Just out of curiousity, does anybody know if there are any plans for Unity to support publishing to other phone OS formats (like Windows Mobile, Android, Blackberry, etc?) It seems like every phone company is jumping in the appstore business these days. Just thought would be nice if Unity can support them all… if not, a few? I know it’s probably just wishful thinking…
While I don’t believe Unity will ever confirm support for a platform is upcoming (citation needed), let me assure you that Unity have plans for global domination, thus, you can rest assured they’re doing everything in their power to get their little paws in everything they can.
Hahah… Thanks JT. Let’s just hope you are right sooner than later…
Given the recent developer figures on their Android mega flops I’m unsure if its even worth calling it target platform in a commercial sense. With examples like Trim which has sold something about 500 licenses in the first 3 months on android, which makes about $1050 revenue, compared to 250k on the appstore in 2months. And just to keep in mind: trism was a top 5 ranked in both stores!
I really don’t even consider the android store an uninteresting platform for commercial dev, its a dead platform right now for this purpose. the estimations of of the selling potential / sell worth with around 5M are totally off, as top 10 sellers make $1000 - $2000 a month with their sales, below top 25 it goes in the few dozen bucks at best.
Why pay thousands of dollars for a tech (an android tech would cost considerably more than an iphone one as the potential userbase is much smaller so less people have to pay the same “total fee” for a platform where I even with a top 5 ranked app need months to just get the license and device costs back?
I’d love to run my Unity stuff on other devices, but if there’s anything else actually worth supporting right now, I’m not aware of it. Anyone have a list of mobile hardware that can run Unity with a supporting infrastructure that’s indie developer-friendly? Remember that it needs a CPU/GPU combo that’s at least as powerful as an original iPhone, as that’s the minimum level that makes any sense to run Unity at all. (Phones that can barely play Pong are not going to be running Unity content.)
–Eric
The unfortunate problem is that the iPhone is not a particularly impressive device, it just happens to have the best adoption and (I want to cut myself when I say this) a decent appstore.
The fact that the abortion that is the Appstore is the ‘best’ is sickening, but there it is.
We still intend to port some of our Unity apps to android (more to be ‘first in and best dressed’) but as you can imagine, without actually having Unity its substantially more tedious… Basically rebuilding the app from scratch without a convenient engine to hold your hand 
Please have a look around here on the forums as we’ve discussed this repeatedly so you should be able to find some good chatter out there. To answer it here, yes, we at Unity Tech are very keen on expanding to new platforms and that includes additional consoles and mobile devices. Whether that next platform is the XBox, PSP, Android, Nokia or whatever is not something we’re ready to commit to, but we can commit to the fact that we’re actively making plans for more and more new platforms going forward.
w00t!
Yeah, the info dreamora is citing is here, for those who don’t read toucharcade religiously:
Reading this makes it clear that android, at least, is completely pointless to support right now. An average of $62 a day in revenue, between two high rated apps that are each $5 a piece? That means they’re moving about 16 copies a day between the two of them, if the developer’s share is 70% as it is with the app store. So, being in the top 10 paid apps on android marketplace is maybe 10 sales a day right now? The most successful app on the platform is generating minimum wage at its peak.
I eagerly await the next true competitor to the app store, but right now there isn’t anything that’s even worth a passing glance. (when it comes to smart phones)
Thanks guys, pirate for the stats 
You’re right, it’s probably pointless to tackle Android at the moment given those figures. Perhaps the PSP Go might be a safer bet? Heard they lowered their development kit costs down to $1000, which is much more affordable for indie developers. It’s also got a fanbase already and for certain the hardware will be there.
The PSP Dev kit prices never were a problem.
The problem is that Sony does not invite any monkey with a a text editor to develop for the platform as Apple does, nor does Sony let any brainfarting want to be programmer just push his stuff onto the platform as Apple does, they are not seeking for quantity but quality
If you show that you can develop and have the funding for a real mobile game for a professional platform, you don’t even get the chance to sign a developer license which is the very base requirement to even be able to invest into dev kit etc.
