Unity Technologies Browser Plugin hits important milestones

Unity Technologies, provider of the Unity development platform for games and interactive 3D on the web, iOS, Android, consoles and beyond, today announced that its registered user base has doubled to more than 500,000 users in just over 6 months; 150,000 of these users are active monthly users representing well over a million hours of game development every month. In addition, installs of the free Unity browser plugin for playing web games have surpassed 60 million.

In 2003 and long before the introduction of Facebook and the iPhone, co-founders David Helgason (CEO), Nicholas Francis (Chief Creative Officer) and Joachim Ante (Chief Technology Officer) had the vision of democratizing game development and enabling everyone to create rich interactive 3D.

They took the very complex and expensive technology required for modern, cross-platform video game development and built a powerful, intuitive suite of tools with smooth and efficient workflows around it. The end result: the Unity development platform. A major feature of Unity is “Author Once, Deploy Anywhere” support for every major gaming platform so that developers can reach huge audiences for their games with great speed and flexibility.

“The combination of Unity’s powerful yet approachable technology has resulted in it being the #1 game engine used for both traditional and casual games,” said David Helgason, CEO of Unity Technologies. “It’s exciting to see how our users build on top of Unity to create mind blowing innovation of their own.”

Unity powers web games for global brand names like Axe, Bigpoint’s Battlestar Galactica Online, Cartoon Network, Cheerios, Coca-Cola, Disney, Electronic Arts’ Tiger Woods PGA Tour Online, Gazillion’s Marvel Super Hero Squad, Gorillaz, LEGO, Marvel’s Iron Man, Nickelodeon and Pepsi; and Unity has a rapidly growing presence on both gaming portals and social networking sites.

Unity is the most widely-used middleware in games for the Apple iOS App Store. More than 1500 Unity games are in the App Store today with many having made “best of” and “top selling” lists like Battleheart, Gears, Samurai II, Skee-Ball and Snuggle Truck. Unity also powers mobile training apps like Launcher Dogs for the US Military. Unity for Android was generally available in March of this year, and there already more than 100 Android games on the market with many getting rave reviews.
Unity also supports all the major gaming consoles — Wii, Xbox 360 and PlayStation. Rochard, the first Unity-powered Sony PlayStation game, is scheduled for release this year.

Unity Technologies continues to seek out new ways to radically democratize the entire game industry. In 2010, the company introduced the Unity Asset Store, a digital marketplace where developers can share and sell assets to accelerate development. The Unity Asset Store catalog has grown to more than 630 ready-to-use packages, with some top-sellers earning more than $15,000 per month.

Unity Technologies also 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. More than 1000 developers representing more than 1000 Unity-authored titles have registered with Union. Union recently 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.