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发帖数: 1034 | 1 http://venturebeat.com/2014/05/09/ceo-david-helgason-on-why-uni
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.
I interviewed Helgason onstage at the Mobile Gaming USA event in San
Francisco this week. Here’s an edited transcript of our talk.
GamesBeat: You started in 2004. For our crowd here, why don’t you bring us
up to date on how large Unity has become?
Dean Takahashi and David Helgason at Mobile Gaming USA
Above: Dean Takahashi and David Helgason at Mobile Gaming USA.
Image Credit: Steve Peterson
David Helgason: Sure. Actually, code was written as early as 2001 and 2002.
But we formed the company in 2004, when I had been part of a group for about
a year. We launched Unity 1.0, our game engine and development platform—
originally it wasn’t for mobile games, because mobile was kind of shitty
back in 2005. I was going to say it didn’t exist, but that’s not true. In
fact, I’d worked for Nokia before this.
But we launched as a Mac/PC/web development platform, and then when iOS
opened up in 2008, we were bizarrely enough not just first there, but we
were by far the first. Nobody else was doing tools for iOS development until
, as far as I can tell, 2010 or something? Which is why when Android came
out with the native SDK, we went there as the first development platform as
well.
We’re not originally a mobile platform, but we wrote that very fast. It’s
benefited the ecosystem, obviously, as we well know. It’s grown at some
ridiculous, historically very rare rates. We’ve been able to follow that.
There are all kinds of ways to measure our business. We have a tool that can
develop for pretty much every platform that matters, and some that don’t
matter to everyone. In the last month, 630,000 developers used our platform
to develop for something like 9 million hours.
GamesBeat: It was something like 300,000 in 2012, right?
Helgason: Yeah. We’ve doubled in a year and a half, maybe? I can’t
remember exactly when things happen. We can’t really keep track of the
number of games, but we know it’s at least 10,000. We think it’s a lot
more. There are some really good games and a lot of bad games. People-wise,
we’re over 400 now, globally. It’s a pretty fantastic ecosystem.
GamesBeat: Did you start out thinking about indie developers? Was that a
happy accident along the way?
Helgason: The not-so-often-told story is we started out as indie developers.
We were going to make our own games, but there was no tool like Unity out
there, so we had to make it for ourselves. Then we realized we weren’t
great game developers. We weren’t the worst, but we were pretty mediocre.
But we’d created tools for ourselves that were unusual in quality and
polish. We decided that we’d be a tools company rather than a game company.
We recently released the Mobile Games Monetization report.
It was very natural for us to pick a price point that we felt was realistic
and go out with a product that would be available for pretty much everyone.
We started with a $200 price point and higher pro price point. A few years
later we realized that while $200 isn’t a lot in our part of the world —
we had kids mowing a lot of lawns to buy Unity – at some point we went free
as well, because the rest of the world was really important.
We never said we were an indie engine. We just wanted to support everyone,
including the indies. We always felt that we should push ourselves hard to
make tools that were for everyone, rather than the biggest companies. We’ve
achieved that. Most of the big companies use our software on some level.
Part of it is just that we believe the indies deserve really professional
tools.
Image (2) unity-2.jpg for post 135785GamesBeat: I’m sure everyone knows you
’ve grown fast in this sector, and that you’re very important now. But
maybe they don’t know exactly how you make money, what your business
actually is.
Helgason: It’s pretty old-fashioned. My father’s now over 80. He once said
a few years ago, “You know, your company is quite old-fashioned. You make
a product and you sell it to people who use it.” It’s a tool and the
people who use the tool buy it. We sell it on a purchasing basis. That’s
the bulk of the revenue.
GamesBeat: On a premium level?
Helgason: Yeah. EA and some of the big companies buy a lot of it, so they
get some sort of enterprise deals. We’ve announced a few of those, but
there are many others that aren’t big enough to talk about.
However, we’ve been thinking about how to broaden our support for the
developer ecosystem. One thing we came up with a few years ago is this asset
store, where developers can trade amongst each other. If somebody’s
created a script to achieve a particular purpose, they can sell it for
whatever dollars. Often they’re in the $0-$100 range. It ends up being a
pretty big marketplace. We take a 30 percent cut, which covers the cost of
running it. It’s profitable, but not wildly so.
