Marc Whitten is preparing to leave Unity. The company announced this in a report to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
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Engines and tools
Section about game engines and tools: announcements of new frameworks, releases, and significant updates.
In March, Slavania, the debut game by FrostLeaf Games studio, published by Game Art Pioneers, was released on Steam. We talked with Vladimir Averyanov, the game designer of the project, about how the metroidvania was developed based on Russian fairy tales.
Unity continues to improve its engine. She released a preview version of Unity 6 with accelerated rendering, artificial intelligence-based tools and various optimizations for multiplayer games.
Unity has found a successor to John Riccitiello, who left the post of CEO in the fall of 2023 after a scandal with an updated pricing policy. She announced that from May 15, 2024, this position will be held by Matthew Bromberg.
Epic Games has officially released an updated version of the Unreal Engine — 5.4. It has significantly improved the quality of animation and improved rendering performance.
On April 17, the Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation again included UNIGINE in the register of domestic software. The engine has been missing from the list since the end of February.
On April 11, the global strategy Revival: Recolonization was released on PC in full. App2Top talked with Sergey Ulankin, head of console and PC publishing at HeroCraft, about how development was going, how successful early access was, about working with VK Play, and much more.
Ziva Dynamics is a company that deals with technologies of complex modeling and deformation in real time. Her tools are used to create realistic 3D models of people, animals and other creatures. The other day, Unity, the company that owns Ziva Dynamics, decided to abandon their support.
This was told by one of Godot programmers Adam Scott in an interview with journalist Stephen Totilo from Game File.
Epic Games held a presentation of State of Unreal at the GDC 2024 developer Conference. During it, the company demonstrated the capabilities of the next version of the Unreal Engine and shared a number of news on the development of Fortnite and its business in general. We have collected the most important announcements.
Epic Games just held its annual State of Unreal keynote, showcasing the future of Unreal Enigne and sharing other news related to Fortnite and its business in general. Here are all the major updates announced at the event.
The giant 2024 Unity Gaming Report has been released. It is dedicated to trends in game development. If possible, we will briefly tell you about the main thing from the study.
Good news. Despite the crisis in the industry, new gaming companies are still emerging. Emanuel Palalic and Garrett Young have announced the launch of a new studio. It's called Emptyvessel. This is the second such announcement in the last 24 hours.
In mid-February, OpenAI introduced a new generative network that is capable of generating very high-quality video by text format. It's called Sora. We talked about its prospects in the gaming industry with teams that have already implemented other neural networks into their pipeline. Our experts include representatives of Charisma, Playkot, Lost Lore, Skywaylab and ZiMAD.
PlayStation 5 support has been added to Defold
· 3 months agoThe Defold Foundation has announced that its engine now supports the development of games for PlayStation 5. You can get all the necessary tools, documentation and source code of the engine for free. The only limitation is that you need to be an approved PlayStation developer to access them.
The young Russian Case studio decided to develop its own game engine. She plans to make its use free for indie teams, but without access to the source code.
Unity has published a financial report for the fourth quarter of 2023 and immediately for the whole year. She reported on revenue growth, and also shared new details about the process of "rebooting" the company.
There are no more game engines in the registry of domestic software. On February 20, UNIGINE was removed from it by the decision of the expert council under the Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation.
In January 2018, Autodesk stopped supporting the Autodesk Stingray engine, formerly known as Bitsquid. However, the tool lives on. Developer Andy Touch noticed that it was used by the authors of the popular shooter Helldivers 2.
Indie developer Maxim Bykov has been developing the lamp role-playing platformer Roam (formerly Moist) for three years now. About the project, the pipeline, the difficulties of development and expectations, in our interview with him.
An update has appeared. Eidos Montreal has confirmed the cuts.
In accordance with the new law adopted in Europe, Apple has announced a number of innovations in iOS. These include support for third—party stores and payment systems. But there were nuances. Those who want to use the new functionality will have to pay for each installation. For more information about the situation, see our analysis.
The current head of Roblox Studio, Stefano Corazza, announced that his company has joined the Blender Development Fund.
Game studio RAWRLAB Games has released a toolkit for porting Godot games to the Nintendo Switch platform. The solution is free, distributed under the MIT license. The only limitation is that you need to be an authorized Nintendo developer to work with the code.
The organizers of the Game Developers Conference (GDC), with the participation of the Omdia consulting firm, conducted a survey of 3,000 game developers. According to him, over the past 12 months, 7% of developers have already changed the engine, and 28% began to consider this possibility.
Unity continues to restructure, this time preparing for changes in its leadership. The founders of ironSource, an app monetization platform it acquired in 2022, will soon leave the company.