Here on the board there are about a dozen perhaps two dozen iphone devs who could even hope to get a chance to get onto the platform.
How many of those two dozen devs are able to pull off an own engine though is a whole different story, as the PSP memory limits are much tighter (32mb for the whole system with an embedded DRAM), running Unity on it is out of question unless you are able to source license the technology!
Additionally the CPU is about half as fast as the first gen iphone / itouch cpu and it does not offer a VFP unit to offload heavier calculations. The GPU suffers similar issues.
well, there is the Zii EGG as well, which might outperform all of the recently available and affordable devices hardware and price wize… besides the lack of a gsm module and…yeah…android…
check this: http://www.zii.com/Developer/Landing.aspx
the dev kit with device is USD 399…
the mobile market will definately open up for other devices and platforms/appstores, too. there’s enough chatter about it around me thinks. but it takes a while.
cheers,
m
That’s exactly why I don’t think the PSP store is going to take off in a very big way. The whole reason everyone gets so excited about the App Store is because of its perceived openness. I’ve played many great little games made by people that wouldn’t have a shot at that Sony dev license, and if stores like Sony’s were all that existed that would be everyone’s loss.
The walled garden approach is great for traditional consoles, where people will be buying games from real stores with real limits on how much they can cram on the shelves. With digital distribution it’s just silly. Quality in that context doesn’t have to be had at the expense of quantity, because 100 crap games in the shop doesn’t mean there’s no room for 1 good one. Keeping the best ones in the limelight is as simple as providing the customer with adequate tools for sorting and filtering results - something any company the size of Sony, or Apple (ahem), should be able to provide.
And while yes, letting “any monkey with a text editor” (great phrase, by the way 
) submit apps will yield a lot more cruft, it also just plain yields a lot more content, good and bad. As the saying goes, 90% of everything is crap, and that includes games by big established studios and indie startups alike, and there’s not really any escaping it. By putting out a sign that says “Your annual turnover must be this high to ride”, Sony can’t guarantee quality, just that the absolute number of quality titles (or titles period) available in their store is smaller.
I think Symbian OS is a good target platform to have Unity on - Nokia devices are very popular.
Good joke
The majority of the Nokia devices don’t even have enough ram to load Unity at all without your textures.
Those that can load it with the textures to a large degree have too slow cpus and GPUs
many phones from nokia would even be killed by the psp and the psp is insufficient for Unity already
Symbian smarts are popular and new ones have 128 RAM, but no any kind of good GPU. This dramatically reduces gaming potential of this platform.
The Nokia platform that makes sense for Unity3D is Maemo. Symbian is targeting generally lower specced and/or midrange devices. On the other hand, the upcoming Maemo 5 devices have hardware more than capable of running Unity3D (the Nokia N900 has a very similar CPU and GPU as the iPhone 3GS).
Of course, until there are millions of Maemo devices out there it is not really interesting, but considering the number of handsets Nokia sells, it is certainly something to be aware of.
Considering the rapid lose of market and the far lower sale numbers for the “upper end” devices nokia gets I really doubt that.
Nokia became famous for the crappies (quantity instead of quality) market, not because it created better devices actually.
Nokia should have realized years ago that masses are not able to compete against longer time stable, higher quality devices like the iPhone, whichs primary source of success is that it is the “top end” for year and has software updates for many years.
On Nokia you can be happy if you get any update, and that without considering feature expanding updates. Normally they just replace the device with a new one that has an upgraded OS …
Thats what made me leave nokia behind as it is more than just troublesome if your phone often is EOL supportwise the day it enters the store, especially if stuff like folder management etc has been sub par for year.
I’ve actually my doubts that nokia will remain in their current position if they do not soon realize that “trash canons” don’t survive tough times.
Well, Maemo is supposed to address those exact deficiencies (whether it lives up to the expectations is yet to be seen - technically it should be the easiest to update as it’s a very lightly modified linux), and while not as popular in the US as in the rest of the world, Nokia does push around a double digit in millions of high end handsets.