mandag 8. februar 2010

Unity Technologies strikes multi-year deal with LEGO for 3-D browser games

Unity Technologies is announcing today it has struck a three-year deal with LEGO in which the toy company will use Unity’s 3-D animation engine in its upcoming online games.
San Francisco-based Unity makes a game engine, which is a set of tools that makes it easy to create a game. While many online games are based on Adobe’s Flash technology, those games tend to be two-dimensional and cartoon-like. Unity enables game developers using it to create 3-D games.
“LEGO will generate a lot of content using our engine,” said David Helgason (pictured below), chief executive of Unity.
The deal is an important recognition for Unity, which is proving that it is possible to create a high-quality 3-D game using a game engine that doesn’t require a download. Unity’s technology enables browser-based games. That’s important because lots of casual gamers won’t download anything. If they can play games within a web browser without a big download, then that greases the skids for the players to spend more time on the game and more money playing it. About a million players a month are installing Unity’s plug-in, which is required to play the browser-based 3-D games.
For LEGO, Unity is important in the creation of games in the LEGO Star Wars category, one of the popular genres that has revived LEGO’s fortunes in the video game business.
So far, Unity has more than 90,000 registered developers, up from just 13,000 in October. It makes money through standard licensing fees for software. A tool set to make iPhone games, for instance, costs $400. But in October, Unity also launched a free version of its engine for hobbyists to use. That explains the huge rise in developers registered to use Unity. As a result, the company is enabling a new era of “garage developers,” or people who are making games on low budgets for web-based platforms.
The conventional wisdom used to be that 2-D games were far easier to make than 3-D games. But Helgason said the barrier to 3-D is coming down. A typical programmer can create a 3-D building in perhaps 20 minutes.
Meanwhile, the LEGO deal will help Unity gain corporate respect as well. Other big entities using the Unity engine are NASA, the Cartoon Network, and Electronic Arts. Unity has 60 employees and is funded by Sequoia Capital.
David Helgason will be a speaker on a panel on Disruptive Innovation at our GamesBeat@GDC conference on March 10 in San Francisco.

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