One way to slice it is, on a run rate basis there are six million packages
— assets, scripts, particle systems, animation clips – being downloaded
from the store on a yearly basis. Many of them free, also many of them sold.
Some of these things will take a professional between one and a few days to
make. Some will take upwards of two weeks. If you just add up a day of
saved work per downloaded asset, going by a $50,000 fully loaded global
salary, which I think is quite useful as a metric, it’s very hard to get
under a billion dollars of saved work for the industry. That’s pretty wild.
That’s much more important than the revenue for us, which is just cost-
plus at this point.
GamesBeat: Are you at some point going to talk about how much downloading is
going on there, how many units of these things are coming from the asset
store?
Helgason: Like I say, six million packages per year. That’s the current
rate, like half a million packages per month. It’s growing every month, but
that’s the run rate currently.
GamesBeat: That seems like it’s going to have some decent upside. It may be
a more important business, at some point, than the rest of your business,
selling licenses.
Helgason: Maybe? It’s not, at this point. It’s a low net margin business.
When we sell a license of Unity Pro, we keep 90-something percent of that as
our margin. When somebody sells a $100 package, we keep $30 from the store.
It’s very different.
Playnomics predictive churn management
Above: Playnomics’ predictive churn management.
Image Credit: Playnomics
GamesBeat: And you have services now. You acquired Applifier, and I think
somebody else, too?
Helgason: Yeah, Playnomics. It’s a business, but more important, we started
the company asking the question, “How can we help developers of all sorts,
from the biggest to the smallest, make great games?” Then we got that back
and we realized that there are two questions that developers live and die
by. The first is, “Can I make a great game?” There are lots of sub-
questions about the right platform, the right features, performance, cost
efficiency, production, all these things, and we worked hard on that for 12-
ish years. But they also live and die by another big question, which is, “
Once I create a great game, can I connect that game with an audience?”
There’s a lot of solutions out there. The app stores are great. If you get
into the rankings it’s great. If you get editorialized by Apple or Google,
that’s great. But there’s also answers to that question that aren’t as
obvious. There are answers that we think benefit from being integrated into
Unity, or that can benefit from our scale.
One is, we acquired an ad network, GameAds, which we’re working on making
bigger now. It’s already quite big, but it’s growing fast. You sell
traffic or buy traffic. We care, probably, as much about the sell side.
Small developers with high-traffic apps that don’t monetize very well as
the buy side, we’re driving traffic to their games.
There’s also Everyplay, which is a game replay sharing network. As you’re
playing a game, when something great happens in the game, there’s a button
where you can push a video up to YouTube or Facebook. It’s one of these
things that performs very well for developers already, but we wanted to make
it much bigger and better-integrated.
Endless Legend is built with Unity
Above: Endless Legend is built with Unity.
Image Credit: Unity
GamesBeat: This is a new sector for you guys to go into. Why did you decide
to go into this layer of the business?
Helgason: It’s this question that we see many of our customers not just
living by, but dying by. They have a hard time getting the right traffic to
their games.
GamesBeat: There are, what, maybe 400 companies in this middleman space?
They’re all trying to sell a different solution to the gamemakers who are
wondering what the solution is for getting traffic and downloads. Why have
Unity as one more company in the space?
Helgason: It’s fair to say that of the 400, we picked the one we were most
passionate about in Everyplay. It’s a free service. It’s not really
advertising. It’s not really a lot of these things. It’s a pure mechanism
for players who are playing the game to share their experience. From that,
games get additional traffic. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s well-coded by a
small Finnish team. There’s a lot of brilliant people in Finland for
whatever reason.
We felt this was a solution we could bring out to our customers that will
help them. We already saw it, before we acquired them, driving traffic to
cool games. Also games that are premium downloads, or DLC-based rather than
in-app purchase-based, which we think is underserved. It’s something that
needs more power in their ecosystem. It doesn’t invalidate the 399 other
companies, of course.
GamesBeat: Do you see Unity as a consolidator in the space?
