CEO David Helgason on why Unity has expanded into mobile game-dev services (interview)

David Helgason has grown up with indie-game developers by providing tools like the Unity 5 engine for building cross-platform games. As mobile exploded, so did Unity, which can be used to publish games across Android, iOS, PC, Facebook, the web, and next-generation consoles.

But Helgason, the chief executive of Unity Technologies, doesn’t like to see game developers die. So the San Francisco-based company has expanded into providing services for game discovery, predictive analytics, and monetization. And it has a growing asset store, where game developers can sell their own tools and art components for others to use in their games. The idea is to equip developers for survival in a world where there are a million competitors. At the same time, Unity is beefing up the quality of its 3D animation tools so that it can compete with high-end rivals Unreal and Crytek. That’s going to make mobile games look much better — World of Warcraft publisher Blizzard used Unity to bring its popular and successful card battler Hearthstone to iPad — and hopefully broaden the selection of games in the $16 billion mobile game business.