2024 Unity Gaming Report

Players are setting the bar higher these days, and this has an impact on production. Studios need to make sure that they can actually reach the expectations of those players, and production becomes more costly and takes more time.

I am experimenting with AI. There are many disciplines that go into making a game, and I am trying to understand how each and every one of them can benefit from it, like tools that can aid prototyping and content generation, level design, and narrative. I think there’s a whole universe that goes into workflows and analysis of data and analytics, so there’s so much that can be done with AI that can boost productivity at every level.

I’ve used AI for quick prototypes when I wanted to test out something without writing any boilerplate code. It was super useful for me.

To increase our productivity, like many others, we’ve been really looking at AI and seeing how we can use this new generation of tools to empower our designers so they can create new assets to explore new ideas. Also, how we can prototype new ways of characters, bring them to life, and have them animate in new ways.

Cloud services have a lot of things to offer. It will help smaller teams achieve things that were previously only possible for larger teams with dedicated server engineers.

In the DevOps space, disparate information streams are a challenge, especially when dealing with emerging or live issues. I think teams are hungry to understand interrelationships between data streams, such as stability tracking, live metrics, and user churn, and I could see a greater focus on tools to draw inferences and support looking at what matters, when it matters.

We’re really excited about emerging markets. We’ve recently expanded in India and Indonesia, and there’s a lot of excitement from the player bases there. It’s been enlightening to experiment to see what resonates with players.

Competition and the maturity of the market have made it harder to retain players. There are more games than ever, and players have become more selective.

The overall IAP market has gone down slightly this year. I think we are still feeling the post-COVID impacts and are working to find the right audience at the right price.

There is some strategy to making the most out of your placements. If you have three placements that entice the same kind of user you're probably not making the most money out of your whole portfolio of placements. We are trying to maximize both engagement and the number of ads people watch.

Smaller studios are shipping on multiple platforms since it’s been easier to do so using tools like what Unity provides for us. Platform holders are also helping, giving expertise and development kits to indie studios to launch on multiple platforms. I think that’s helped tremendously.

Launching on multiple platforms has definitely become more accessible because of the tools that are available. When thinking about what platforms to consider, the biggest concern that we have is if we can deliver a playable experience on that platform. It’s also about performance. Can we get the right fidelity, graphics, and frame rate on the target platforms?

Start thinking about your multiplatform strategy as soon as you have a stable build that you are confident to show at events. That way, you can get feedback from players on where they want to see it launch. You can also speak to different platforms and people that are at the event to see if there’s a good opportunity to work together.

PC tends to be our first port of call for a couple of reasons. It’s generally easier to just build for PC, first, because everyone’s working on PC, and it’s easy to get a build back onto a PC. Also, when it comes to trying to define metrics for everything, for example, when you’re pitching, it’s easy to collect data for PC titles.

I think a lot of smaller studios are launching on a lot of platforms at the same time because it helps in getting exposure while taking advantage of content creation efficiencies.

When we consider publishing on other platforms, we look at how other games in our genre perform on those platforms, and check if maybe there’s a market for the game that we want to create in the future.

Cross-platform is something that a lot of players are expecting games to be right now, and from a developer point of view, it’s something that is actually very technically complex. People want to play with other people on whatever platform they’re on. So Unity is a really spectacular tool for making that happen, and taking a lot of that complexity away.

Multiplayer games have become more popular because new technologies help make them easier to build and allow more people online to play. The increase in games means more competition, which leads to higher quality.

As competition and market saturation increases, it’s harder to succeed with a multiplayer game. It’s attractive to be on as many platforms as possible to be able to meet players, and their friends, wherever they are throughout the day. You want to make it as convenient as possible for them to reach for the game.

Multiplayer games on mobile are all about community solutions. Having the opportunity to play with friends on their phones and communicate all throughout the day keeps people engaged and coming back to your game. Word of mouth and player adoption of your game also become easier.

We’re a free-to-play game, so we are going to be planning how we’re going to keep people retained, how we do our events, and our analytics early on. However, it’s still an evolving learning journey as to how and when to respond to those analytics in the right and most efficient way.

The community is the life blood of evergreen games. It’s something that you need to cultivate and encourage. Part of doing that is ensuring they have regular fresh content. For Subway Surfers, we have a three-week content update cycle that works really well for us.

Toxicity in multiplayer VR is a big problem. When you’re looking at lobby or matchmaking tools, I think it’s very difficult, but important. It’s something that as the developer you need to address because your players shouldn't have to have a toxic environment forced on them.

User-generated content is going to be a big trend going forward. It’s definitely the hot thing that everyone is trying to nail down in the mobile space, but in every other category as well. Community teams want to engage, and players want to put themselves into the game they love.

Depending on how production went, we see use of our live ops features after the first few updates have been shipped. Typically, it takes about three or four months after our global launch for usage to seriously kick in.