can browse content in intuitive collections or search based on keywords and license types to encourage content discovery and reuse. Granular role-based access controls enable project managers to add stakeholders for reviews, edits, and other tasks.

Unity Asset Manager also brings content to where devs work by surfacing assets across your development toolchain with integrations into Unity Version Control and Unity Editor. For work-in-progress content, Unity Asset Manager can index and preview assets stored from Version Control in the DAM interface so your teams know which assets are approved and should be used in the game. The Asset Manager Integration window in the Unity Editor provides a searchable view of content from the DAM for easy additions to your game and in-editor asset transformations. 

Handling Team Administration Tasks

Administration and role-based access are table stakes but are hard to get right. Especially across large teams using decentralized tools where stakeholders need access to perform specific tasks or need transparency to parts of a project. Unity Cloud offers user permissioning, solution provisioning, and cost monitoring to support the needs of diverse and distributed teams. It centralizes admin tools, like role-based permissioning and product usage tracking, directly in the Unity Cloud Dashboard. Unity Cloud ensures your admins can easily track spending and product usage while eliminating unnecessary cloud license spending with the ability to review, extend, reallocate, or revoke user solution access. These controls include user-level permissioning to tailor content and solution access to the needs of your studio. By centralizing administrative control and tooling within the Unity Cloud ecosystem teams can access the content and solutions they need to deliver engaging, high-quality games to market while keeping IP safe.

The Unity Ecosystem

While we want to make it as easy as possible for our customers to use our products together, Unity is a platform. We are excited that our customers use our engine in combination with other tools that solve their unique set of challenges better than we can. At the same time, while we are focused on the holistic platform and working best with Unity’s Engine, Unity Cloud is also agnostic. It connects development workflows whether you’re working in the Unity Engine, other game engines, or other third-party point solutions. 

All products and services have engine-agnostic SDKs and API access for additional customization. And we’re continuing our development of Unity Cloud with flexibility and customization in mind: Imagine setting up custom workflows between third-party tools, Unity Cloud, and the Unity Engine so your stack is more connected and workflows more efficient no matter what tools you choose to use. That’s something we’re looking to launch early next year. 

The Roadmap

Unity Cloud is in early access. While most components of Unity Cloud are in general availability (GA) and are fully featured, some capabilities are still in development. Unity Cloud early access lets developers start exploring these new features and capabilities, and then try new features as soon as they’re available. Current Unity subscribers have full access to Unity Cloud features and for folks who are not using our editor, you’ll be able to start exploring the personal tier of Unity Cloud with the fully-featured release planned for early 2024. 

This release is just the first step – we have big plans for Unity Cloud over the coming months, we’re planning to deliver more integrations, tools, and automated workflows that help accelerate a team’s game’s development.

For more information on Unity Cloud visit here.

Benjy Boxer, VP & GM of Unity Cloud

Interview conducted by Arti Burton