Helgason: Only in the sense that, something like Everyplay, it was a fragile
, underfunded company. We were afraid that they would get bumped around. So,
in that sense, by bringing it into a bigger ecosystem and giving it the
boost that we could give them, yes, that helps. But we’re not a
consolidator. We don’t think we should pick winners in every category.
GamesBeat: What is your approach to mobile?
Helgason: It’s been very simple. The tool already exists. We made it export
to iOS and then export to Android and Windows Mobile and Blackberry. People
could build for the platforms they cared about.
GamesBeat: This stuff used to be really hard to do, right?
Helgason: It depends. If you want to be not so generous, or more generous to
the games industry, the games industry has always had tools for themselves.
This industry possesses some of the smartest developers in the world. Big
companies in particular could always figure this out. But here came a tool
that was as good as the best of them and available to the rest of the people
that didn’t have these teams, didn’t have the experience, or didn’t have
the time and money to spend on building their own tech. That’s where we
came from.
It turns out that it’s also cost-effective for some of the big companies
with tech to buy our stuff, because it saves them costs and allows them to
deploy their best engineers on actually building games, which is the real [
difference-maker] these days.
GamesBeat: Is it at this point where it’s trivial matter for you to add
another platform?
Helgason: I wouldn’t say it’s trivial. The cross-platform aspect of Unity
—we talk about mobile platforms, but we support between 15 and 20 actual
platforms, including the consoles and PC and web and WebGL now. It’s not
trivial to do all this stuff at the same time. In fact, it’s kind of the
opposite. We had to innovate a lot to make this possible.
GamesBeat: This is why you have 400 people.
Helgason: It’s definitely a big part of it. It’s not easy to do this.
The Forest is built with Unity
Above: The Forest is built with Unity
Image Credit: Unity
GamesBeat: Your competitors, like Epic and Crytek, came from the top down,
in high-end and console games. You’ve bubbled up from the bottom, in a way.
Can you talk about that dynamic?
Helgason: It’s a good question. They came from a world where they had their
own studios and primarily worked on their own games. Then they
commercialized their engines. That just wasn’t our path. We built our own
software, but we decided that the other path was more interesting to us.
It’s so different, how we think about the world. At some point we said, “
We’re going to be cheaper,” and then we said, “We’re going to be cheap
and free.” In 2009 the other guys went free as well, but they failed to get
traction from that. They’re trying to revamp their offerings now, with
subscription and the backend, and updated tools that are better than they
used to be.
Bizarrely enough, it’s not showing up in our numbers at all. Nobody
actually left, it seems. Our numbers are just as stable as they’ve always
been. But it’s interesting to see the industry being more competitive now
than it used to be.
GamesBeat: With their base price, they’re trying to undercut you.
Helgason: They actually went up in price, in a way. Now Unreal has a five
percent backend, which arguably makes it the most expensive engine on the
market. It doesn’t really matter. I won’t go into the math.
GamesBeat: What are you hoping for over time, in the next year or two years?
What do you want Unity to be, and the ecosystem as well?
Helgason: I want Unity to be the same as it is, serving developers as well
as we can with great tools and services. We want to focus on their success.
That’s Unity. I don’t see us changing. What I want for the industry is a
few things. I want more power to premium games and storytelling games, games
that are more culturally relevant than the hardcore-est of hardcore
freemium titles. Apple and Google support that to some level, and I think
they’ll support it more.
We want to support it more with things like Everyplay, where instead of
seeing an icon in an app store, you actually see a video of what the game
offers. That gives a lot of power to people with compelling, deep
experiences. Now, most games seem to get downloaded through an icon or a
name, which is hard to put a value on. It’s part of why free games dominate
so harshly.
Otherwise, we want to follow where the ecosystem takes us and support the
needs of developers.
GamesBeat: Is there a way you think you can get into the heart of what
people consider the traditional game industry, the home console business?
Helgason: We are there, in the sense that a lot of console games are being
built with Unity now. We partnered with the big platforms. Unity’s free for
Xbox One and Wii U. Sony’s sponsored licenses for PlayStation. A lot of
titles are coming out from first parties. So we’re definitely there. Also
some large PC franchises are using Unity.
ouya
GamesBeat: What about micro-consoles? Are you optimistic about that category?
