Unity, the cross-platform game engine maker, said at its annual Unite conference that it wants to enable creators to develop, deploy, and grow games on every major platform from inside one trusted environment.
“We want to be the bridge between developers’ creativity and the players who turn their games into global hits,” said Matt Bromberg, President and CEO of Unity, in a statement. “We’re putting developers in control of their own success — giving them real choice and the power to do it all seamlessly inside Unity.”
I interviewed Adam Smith, senior vice president of product for engine at Unity, about the announcements.
Compared to a year ago, Unity is in better shape. It has stabilized defetions from the platform from people who last year were still angry that Unity tried to charge a fee, dubbed the Runtime Fee, based on how much games were played. Smith said Unity is rebuilding trust with developers now.
“What we’re proud of this year again, over these last many months, is we can only judge if we’ve rebuilt that developer trust, if the games are coming, if the successes are happening. I think there’s far more major industry successes from one single engine happening within the Unity community than any other engine,” Smith said. “This year, we’re not looking backwards at all. So the big change now is we’re looking forward. So 2025 was about reestablishing trust, bringing predictability to our release schedule, and developing or shifting our engine [to be] on time and on quality. We’ve achieved that.”
The goal now is to help studios at a difficult time with tough market conditions. It is helping them with discoverability, growing their audiences and creating better economics for studios.
AI is also a big topic, and Unity will talk about that a lot.
“This year, we want to put a heavy emphasis on faster iteration times and discoverability when you get into the market. And that’s why we’re excited about our IAP technology, enabling studios with free-to-play monetization capabilities where they didn’t necessarily have that access before,” Smith said.
The announcements
Unity’s goals are to develop faster with:
● Enhanced security with Unity Core Standards — a new set of technology and guidelines
that will provide developers with verified and signed packages to ensure trust and reliability for the third-party tools that help bring the Unity platform to life, so developers can build with confidence.
● Better performance, stability, and upgradability with the new Unity 6 Production
Verification process, which has set a new standard of quality across all of its teams. This
included partnering with Konami to develop Survival Kids, which was pivotal in pressure-testing many innovations, including day-one support for Nintendo Switch 2 and GameShare.
● Unity’s Industry team has introduced Unity Studio, a new authoring tool for web browsers that solves many of the common issues that industrial users have, from data transformation to iteration and collaboration. It points the way for collaborative authoring in the future; more details to follow next year.
● Coming in 2026, the Unity AI Gateway is for developers who choose to bring AI into their
workflow. It will be the officially supported way to connect AI agents securely with Unity.
The company also wants to deploy everywhere with:
● Platform Toolkit – simplifies multi-platform deployment with a single workflow that
integrates SDKs, automates certification checks, and reduces time-to-launch across
devices.
● Developer Data Framework – provides deeper, more actionable insights to help developers improve their games, while enhancing their control over how their data is collected and shared.
And Unity wants to grow with greater flexibility:
● With app stores opening up globally and mobile In-App Purchase (IAP) spend growing,
Unity’s introducing new enhancements to its native IAP (now in limited early access). Developers will get a single place to manage everything from their digital catalogs to
payment providers and web shops across mobile, web, and PC.
● Unity Vector AI — Unity’s AI platform now integrates the free, platform-agnostic Ad Quality tool, helping developers find their next deeply engaged players and deliver better ad experiences that keep them engaged.
The thinking behind develop, deploy and grow
“There’s a new framework that we’re talking about, which is develop, deploy and grow,” Smith said. “Over the last many months, we’ve seen this range of developers that people wouldn’t expect in studios that people never heard of, because they’re new and they’re developing fast. They’re developing different and they’re not necessarily going through the traditional life cycle of concept, prototype, green light, pre-production, production published, live operations.”
These are like Landfall Games’ Peak, Aggro Crab, or Repo or Megabonk.
“These are not games that took years and years and years to build. These are games that took months to build, or even weeks,” Smith said. “In the case of a game like Peak, it went on to become a No. 1 game on Steam. And so we’re seeing this new generation of developers that are collapsing the traditional game development life cycle into one develop phase, rather than the staged approach. We’re going to be celebrating that.”
He said developers are telling Unity that the thing they want from it the most is to enable them to go faster so they can bring their games to market.
“The games industry is complicated right now. They need to take more shots, develop more games. But they’re also navigating the fact that there are more platforms than ever before,” he said. “The Switch 2 is out. Android XR is coming. There are new web capabilities such as web GPU.”
Those devs want to know how Unity can help them ship on all these platforms in the most frictionless way. So Unity will be talking about its Platform Toolkit, which is a wrapper for many of the requirements needed to ship on platforms.
Once a dev has quickly built a game and frictionlessly deployed it to all platforms, then it comes time to “grow” the player base, Smith said.
Now there are regulations in place that will bring down the walls of walled gardens, enabling mobile games to reach more people without big fees.
“With one implementation, you have access to the vast majority of the third-party payments frameworks globally, so that developers will be able to take advantage of the newly legislated, more favorable royalty rates and more choice in how they provide their core game loop, including their monetization loop, to players,” Smith said. “It’s better for players. It’s better for developers, and it enables studios that didn’t have the capability to build a free-to-play game previously, with the back-end technology to do so. So develop, deploy, grow. That will be the theme for the keynote.”
AI gateway
The Unity AI gateway is being leveraged by devs to use third-party AI tools of their own choosing.
“It’s about developer choice,” Smith said. “One of the things that unpins the AI gateway is a new program, UCS, or Unity Core Standards. It’s a set of standards that allow for third-party technologies to be integrated into the native editor workflow with the same level of standardization and quality that we expect for our own first-party implementations to the engine. We want to do this not just with AI, but with in-app purchasing and other technologies that will be unveiled throughout the year.”
He added, “We will have smart agents within the Unity Editor that are able to talk to the third-party AI tooling of the world. And so, based on the task that you have in that moment, the AI gateway will understand which third-party services are best for the task at hand and assign that task to that third party service.”
That smart agent capability within the Editor is coming in 2026.
Also announced today at Unite, Unity’s next long-term support (LTS) release, Unity 6.3 –
extending the Unity 6 foundation with major 2D and 3D rendering upgrades, optimized 2D physics, and faster multiplayer prototyping through new ready-to-use templates – will be available in December 2025.
Unite 2025 brings together over 1,500 developers for technical sessions, networking, and
hands-on learning. The Keynote will be livestreamed [here], with recorded sessions available to Unity’s global community in the coming weeks.