Unity is a very popular engine when it comes to Iphone market, but is there any future plan to make Unity more popular on the web (in term of market penetration).
Right now Flash is the dominant market of web gaming, it’s a lot easier to look for a sponsorship if you make game with flash (through FGL (Flash Game License)).
Not many site accept Unity Game (only a few, like shockwave, wooglie which is way less popular when you compare to site like Kongregate, Armor Games, Mochi Games, Newsground etc)
And also all those site who accept unity, they only use ad-revenue and not supporting sponsorship type of a deal (similar to FGL).
I hope in the future, a site similar to FGL will be available for Unity Games so we’re not only relying on ad-revenue.
I’ve actually considered developing a unity-specific gaming sort of site. It wouldn’t be hard to code, nor would it take up massive bandwidth. The question would be how to monetize it, as well as effectively marketing it. Putting it under consideration, how would you suggest the site makes money outside of ad revenue (maybe getting a cut of paid games, etc), and what features would you expect in such a site?
I think it will take a while before we can see Unity as popular as flash (i do hope it happen sooner though),
i guess that’s why most sponsor still relying on Flash Game for sponsorship.
I do like how FGL works also, we just need to make a game, put it for a bid and wait until a sponsor bid on our game, and we will get a lump sum of cash once the bidding is over.
The thing is, even if right now we have something similar to FGL that accept Unity Games (for bidding), probably not a lot of sponsor who actually going to bid on it, they will stick to the popular one, which is Flash at the moment.
I heard that Unity is working with Google so that Google Chrome can play Unity Game without installing any plugin, i think that’s a great first step, maybe later it will expand to Firefox, IE, Safari etc… who knows
What we need is some sort of quality website something like a wooglie but will only accept high quality games (I know thats subjective but for for example jetlane, 4x4 racing). te problem is are we getting to get enough quality games quickly enough to do this, by that I mean that we need to have at least one new game every week (say friday or so).
The problem of course is there is no real incentive to create content (because there is no sponsorship), which brings up a sort of catch-22, there is no sponsorship because of the lack of content. Imagine if we had something like 1k-5k for each game that is “sponsored”, that would spur alot more development into web-games. Of course who is going to front that money if there is without seeing an immediate return.
perhaps you are just on a 2GB RAM system and forgot that Firefox past 2.0 has evolved from trash to total inacceptable trash (I’ve been a big supporter and fan of firefox since 0.7 before it even had javascript support … but what they did to 2.5 but expecially the 3.x versions is inacceptable. even opera works better and with a fraction of the ram usage … nowadays I use chrome exclusively)
Market penetration? Someday people will look back on the days when people relied on Flash 2d and roll their eyes. 3d is the future, and Unity is at the front. Have faith and plan for that future, or step aside and watch the rest of us ride the wave of destiny.
You mean the year 2007?
Cause thats when java got a large enough penetration to do 3d already with its work … the panda 3d engine as an example of stuff that already rocked around back then
I’d love to see the webPlayer become more stable first. StandAlone versions just run so much better than the webBuilds - and from our side it’s pretty much impossible to figure out why exactly that happens.
I think it takes a couple of really successful 3d games that you can play in the browser through Unity that become absolute smash hits before Unity gains more acceptance in that regard. Another thing that keeps people from playing on the PC is just lack of knowledge. Most JoeSchmo’s have no idea that they can just buy an HDMI cable and hook their PC up to their HDTV - or even use a Xbox or PS3 controller to play games.
Actually, I think UT is doing quite a bit to make the Web player more popular. The new socketPolicy stuff is one thing that is meant to make installing the Web player acceptable in environments that have security concerns. Also, I think they once again optimized the installation process to make it true one-click (at least under Windows).
Obviously, you can’t compare the Unity Web Player with Flash (which even comes pre-installed with some systems). But in June 2010, there were 30 million Web player installation, and May 2010 alone added 2 million. So I guess UT is heading the right direction. Not sure about other 3D Web technologies but ShiVa 3D which currently is trying to position itself against Unity only had 3 million installations in March 2010. So on that end, Unity has 10 times as much penetration as ShiVa 3D has.
Indeed
Thought it will have to be seen how it plays out as the Shiva devs realized that caching is a fundamental functionality for web technology, not a 5 to 6 figure / year addon thing making it impossible to reasonably make gamers larger than a 20-40mb (these figures from what I got depend a bit on the explicit project and type of income generation you have).
I was more than a bit shocked by such price figures of a technology thats trying to pioneer 3d web gaming or at least redefining it while lacking webcam support, voice chat support and caching.
So far Unity went away cause Shivas editor just lacks some major things but Shiva has a new major in close range too which will change its face reasonably enough to make the differenceas Unity 2.5 did to Unity and they will have the native code SDK many months early than unity, given unity gets such a thing at all.
And even though there may not be enough Unity-based game aggregators to help out Indy Devs, there are some high powered properties using Unity. For example, Lego Club has several Unity-based games now all through the browser.
As far as hosting your own games on your site. I find that having to learn web coding and js a bit a a bind. Would be nice if the default unity build would make a game screen that didn’t lose focus so easily. I haven’t got a clue how to get around that when doing a TPS or FPS type camera with mouse control.
(i do hope it happen sooner though),
