It’s been a while since I visited the Unity forums and so I thought I would take another look. It would be nice to see some examples of commercial products that have been produced using Unity. I am aware of the projects that are in the pipeline and they look impressive - but has anybody actually managed to release a fully completed product yet?
Other than Gooball I don’t think anyone has released a commercial game with Unity yet.
Gravek is partnering with freeverse to make Big Band Mind Games with Unity.
Link: FreeVerse Games: Keep Your Kids Safe While They Surf the Net!
Scroll down a bit to find it.
Not a whole lot out there yet, but if you consider how long it takes an individual to make a commercial game it’s not too surprising. Many of the projects I’ve seen are quite ambitious and the collaboration forum doesn’t get as much use as it should ;).
Hmm, have to say I’m a bit surprised that there hasn’t been anything released. I certainly understand that it takes a long time to produce a game - but I can’t help thinking that by now we should have seen a few titles like puzzle games etc released if Unity really does make the developer more productive.
People judge game engines by the games that have been produced using them and if we don’t see something soon I think Unity will fall into that category of software that promises a lot but ultimately becomes nothing more than something that enables people to produce glorified 3d demos.
There are some major features still missing from Unity which I hoped would have been addressed by now (like networking, decent terrain engine, portal engine) etc. Sure you can “roll your own” with Unity but I thought the whole point with Unity was to make it easier for the developer. If I have to roll my own I can do that using any software.
Dissapointing. And now that Microsofts XNA is out, with the promise of being able to run your software on the XBOX 360 by the end of the year, along with Torque X coming out too - I have to say that personally that sounds far more appealling - particularly as I can then use c# 2.0 as well.
There are several commercial products created with Unity already.
Shift-ctrl made a huge visualization for Volkswagen. It is exhibited in Volkswagen Autostadt:
http://www.volkswagen.co.uk/company/autostadt
Shift-ctrl also made a big visualization for Prada which is running in several of their shops:
Zero fractal has shipped several kiosks with beautiful architechtural visualizations to customers:
http://unity3d.com/profiles/ZeroFractal.html
This is just some of the projects that are complete shipping. There are many more who are not publicly available.
There are also a couple of games which have already found a publisher and are close to shipping.
Gooball
I think there’s been a few puzzle game releases, but nothing commercial. I think that most people see Unity and want to try something really big…
Networking is a big thing to implement it, and understandably, it isn’t going to plug and play. But thanks to the examples in the wiki it isn’t nearly as hard to get going with Networking now as it was a year ago - this is without a plugin. Thanks to the mesh interface implemented, heightmaps are implementable, I’ve seen people use them and I believe there’s a script out that makes them work - I’ve definitely seen heightmaps referenced in the scripting reference. And a portal system is very easy to implement, by enabling Game Objects and disabling them by checking their distance from the player.
The User version, the would be competition to Unity only runs on other 360s with the XNA kit… And what in C# 2.0 do you want to see in Unity?
GooBall doesn’t count anymore for a number of reasons 
I understand your incredulity about how few “commercial” games have been built with Unity (I’m closing in on a year since I first discovered Unity and I haven’t made a dime off it yet). I don’t think this has anything to do with the quality of Unity but rather the focus of it’s users so far. A lot of people are working on their own and shooting at bigger projects than puzzle/mini games (it takes a loooong time to create a game). I also think a lot of people discovered Unity and thought “damn, you mean I can create high quality video games too?” Unity is one of only a handful tools that is bringing video game production down to the user availability of PhotoShop or similar. It’s a new market and tools like this will inevitably be picked up by bigger studios who will push games out the door much faster than the individual. Torque is certainly making ground with XNA, but I don’t think it’s the same sort of tool in regards to general usability.
Anyway some more examples…
Pawns is a puzzler which should be “commercial” soon.
Tiki Magic Mini Golf looks to be a great title when released.
Neko Factory is a great example of an implementation of the Unity web player for commercial purposes.
Well it looks like there are a few projects in the pipeline but I agree you can’t count Gooball - that must be well over 2 years old and correct me if I’m wrong but wasn’t that developed with an early heavily tailored version of Unity prior to Unity being released?
Ok so there are some visualization products out there but considering the quote on the front page of this web site is “A one stop solution for professional game development” I guess I was just hoping to have seen some more professional games by now.
The thing is: Very, very few “professional” games take less than a year to develop. Unity has been out for approx 17 months. We start GC:Palestine a few months after GooBall, and have been working on it since. It just takes time to do games, no matter which tool you use.
