If you ever downloaded games from the Play or App Store you probably saw the Unity logo and its tagline – “Made With Unity” very often. At one point, Unity’s CEO has said that “Unity powers 50% of all games“. But why is that? Why are so many games made with Unity?
Your Answer Upfront:
The reason so many game developers choose Unity to make their games is due to the fact that it saves a lot of development time (by having most features you need built in), helps with porting your game to multiple platforms and offers an easy way to acquire and exchange assets with other developers.
In this article we’ll go over what the Unity Game Engine is how it helps game developers and why exactly developers love to use it. We’re also going to talk a bit about it’s bad reputation and the downsides of using unity. And all of this with my own experiences backing the topics and subjects.
What is Unity?
Unity is a set of tools and development frameworks that people can build games with. It offers an IDE (Integrated Development Environment), a scene editor that gamers can visually build their games in, a set of powerful cross platform tools for building games (aka make a game and make it work on iOS, Android, Mac, Windows, Linux and your favorite grandma’s oven) and a store where you can purchase assets to use in your games.
The idea behind it is to “satisfy” the most common needs of game developers and to allow them to just work on their game, not on the tools for their game (though we usually just roll our own tools too).
The engine launched in 2005 exclusively for the Mac and by 2012 it was available basically on any platform you wished it to be on. In just a few short years it took the industry by the storm and set the paradigm for fast and easy game development.
Now, in order to understand why so many games are made with Unity we need to understand why developers love to use it. Because, if game devs wouldn’t want to touch it and game devs make the games… you get point.
Why do Game Developers Love Unity?
Back in the day, as a game developer, I used to have to write my own set of tools in order to make a game. I’d bootstrap and build a hacky level editor, a user interface tool to draw the buttons and health bars and usually, but not always, embed a scripting language into the game to make things a bit easier and avoid doing a ton of builds.
This would usually take weeks and even months to get done before I could start actually making a game, but the end result would be something similar (but less feature complete) to Unity.
By just providing the engine itself, it already cut down the development time of a game by at least 25-40% depending on the complexity of the game.
In our article titled “Why Do Gamers Hate Unity” we talked about game development as owning a car manufacturing businesses and imagining Unity as a 3rd party company that could make your life easier by providing a lot of quality of life improvements to your company, while handling all the paperwork and manufacturing processes. It’s an interesting article that I highly recommend to read, but even if you don’t, we’ll cover some of it’s points in here.
The basic idea for why game developers love Unity is this:
- It saves development time by offering a lot of commonly used features like Pathfinding, Navigation, Lightning, Post Processing, Cross-platform build support, Rendering, Input (touch, peripherals) and a lot more stuff that not all games rely on.
- It allows devs to share and retrieve various assets needed in a game in an extremely convenient way (via its asset store).
- The cross-platform build support is a boon (and sometimes, a bit of a curse for devs who don’t actually do Quality Assurance on their games) that saves thousands of dollars (even more) in porting and research costs.
- There’s a ton of tutorials, documentations and freely available code to learn (or copy) from.
Why does Unity have a bad reputation?
Unity had (and still has) a free edition that millions of developers still use. In exchange for using the engine for free, games need to display a splash screen at startup that says: “Made With Unity”.
A lot of new/beginning Unity game developers don’t pay for a professional license so anything they release has the startup screen from the free edition. Professional devs usually purchase an upgraded license for their work and their games don’t display the startup screen.
Since gamers don’t see the Unity logo on GOOD, PROFESSIONAL games (like Hollow Knight or Monument Valley), but they see it on a ton of clones and low quality games (we wrote an article about this very issue here) they assume that Unity is the problem.
So if you’re a game developer or a game dev soon to begin your journey don’t be afraid of using Unity. Your favorite legendary designers and programmers have at least 1-2 games made with it, with many more coming.
What are the downsides of using Unity?
The biggest problem with using Unity comes from its ease of use and beginner friendliness. Since it’s really easy to begin working with it, a lot of people assume they can achieve something beyond their level of knowledge.
A lot of projects are started by beginners and they end up never being finished or just dumped to the app stores as is.
The fact that people with no experience can just purchase or download an entire code base for different types of games for close to nothing (or free in some cases) can lead to a lot of low effort and low quality games being developed with Unity.
An experienced dev or a developer who passed the junior stage with a little bit of experience under his belt won’t have many problems doing anything of quality with it.
Why are so many games made in Unity?
The reason so many game developers choose Unity to make their games is due to the fact that it saves a lot of development time (by having most features you need built in), helps with porting your game to multiple platforms and offers an easy way to acquire and exchange assets with other developers.
If convenience was a tool then Unity would be name used to market that tool. Unity is extremely convenient.
If you use Unity for more than a couple of years you start to develop your own methodology and approach on how to use it. You become extremely proficient at it. Couple this with all the built-in-features that the engine brings to the table and a professional game dev can start churning out games with an incredible speed.
I wrote a game for this very blog in less than 10 days and launched it on the App Store. The game isn’t supposed to make any money as it’s 100% free with no ads, IAP’s and no tracking. The idea behind the game is to use it to make a few case studies that can help answer beginner game developers AND mobile gamer questions.
The only reason I was able to make the game so fast, while having it look as good as it does is thanks to the methodology + Unity’s features I wrote about above.
Where To Next?
You’ve reached the end of our article and I sincerely hope you know understand why so many games are made with Unity. If you liked this article we have many more just like it with original research and examples.
I write extensively about the mobile gaming industry, their tactics and how greed influences a game’s design. I believe that you might be interested in more articles on game monetization. So if you want to stick around, you can check out “How Do Free Mobile Games Make money“, “Why Do Mobile Games Have Fake Ads” and “Why Do Mobile Games Have In-App Purchases“.
There’s also a monster post (about 4000 words) that answers the question: “How Hard Is It To Make A Mobile Game“. It goes in depth with actual examples on how Experience, Resources and Financials affect the difficulty of developing and releasing new mobile games!
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