Media: the founders of ironSource will leave Unity
· 4 months agoAll six ironSource founders will leave Unity within the next six months. This is reported by the Mobilegamer portal, which has read the letter from Jim Whitehurst, interim CEO of Unity, sent to the company's employees.
Less than two weeks into 2024, mass layoffs continue to impact the industry. This time, Unity has decided to cut around 25% of its total workforce as part of its ongoing restructuring.
Unity will hold the largest layoffs in its history
· 4 months agoIn a recent report to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Unity announced plans to conduct a record round of layoffs. She decided to lay off a quarter of the staff, or about 1,800 people.
We continue to summarize the results of 2023 with the gaming (or related to the gaming sector) teams. Next up is an interview with Vitaly Agafonov, head of the Nau Engine product.
We continue to summarize the results of 2023 with the gaming (or related to the gaming sector) teams. Next up is an interview with Denis Shergin, CEO of UNIGINE.
UNIGINE 2.18 was released
· 5 months agoThe developers of UNIGINE announced the release of a new version of the engine — 2.18. Among the key changes are improved performance, VR "out of the box", improved animation system and editor, and much more.
Electronic Arts has suddenly rebranded the Frostbite engine by presenting a new identity and vision for its proprietary tech. The company is betting big on collaborative efforts, while no longer restricting developers from using third-party solutions.
The creators of the Defold engine have decided to remove the monthly fee for using the source code for console platforms. Now every registered developer can access it for free.
The Defold Foundation has announced that it will no longer charge console game developers for full access to the source code of the Defold engine.
We continue to summarize the results of the year with the game teams. Next up is an interview with Oleg Beresnev, founder and CEO of Beresnev Games.
Streaming service Netflix has reported on the gaming results of this year and shared plans for the next one. He has no ambitions for the segment.
The Irish startup W4 Games, founded by Godot veterans, recently announced a Series A funding round. As part of it, the studio will receive a transfer of $15 million from a group of investors.
The Irish startup W4 Games, founded by Godot veterans, recently announced a Series A funding round. As part of it, the studio will receive a transfer of $15 million from a group of investors.
We continue to summarize the results of 2023 together with the game teams. Next up is an interview with Ilya Boytsov, co-founder and CEO of the MidHard Games outsourcing studio.
Godot 4.2 was released
· 5 months agoFive months after the appearance of Godot 4.1, the open source game engine has a full-fledged new version. It includes more than 1,800 changes made by 359 developers.
Fun gameplay aside, one one of the factors behind Dave the Diver’s success was its combination of pixel art and 3D graphics. Here is how a small team at Mintrocket managed to create the game’s appealing visuals using the Unity engine and its tools.
Unity has announced new large-scale cuts. This time the reason was the termination of cooperation with Weta FX, a special effects studio directed by Peter Jackson. A total of 256 people or 3.8% of the total number of Unity employees will remain unemployed.
In October, it became known that the basis of the new Russian open engine Nau Engine will be a solution from Gaijin Entertainment — Dagor Engine. App2Top talked with Andrey Karsakov, Head of Nau Engine development, about how it happened and what technologies the engine will support.
The GameMaker team announced that developers who are not going to make money from their games can now not pay for the engine. The only limitation is that the free version of GameMaker cannot be used for console projects.
During the Unite 2023 conference, Unity announced Unity 6, the next version of its engine. With it, developers will, among other things, get early access to artificial intelligence-based tools Unity Muse and Unity Sentis.
Unity has summarized the financial results of the third quarter of 2023. She said that compared to last year, her revenue increased by 69%. The growth could have been even greater, but in September, after widespread criticism of the new pricing policy of the engine, its revenues decreased slightly.
What should be the game documentation at the first stages of development, who should lead it, whether fake shots are needed - the editors of App2Top talked about this and much more with Konstantin Sakhnov, founder of the indie studio Vengeance Games and author of the course "Fundamentals of Game Design".
Last week, the Nau Engine team announced that they had taken the render core and system-level components from Dagor Engine for their engine. According to Gaijin Entertainment, the company that developed Dagor Engine, this came as a surprise to her.
Many American advertisers abandoned the Unity advertising network after the company introduced a new pricing policy on September 12. According to Sensor Tower analysts, in the week from September 11 to 17, their number on the Unity network decreased by 15%.
Trending this week
There is little talk about games in the Telegram messenger. We decided to fix the situation by talking with Daria Novikova, product director at PlayDeck startup. The latter launched a gaming marketplace for Telegram. In a conversation with Daria, we touched on topics such as user engagement, earnings from leading projects, monetization and, of course, PlayDeck itself.