Unity Is Fully Committed to the Games Industry With the Release of Unity 6 in October

At Unite 24 in Barcelona, Unity announced that Unity 6 will be released in mid-October. Performance, stability, ease of use and long-term support are promised. At the same time, the company has made it clear that it is returning its full focus to the games industry.

Unity has announced that Unity 6 will be released globally on 17 October 2024 at its annual Unite developer conference in Barcelona. The emphasis on being the most stable and performant version of Unity became increasingly vehement during the keynote, which lasted over an hour.

"Developers have been telling us for a long time that they want more stability and more performance, which we are addressing with Unity 6. We're bringing them the best version of Unity yet, backed by deeper, long-term support and dedicated product and engineering resources post launch. They will also get frequent updates with new features, performance boosts, and bug fixes, all informed by their feedback and with minimal disruption to their ongoing projects," said Matt Bromberg, CEO and President of Unity. "We couldn't be more excited to celebrate Unity developers at Unite today and tomorrow and showcase, in particular, how some of them have been using Unity 6 to create amazing games."

Bromberg briefly touched on the restructuring of the company in recent months, following the widely criticised changes to the pricing model in September 2023. The decision to drop the runtime fee was also not discussed. Instead, the CEO said that Unity's vision of being everywhere there are 3D models was not viable. The company will focus on its core business, the complete engine toolkit for game developers and industrial use. It was noticeable that there was a very positive atmosphere at Unite 24, almost Apple-like with the applause for the speakers during the keynote. There was almost a sense of optimism. Game devs are supported from start to finish, from development to user acquisition, live service analysis and in-game advertising, Unity promises.

Unity 6 will offer developers customisable graphics rendering, giving them more control over the visuals of their games. On mobile, the new rendering pipeline will ensure less battery and memory consumption, while on PC and consoles it will shift more load from the CPU to the GPU. AI models can also be integrated into the pipeline, which was demonstrated using a compression problem (cloth moving on a body). Unity 6 also includes its own upscaling technology using spatial and temporal elements. It will be available cross-platform on mobile, consoles and PC.

Visuals were a big topic anyway, as Unity's internal demo team unveiled the Time Ghost demo, which showed off Unity 6's capabilities using the Entity Component System (ECS), Adaptive Probe Volumes, Scenario Blending and SpeedTree (v10) vegetation. The two scenes from Time Ghost demonstrating Unity's ECS for environments and cloth deformation with Unity Sentis will be released with Unity 6 next month. DirectX 12 support, split graphics jobs and ray tracing were also featured in the graphics section of the keynote.

Unity: "Time Ghost, developed with an unmodified Unity 6 engine, was showcased at Unite Barcelona 2024 running on a PC equipped with an Intel Core i9-14900K CPU and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 GPU."

In the new Multiplayer Centre, developers will be able to create multiplayer games much more quickly (based on genre preferences and number of players) and test them in the editor with multiple instances. Distributed Authortity also offers a more scalable alternative to the current client-server model. Unity talks about simplified multiplayer game development to speed up the "journey through the entire game development lifecycle, and robust tools to build rich games optimized for web browsers." The latter was discussed in detail, as it would allow players to be in the game more quickly and not have to be downloaded. A web game jam sponsored by Unity is also planned for early November.

In addition to better tracking the success of updates to Live Service games and improving overall behaviour, Unity will also provide smaller studios with its in-game advertising monetisation options, including access to statistics.

At the same time, it was announced that Unity would be supporting the platform for a long time to come. Proof of this was provided. "Unity 6.1, will ship in April 2025. Unity 6.1 will build on the core Unity 6 capabilities and include new features like support for foldable and larger screen formats, Deferred+ rendering in GPU Resident Drawer, and new build targets and build profiles," the company says. But again, stability and performance are key.

Swedish game studio 10 Chambers, creators of GTFO, is one the Unity game developers who adopted Unity 6 following its preview release earlier this year. They unveiled, on the Unite stage, a environment from Den of Wolves, lit and optimized using the latest graphics features from Unity 6. "Den of Wolves was originally built on Unity 2022 LTS but after seeing the improvements in Unity 6, both in terms of performance and rendering quality, the team decided to upgrade to Unity 6 mid-development," said Svante Vinternatt, co-founder and COO of 10 Chambers. "We needed a rendering tech stack that was both flexible and efficient to allow us to iterate quickly, scale rapidly, and not compromise on quality. And Unity 6 delivered." Vinternatt said during the keynote that the engine upgrade was easier than expected.

"At 10 Chambers, we tend to build many tools ourselves, but when the team at Unity built us a scene in Unity 6 with Den of Wolves assets, we were convinced and started upgrading the game to it. It looks better, but it also lets us iterate quickly and freely, which helps when experimenting with many different gameplay ideas. Something especially valuable for a game like Den of Wolves where we’re trying to elevate what a heist game can be", says Hjalmar Vikström, Co-Founder & Chief Development Officer.

10 Chambers began developing the game in 2021, and although it has left pre-production, the developers are transparent about what stage of development the game is at. "Revealing the look and feel of a game level at a developer conference isn’t the typical marketing approach, but as developers first, it felt natural. Svante showcased Den of Wolves' real-time environment in Unity 6, and while it looks promising, there's still work ahead before it's ready for players. We're taking our time to avoid disappointment, but expect to see gameplay in the not so distant future", says Robin Björkell, Communications Director at 10 Chambers.

Between keynotes, Google, as the event's premium partner, showcased the company's cloud solution for live service gaming: "With the introduction of generative AI, Google Cloud is helping game developers evolve live service games into living games, where the virtual worlds themselves adapt and grow in response to player choices."

Finally, the nominees for the 16th annual Unity Awards have been announced. The community will have until 4 October 2024 to cast their votes for their favourite games, influencers and more. The winners will be announced during a first-ever virtual showcase, which will air on Unity's Twitch channel on 23 October 2024 at 7pm CET. This part of the keynote was hosted by Larry Hryb, aka Major Nelson, who joined the Unity community team in June 2024. He was previously a public face of the Xbox brand.

Unite 2024 is expected to bring together more than 2,000 developers for technical sessions, networking and learning opportunities, and listening sessions with the Unity leadership team. All technical sessions will be recorded and made available to the Unity developer community in the coming weeks.

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