Unity Technologies recently announced that they have entered into a partnership with SCEA that will make Unity tools available for use on practically every Sony platform. The engine will supports the Playstation 4, Playstation 3, PS Vita, PS Mobile and even Sony’s endeavor into cloud technologies.
David Helgason, CEO of Unity Technologies wrote:
“So what is Unity? Well, it’s only the most widely used game creation toolset and engine in the world. It’s so popular because it’s based on the idea of democratizing game development. That means making as many awesome and powerful tools available to as many developers as possible, regardless of how big or small their company or team. Unity is elegant, efficient, approachable, extensible, and affordable. Unity makes it easy to iterate and Unity does the heavy lifting when porting games to other platforms. Code is automatically converted, and just polish and optimization for that specific platform needs to be added. But all the other stuff — the art, the game logic, artificial intelligence, sound — everything else, remains the same.”
Now this wouldn’t be the first time that we have seen the Unity engine in use on a Sony system, in fact a large number of you have likely already played Unity based games in the past, but the aim of the partnership is to extend their to even more developers. Some of you may have played Escape Plan, which would have been a good example of the Unity engine in action prior to the Playstation development tools for Unity becoming publicly available.
The true benefit of this partnership will most likely shine through in the format of Indie games, which comprises a rather large chunk of Unity Technologies business. The announcement alone is certainly a sign that we can also expect the success of the Indie game community to carry over to the next generation as well, possibly even in a bigger way than we have this gen.
In case you haven’t seen the Unity engine in use before, here’s just a couple of the many available examples of what the software can do.