Helgason: I want to be. I want to be optimistic about everything. The more
opportunities there are for developers, the better. I guess there are
questions about Ouya now. I haven’t followed the news too closely. There
are lots of rumors.
It’s great if these devices have traction, because again, people clearly
want to play games in a lot of places. It’s tough for micro-consoles to
compete with mobile, though. This is just a device people have in their
pocket. To do an additional purchase, I think, is a tough sell to everyone
except the more hardcore audience, which is already buying these wildly more
powerful consoles.
GamesBeat: Now that you’re in services, what do you think is going to
happen to solve the problem that mobile game companies have with discovery
and user acquisition?
Helgason: I don’t know. We’re going to help a little bit, and maybe a lot.
We acquired Playnomics, which is a sort of—they do analytics, but the goal
of it is CRM, managing your users. Predictive analytics and making
decisions based on behavior about how you should deal with your players. We
’re going to do everything we can to give great tools like that to
developers.
Besides that, I think a lot of it is on the app store managers to elevate
games that are really good. They already do a decent job of it. But not just
the people who can buy their way through the rankings. All my intuition is
screaming that this is going to happen, and then we’ll have a healthier
industry in a year or two.
GamesBeat: What do you think the quality level will be like in a year or two
for the best mobile games?
Helgason: It blows my mind every year. The quality, the polish goes up so
dramatically. Just in our world, which is a sort of annex to the whole
mobile industry—we have awards every year for the best games in our
ecosystem. At some point I said, “Every game that was nominated this year
would have won every award last year.”
That’s how I feel about the whole industry, or at least the mobile
ecosystem. It’s going up at a staggering rate. The devices get more
powerful. Developers get smarter. The ecosystem gets bigger so they can
afford to invest more. The tools get better. People get great at making
games for mobile. Three years ago, nobody had more than a couple of years’
experience in mobile. Now a lot of people have five-plus years. There are
many sharply inclining lines layered on top of each other.
GamesBeat: Knowing what you guys know about the game business and gamemakers
, what sort of visibility is most interesting to you, that you get from this
? What’s the direction of the game industry right now? What kind of
analytics information do you absorb that you can direct people with?
Helgason: It’s just in the biggest lines, in that—We see everything
working. We see two-person teams building fantastic games and making enough
money that they can pay the bills for several years, which enables them to
build wonderful studios. We see every type of thing working, and of course
also not working.
The possibilities are so wild. The industry, or at least the press, can be a
bit myopically focused on one company making $1 billion. There’s a lot of
people making $1 million to $5 million, which is incredible, if you’ve
invested only a couple hundred thousand. We see that everywhere. The main
thing is just the continuing explosion of opportunity. That’s the top line
for us.
You may have heard me say this before, but if you go back 15 years, if you
had a product you wanted to show the world of any kind, the biggest way to
take that to the market would be prime time U.S. television. You might get
noticed by 100 million people if you spent a lot of money. Now you can take
a quality offering to a few app stores and marketplaces and reach more than
2 billion people. In five years that’ll be 4 billion people. It’s 40 times
larger in the space in 20 years. It’s liquid. There’s no particular
friction in it except the competition with others, which is significant. But
we keep seeing amazing things get a lot of traction. To be part of the
industry in this time is mind-blowing.
GamesBeat: It’s interesting to see user-generated content grow like crazy.
I wonder, is there an opportunity for you guys in that space? Right now, you
’re mainly helping professional developers. There are also players who want
to create for these games.
Helgason: There some really amazing games that solicit user-generated
content. Stair Dismount had that on Steam. We’ve not seen a lot of user-
generated content on mobile, because the tools to create are still kind of
wonky there. But people will figure it out. With the traction user-generated
content has on other platforms, it’s impossible that nobody’s going to be
successful with that in the next few years.
Our main job sometimes, especially with development features, is just to get
out of the way and make it possible for developers to do. It’s possible
and it’s easy, so we’re just not in the way. It’s going to be exciting
when that happens.
Dex is built with Unity
Above: Dex is built with Unity
Image Credit: Unity
GamesBeat: If something’s taking off in the asset store, maybe all of the
other game developers should take note. There’s this thing that everyone
seems to be using.
