Unity thrives as Unite doors open

Today Unity has opened the doors of its own Unite conference, kicking off with a volley of announcements and some statistics that will no doubt impress observers acorss the industry.

CEO David Helgason has used the opening keynote to announce today’s launch of the Unity Asset Store; an asset sharing marketplace that allows users to buy and sell virtual goods, tutorials, feature upgrades and other creations directly inside the popular engine.

In the same session, delivered to a hall packed with developers, Helgason also unveiled a new business model to empower its thousands of users called Union. The initiative sees Unity support its customers in publishing their games on a myriad of new platforms including smart phones and the new wave of web TVs and set top boxes.

Both Unity Asset Store and Union are available today as part of the new Unity 3.1 release, which can be downloaded from Unity here.

Helgason also delivered a list of numbers that demonstrate the ongoing success of the Unity platform.

In the last week alone 42,000 developers have used the engine. In the past month some 80,000 have used Unity, meaning a third of the engine’s 260,000 total users since the launch of the first version are still active on a monthly basis.

Unity is also now seeing 2.5 million consumers download its web player every month, averaging one per second, meaning it is reaching some 30 per cent of web gamers.

Furthermore over 1,000 iOS games have now been created using Unity. 15 per cent of all the top selling iPhone games ever released have been made with Unity, and at last 17 Unity-built titles have made it to the iPhone ‘top 10’ list.

"Unity lets our users do some amazing things," said company CEO David Helgason, pictured.