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.