For comparison I suggest googling the release dates of various torque games. Compared to the thousands of users they have, I dare say that the release record of that engine is somewhat less than impressive It’ll be interesting to see how much better TorqueXNA is.
About GooBall: it was not made with a tailored version. It was made with a version that was a LOT more broken and rough than 1.0… I don’t see why it doesn’t count - sure it came out 20 months ago, but it IS a professional game. It IS created with Unity - just a very underpowered version compared to what is available today.
What about seriousgames’s Global Conflicts? It’s of that magnitude, if not traditionally commercial.
Edit: beaten to it.
There are certainly nothing about the claims that are untrue. The demo IS free for a month, no limitations…why not give it a try? And what makes more sense: spending a week (or less–a portal system is trivial to implement) building a feature on top of Unity, or spending years to roll your own system that includes that feature? (And let’s be realistic: your own system isn’t going to be nearly as good, either, unless you’re extraordinarily talented.)
–Eric
I dont doubt that Unity is capable of producing professional games, but I think I was just hoping that a tool like Unity could have by now empowered more indie developers to produce a finished game - not necessarily a professional quality game but a finished one nonetheless.
Many indie developers start game projects but few rarely finish them - but for those that are nearing completion I wish them well.
As for me - I think I’ve decided to dip my toe into the XNA arena. After all Visual C# express and XNA are free and the prospect of seeing code I write running on an XBOX is just too tempting 
I’ve finished three games. Certainly not remotely professional quality…they all took one day (or less). But they are complete games with specific goals, scoring, title screens, etc., even if they are trivial (and only meant to be seen by a few people).
But no matter how powerful Unity is, it doesn’t have a “Force User to Finish Game” feature, sorry. A “real” game takes a long time, and if you have to do it part-time by yourself, a very long time. As I’m sure you’ll discover if you do try to make a game, especially since you’ll have to do a lot of the “heavy lifting” yourself.
–Eric
Codemasters has allowed me to tell that they already completed a game with Unity. It’s not released yet, and no details are public though.
And then there’s the space-shooter project by Neil Carter, which looks great already. It’s not released yet, from what I’ve seen it looks very polished already.
d.
adshead: as far as I can see, the XNA Express editor does not allow you to create commercial games. So in that area Unity vs. XNA will always win, as there can be zero commercial games made with XNA Express by definition.
Not sure about TorqueX thing (they don’t have too much details on the site). Maybe it allows you to use Torque with XNA, but with the same limitations as the XNA Express (i.e. no commercial games)?
Honestly i don’t think it’s surprising in any way that there aren’t dozens of games already around due to different reasons like:
a) Unity is Mac only.
b) Unity is in my opinion useable first with the 1.5 release which was released this summer.
c) Developers have to invest time for learning a new tool and before that they must have the need to learn a new tool.
d) Contract work is very conservative due to a) building on existing frameworks and b) reliable solutions needed.
e) Game development takes time.
Hi there.
We are working on a commercial release with Unity right now. Due out sometime in late December. Using Unity, we were able to quickly develop a demo that blew off the socks of a well known software publisher.
We have been using Unity as our development platform and it is amazing.
The short of it is that Unity allowed us to get a publishing deal, and will enable us to deliver a great professional title in a fraction of the time and with a fraction of the resources required under other paradigms.
Cheers,
Charles
Well I stand corrected as it sounds like there are some exciting projects on the horizon after all. I look forward to seeing them.
Can I just correct you though Aras Pranckevicius. When Microsoft XNA is finally released this christmas holiday anything you develop using it will run on both the PC and XBOX platform - and anything developed for the PC platform you are free to release as a commercial product with no strings attached. As for XBOX, although your software will run on it understandably you would still need to go through the normal approval procedures with Microsoft to get something released on XBOX live (and that costs money).
However with XBOX live being so popular I think is a masterstroke for Microsoft to finally give indie developers the opportunity to develop for a console and I have no doubt that before long you will start to see indie developed games on XBOX live - and that can’t be bad considering the development software is free.
Yeah, I wasn’t very clear that I was talking only about Xbox part of XNA.
Whether MS will finally allow to publish games on Xbox Live with a zero-cost software, that we will see. I see both positive and negative things about either decision (and I’m sure everyone else does too).
However, the PC side of XNA is not much as cleaned up Managed DX plus Visual Studio, I think. Sure, DirectX is great, Visual Studio is great too, the XNA content pipeline is cool, but that is still far from being “a complete package” like Unity is. I’m biased of course