Unity continues to invest in supporting developers creating multiplayer experiences - no matter the game engine they use or target platform
SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--As highlighted in the 2024 Unity Gaming Report, even as the gaming industry faced economic challenges, multiplayer games are still proving tremendously successful. 68% of studios using Unity are developing multiplayer games in an effort to reach greater player engagement through competition and community building. As multiplayer game development and operating a live game service remain a complex undertaking for studios of all sizes, Unity (NYSE: U), the world's leading platform of tools for creators to build and grow real-time games, apps, and experiences across multiple platforms, remains committed to supporting developers by streamlining the entire development process via a suite of flexible and extensible tools that they can use regardless of the game engine they choose or the platform they are targeting:
- Unity Gaming Services (UGS) have been used by studios like StickyLock and Triangle Factory to deliver exciting and engaging co-op and multiplayer experiences across multiple platforms.
"We chose multiplayer UGS because we wanted to have a third party take care of all complex logic for us so we could focus on the core gameplay of Histera. We use quite a few services from UGS, and it's very useful to get them with one single provider. There's less glue between various services for us to worry about, said Jamel Ziaty, Producer, StickyLock.
Unity's Multiplayer Services has reduced development time on player features from a few weeks to a few days. Had we built everything ourselves, it would've required more resources and significantly more funds, said Pieter Vantorre, CTO, Triangle Factory.
- Additionally, Unity's Multiplayer Hosting, leveraged by over 400 studios worldwide, provides dedicated high-concurrency servers with 99.95% uptime and may reduce costs between 30-40%. Unity Multiplay Hosting will receive these capabilities prior to the launch of Unity 6 this fall.
- Bring Your Own Cloud: This gives studios the ability to run their game in their own cloud account, with support from major providers like GCP, AWS, Azure and more.
- Flexibility and Choice: Developers can connect and use existing accounts on their chosen cloud providers marketplaces.
- Additional CICD & observability options: In order for studios to build their CICD pipeline, they need a new external bucket upload and build tagging options; new self-serve logs and metrics export will improve a studio's ability to observe their game and analytics.
The rise in multiplayer games the industry overall is witnessing has driven change and choice not only in the tools leveraged in development but in the hosting infrastructure landscape. Game studios now have the choice, bare metal versus cloud hosting and a multitude of providers, said Benjy Boxer, SVP & GM, Unity Cloud. Unity Multiplay Hosting hosts over 77 million game sessions in a month and continues to demonstrate its ability to scale supporting more than 3 million concurrent users at any given moment. This service is a critical business area for Unity that will see continued investment and new features as part of the Unity 6 launch later this year.
Additional multiplayer features and support developers can expect to see in Unity 6 are:
- Multiplayer Play Mode that gives developers the ability to quickly test game functionality in editor.
- Multiplayer Center streamlines a project set-up.
- Multiplayer for VR games will get support via the new Multiplayer VR template built on Open XR.
- Relay and Multiplay Hosting will further streamline development, playtesting, and deployment.
- Unity Multiplayer services including matchmaking, lobby, and voice chat will be fully integrated into the Unity Editor.
- Distributed Authority: A network topology that game developers can use to build large scale multiplayer games with deep simulation, in a cost-effective way without the complexity of dedicated servers.
To learn more about studios using Unity Gaming Services and Multiplay Hosting capabilities, visit the blog or download the recently released Megacity Metro sample game that provides a blueprint for end-to-end multiplayer development in Unity.
About Unity
Unity [NYSE: U] is the world's leading platform of tools for creators to build and grow real-time games, apps, and experiences across multiple platforms, from mobile, PC, and console, to spatial computing. For more information, visit Unity.com.
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Kelly Ekins
kellye@unity3d.com
Source: Unity