Helgason: Oh, I think everyone who uses Unity relies heavily on the store.
The cost savings from using it are just mind-blowing. The people who are
selling, they’re doing really well. Several hundred are having a
significant income from it. Several dozen might be between making a full
living and getting rich.
Question: You mentioned that you wanted to be optimistic about micro-
consoles. Of course, there’s a lot of discussion from you and others about
the growing power of mobile devices. We’re bullish on connecting phones to
big screens through wireless HD and other technologies. I’d like to know
your thoughts and plans for supporting tools as far as doing things
simultaneously on the small screen and the big screen.
Helgason: We already support that with mirroring, which is separate. On iOS
you can also, for example, have different views. With Samsung we’re working
on their multiscreen project, to make it really easy for their ecosystem.
Over time we just want to make sure that it’s easy everywhere.
The reason we haven’t gone all in from the very beginning of that trend is
just because we haven’t seen a lot of need for it. The pull hasn’t been
there. You have latency issues and controller issues and so on, which makes
it hard—Doing something with your touch device while something plays on the
big screen is kind of hard. But no, no good answer, other than we think it
’s a very viable use case and we want to support it. People have done it
and it does work in many cases, for a lot of different situations.
ZeroLight is built with Unity
Above: ZeroLight is built with Unity
Image Credit: Unity
Question: The rumor a while back was that AutoDesk was trying to acquire you
guys. Thanks for not selling, if that was at all possible.
Helgason: If I had a dollar for every rumor about acquisition, I wouldn’t
be rich, but I could buy myself a really nice meal.
Question: I wonder if you could set our minds at ease, though. To a lot of
developers, Unity is almost priceless, and we want you guys to stay
independent. Maybe you could talk about your vision for the next 12 to 24
months, where you see Unity, and if there’s any exit on the horizon?
Helgason: No, I can say with perfect candor that there’s no such discussion
going on, no negotiation, and nobody in particular is approaching us right
now. There have been approaches in the past. Good technology companies get
approaches. But we’re very focused on being able to support the whole
ecosystem and be a kind of Switzerland between all the platforms – hardware
devices, operating systems, publishers and down that line. We really
believe that Unity is best if we can support everyone. That’s been our long
-term plan and tradition.
That’s also how we structured the company. We raised venture money, but we
put all the money in the bank. We’re very conservative about how we run the
business. We know it’s more important for developers that we’re there
than that we have a particular style of success or whatever. We’ve now been
on the market for nine years. The goal is to keep Unity on the market for
another 10, 20, however many years we can keep at it.
GamesBeat: What else would you say are some decision that you have to make
to keep Unity useful for indies?
Helgason: One of them is just letting our developers – the people who are
in the company, creating the product – make a lot of decisions on their own
. They’re recruited largely from the game industry, and from all kinds of
companies, including small studios. Their intuitions as far as what
developers need are really good. That’s one way we do it.
Another is, we partner with a lot of big companies, but we partner very
carefully and selectively. We don’t do exclusives. We don’t overcommit
ourselves to one particular direction or form factor or operating system and
so on.
Question: What are your plans for supporting HTML 5 as a run-time?
Helgason: We started working on that quite a while ago. We announced it and
showed it at GDC a couple of months ago, a Unity exporter for HTML 5 and
WebGL. It’s running really well. It’s not perfect, but it’s going to be
out in what we call a preview with our Unity 5, which is the next big
release. It doesn’t have a date yet, but it’s getting really close. It
definitely exists and it’s surprisingly awesome.
GamesBeat: Are you optimistic that we could get to universal cool 3D browser
games?
Helgason: Yes, if you count “universal” as only new browsers. A couple of
browsers are big question marks as far as whether they’ll support WebGL at
all. For these, we still have our browser plugin, so you can create the same
content across browsers that support WebGL or not. But give it a couple
more years. I wouldn’t be surprised if every major browser supported WebGL.
GamesBeat: And then we don’t need consoles anymore?
Helgason: Ah, it’s not that simple. HTML 5 is very fast. JavaScript in HTML
5 is really fast. But it’s still a thick layer between the CPU and the
code. So no, I think it’s only part of the use case. We need native for at
least quite a while still. More than a couple of years. |
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