Reason is simple: Most developers don’t like or can’t take care of marketing and sales thing, so having publisher that will partially fund their game and take care of that stuff would be good for those who need such thing.
This would also benefit Unity, because they’d take small cut from all sales if developer would decide to go with them as their publisher, which means additional source of income.
Of course, toolset itself would remain royalty-free and any royalties would come into effect only if developer decide to get his/her game published through Unity.
Unity did have their own publishing arm for a while, which was more specific to games running on TV’s and other less common gaming devices.
Since their focus with John now as the CEO, is moving towards being a services company, there is a good chance this may happen. But then again, this might also not happen, as Unity might be stepping on too many toes due to it’s wide range of partnerships.
The initiative Meltdown is talking about was called Union, they would port and publish titles to consoles and other platforms we didn’t support. We then included console deployment in the editor so there was no need to port those, just the odd platforms we didn’t support.
This then turned into a publishing initiative called Unity Games, this doesn’t exist anymore in EMEA and Americas but it does still in Asia.
Actually it would be nice that the publishing/marketing nightmare would be taken cared “in house” so to speak. You know Unity won’t make you a terrible deal.
I can see the point of BoredMormon, there could be at some point, some conflict of interest if Unity users are being published by someone else. That would be a problem right? Unity would be competing with their own clients.
Nevertheless Unity have all the qualities you’d want on a publisher. Serious, reliable, practical yet not greedy, etc.