I have mentioned in other posts recently that I make flash games. These games can be played by around 89% of the people on the net. I have never needed to worry about how many people do and dont have the plugin. However, as I plan to diverse into unity. I seem to now have this worry.
Which brings me to my questions:
Does google analytics monitor Unity plug in?
… just checked and it doesnt, which would be useful, maybe that could be investigated, I could then use my game portal to monitor the percentage of everyday game players have the plugin installed. I sense it’s very little but stats are important?
Does anyone have any stats?
What is the method that people encounter when they come across Unity content? and dont have the plugin?
How is it embedded and does it use a javascript embed method to avoid similar IE issues that flash has?
Is there plans to reduce the size of the plugin or any work taking place on that front?
It would also be useful to see how many people come to a web page with unity content and how many of those download and install the plug in, does anyone have stats at Unity on these things? can you make them available?
I think this information will help me to understand a lot about the target audience and how my content users will act.
The plugin is very small and its actually only required to be installed once. Also the fact that all the engine aspects are in the plugin means that the app that you put online for playing is only the game, no runtime, so the download time of the different projects is significantly smaller at the price of a one time tiny installation.
mmm, these are interesting, but don’t show how many out of the net overall. I need like someone with a generic games site to give us stats on how many users have untiy installed.
also, I might be wrong, but these stats are not solid and seem to me to be biased. I say this as I would assume they are gathered from this site itself and people who are interested in Unity:
Thus it could be argued that the stats don’t accurately represent the truth. People coming to this site have an interest in graphics, game development and are often tech savy Mac users with an interest in Unity. This group of individuals would have better than average computers and better graphics. I might be wrong, these might have been gathered from a local library, a school, and a 100 random houses from across the globe. However, I doubt it.
Does anyone have any other stats, I know I sound like I am stat mad but they really do help us all.
I have to agree with you, 8 meg for the universal binary isn’t bad but it could do with been 5 meg like flash player. The others seem on a very competitive size.
The default HTML file created by Unity shows a simple JavaScript based player detection routine, if the player is installed the content is shown, if not then the user is given a button to download/install the player. When that install is complete the page auto-refreshes showing the content. The user never leaves the page, the user never has to shut down their browser.
Developers are of course free to customize this experience as they see fit.
We are always in a battle between the forces of new features and keeping the web player’s size in check. Will it ever be reduced in size? Will it ever grow in size? Both are difficult to answer definitively but the goal is always to keep the web player tidy, compact and as small as possible.
We don’t have that data as it’s up to the site owner to implement that sort of routine for their content. We are getting hardware information (thus we know how many installs actually happen) and we can compare that against the total number of installer downloads to get a global sense of bail-out/failure rates, but we haven’t crunched those numbers yet.
No, there are no other global stats.
There might be some who have gathered those data personally but I doubt it, as the users either
a) want to play the game and do the 3 clicks and 2 mins of install
b) don’t do so.
With Unity Webplayer MMOs like Fusion Fall and the one in work by the Age of Conan devs (as rumored), the acceptance for the Unity Webplayer raises drastically but it was not even a problem before, as it works as a save sandbox.
Also with the possibility of Windows authoring, the amount of available games will likely explode in comparision to yet.
As far as the stats are biased is over my head.
That are the global usage statistics of the webplayer, not the least bit a mac only thingy.
You are just two steps smarter if you use the apple site for PR as well as the competition field is much smaller and apples own application list gives you an exposure that would cost you several tens of tousands of USD on the windows side at very least.
Possible that you are a bit of “anti mac” and have doubts due to that?
A personal opinion:
If people were as picky when flash started out about the installed userbase, flash wouldn’t be around anymore.
Just jump in, create a game that people want to play and put it online.
People who want to play WILL install the plugin.
Hell people even install plugins for single games! (Quake Live, Instant Actions)
For clarity, you don’t install Instant Action for a single game, you install a plugin to download any number of games, each of those being an entire executable build! So that plugin isn’t associated with any partuclar title, it is installed once to serve as a download/launch manager for executables and the IA framework can even work with Unity content.
Either way though, jump in and get started with Unity to help continue the surge in momentum. A year or so ago we would have offered a total install base of 1-2 million web players, today we can easily claim 6-8 million and that number is exploding given that we’ve increased the player install base by 25% or so in the last three months alone.
I agree, but the type of casual games I wish to make from Unity are going to be totally free, with in game ads. The people that play them will be in it for a quick lunchtime fix or weekend play and not all of them are happy to install EXTRA plugins.
I suppose I will have to really plug the games to get them to play, I noticed a few people using youtube videos of their games before you play them. That to me seems the best way to entice a flash plugin audience into installing this plugin.
Not all of them, thats right
But the majority really does not care that much about anymore as many did a few years ago.
Flash Games, Shockwave Games and all the social networking pages with their “in network addons” as well as the many nice addons to IE and Firefox in general have helped making the “fear barrier” erode considerably, when comparing to the “I don’t allow anything unsafe to run on my system”
Additionally the safe sandboxes of FF3 IE7+ make the people able to trust into the safeness as anything within the browser can only access the browsers resources. The rest of the system does not exist at all to the plugins.
Using another multimedia way to show them what they get by installing the plugin is also a great way to get them in.
What you or perhaps better Unity Technologies might add is a link to a fact page about the plugin and what it does and does not (unity tech would be better as it then would be a more trusted page) so the tech phobias can be satisfyed as well
