Hello Unity developers! My name is Jesper, and I’m an engineering manager at Unity, responsible for some of our release and publishing processes.
I’m writing to announce that we are deprecating BitTorrent as a way to download new versions of Unity.
Unity has been offering users the option to use BitTorrent as a peer-to-peer method of downloading Unity installers for a long time. In the recent few years, the usage of this option has decreased significantly, to the point where very few developers are using this download method today.
On May 1, 2024, Unity’s BitTorrent service will be shut down after many years of faithful service.
What does this mean for me?
If you are not using BitTorrent to download new versions of Unity today, nothing will change.
If you are, you will need to start using one of our other download options instead in the future:
- The Unity Hub is, and will remain to be, the main way for most users to obtain new versions of Unity.
- As an alternative, you can always find all our released versions in the Unity Download Archive.
- Unity also offers different options to perform automated installs through the command line, which can be suitable in contexts of automated testing or continuous integration (CI).
The Unity Download Archive will stop linking to the BitTorrent downloads on May 1, 2024, and a week after, we will remove the actual .torrent files from our download servers, and stop the remaining BitTorrent services altogether.
Why is Unity making this change?
As for all public-facing Internet systems, Unity’s BitTorrent service comes at a cost and a certain complexity, simply through its ongoing maintenance, relevant security updates, and its integration with the rest of Unity’s release pipeline. The BitTorrent service in particular is a bit eccentric in that it doesn’t really resemble any other service Unity offers, which means that the tools we need to monitor it and keep it up to date are tailored specifically for this purpose.
Additionally, it takes a long time to transform the data in a release to the format required to offer it for download through the BitTorrent service. This has become noticeable during our ongoing efforts to improve the performance of a Unity release, i.e., how long it takes us to finish building all the releasable artifacts comprising the release and putting them in your hands.
In light of this and the fact that the use of the BitTorrent service has dropped so significantly, we want to take this opportunity to reduce the complexity and increase the performance of our release process.
Please let us know if you have any questions about the above.