The excitement/ disappointment over the 3.1 release and the asset store were discussed lengthy in another thread, i felt like the union announcement wasn´t talked about a lot though.
Union makes me excited in some ways, it definitely has a lot of potential.
I´ve got various questions on this, one thing i particularly wondered about is the names of the partners listed.
Ones like Nokia, hp palm etc, hm, companies doing devices/ distribution ways where unity is usually not available for.
So where does that lead us, are you UT fellas intending to add deploy options for all those platforms into the usual unity ide and then one can choose to release things on those platforms oneself or using union or is it more like doing a desktop/ web deploy from unity and then you somehow get that running on those platforms or something similar?
Also: do you have any halfway definitive date in mind for when this will launch?
Well, yeah, any more information is appreciated =)
If you’re at the conference I think the ‘secret’ session tomorrow morning is the session on Union. I think they mentioned that during the keynote but I can’t remember for sure.
sadly i´m not at the conference =(
We will not implement support for letting you deploy to those platforms yourself, the only way will be through Union. The reason is two-fold:
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Those are CLOSED platforms, so there is no way you can get your game onto them by yourself. Broadly speaking, they are only interested in getting games from big companies that can provide them with a lot of high quality games in bulk. Normally that would exclude small and medium-sized game companies like most Unity users, but by aggregating games through Union we can help you get your games onto those closed platforms through us.
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It would not be a viable business model for us to add support for deploying to those platforms. Adding support to deploy to a new platform is a big undertaking - we need to make sure that Unity is feature-complete and ideally bug-free for any games you guys can come up with and that is a major engineering and testing effort. We would also need to keep supporting that platform - it would not be enough to just port it once and then forget about it. All this is only viable for major non-closed platforms. Now, when instead you submit your game project folders to us and WE take care of making it work on those new platforms, then we can make a much more limited port of Unity to that platform. Instead of making the port have all features Unity users might need and are used to, it only requires to have the features working that the specific games in question are using. And we also don’t need to fix bugs in those ports that are not relevant to the games that are ported. Furthermore, once we have ported the games we want to the platform, we don’t have to spend resources on keeping up our support for that platform; we can just forget about it (at least until the next time we might need to port more games to it). So this makes the porting work required way smaller in scope, which makes it economically viable for us to do the port.
This is an early answer based on my understanding of Union but things should be more clear after the session at Unite tomorrow.
Rune
Union sounds absolutely great. No kidding.
Can’t wait to see what is it going to be turning into in a near future.
I am keenly interested in seeing how this one plays out, if it is what I take it to be, then this is a tremendous new opportunity for smaller studios and indies! I expect there will be some bumps in the road, but a fantastic idea! While I have been generally underwhelmed by the 3.1 update, this Union offering has really peaked my interest!
While I know details are still unfolding, my very first question would be directly related to Unity licensing… it’s fine to have a deployment (publisher?) path onto the consoles, does that presume that we’ll need the specific console licenses of Unity to “come in and play”? That makes some sense, with the exception that in the current state of affairs you need to be in each console’s dev program to get access to actually test your game on a device. As much as I love Unity, I’m not sure we’ve achieved the complete “write once, deploy everywhere” holy grail of … well… computer development in general for, oh, the last 30 years 
I can’t imagine Unity taking on full platform test, and update regression testing… of course, I don’t have David’s level of imagination either
Cheers,
Galen
@Galent:
Rune´s reply implied that there wouldn´t be specific licenses for some of these new platforms in cases where the usual unity ide doesn´t get the deploy option to those and rather UT team would do the lifting to bring those over.
@Rune:
thanks for the indepth reply, i find this approach very interesting =)
We are getting contacted by some platform holders every now and then asking whether we´d bring some of our games over to their existing/ approaching platforms, but i opted to not do that in some cases due to those platforms having a much smaller aoption right now/in the forseeable future and then when in some cases the tools we used offfered no porting path to those platforms it seemed like a too risky investment for us to port the content over by essentially rewriting it in whatever language/ dev tools made for that platform specifically (hence then that port also wouldn´t fly on other platforms).
So yeah, hence why your idea for how to get it going sounds quite appealing to me =)
So the way i picture it as developer one should ideally create the games with as few platform specific functionality as possible and have it be as platform independent as possible on other ends (like it should be as resolution independent as possible) and probably optimize for mobile devices’ performance constraints (maybe internally automatically choosing between opengl es1/2 and low res/high res assets) and that then could make it reasonably feasable for you to bring them over to such other platforms?
Am I the only one who feels that Union has a lot similarity to the approach the GameSalad creators are going with their technology and that this is UTs first move into a royality based model instead of distinct per platform license fees?
I’m definitely interested to see how its working out and what consequences it might have onto the platform strategies for other AA+ only platforms, especially consoles
I did notice the similarity, which would be terrible if UT went that way. But after reading runevision’s reply above, I’ve read between the lines and come to a more positive thought on possible direction. I may of course be wrong, but I see this potential situation:
Union allows deployment to new platforms without the need for full compatibility, making it a lower risk to try new options. As demand grows for a particular platform, the number of games passing through means more and more corners of the Unity engine are covered. Eventually a stable public release is easy. Essentially Union can self-finance extended, battle-tested development for new deployment options.
The problem with this approach is that it though also means that someone decides if your game shall ever happen because they don’t have unlimited resources to accept any request which can be good but can also have terrible consequences for teams
Union sounds great. We are making a big game for PC and would this like porting to Xbox360 or PS3 with support of union. But how safe is our project/game (including source-code) in the hands of the union ? developer version of crysis 2 is leaked and same thing would be very bad for us.
Can you list your partners ?
It isn’t in the interests of Unity or the developer community to leak source assets submitted to Union. Presumably, beyond that point, the arrangement is a secure as any other NDA-bound transaction. However, if you have any specific questions about how Union operates and what we do as regards IP security then please contact union@unity3d.com.
I have sent an email to union@unity3d.com but no response since 1,5 weeks. 
sounds not good for a serious partnership. Fast email traffic and close contact is very important for us.