Abstract
This chapter argues that Unity’s ‘conditions of existence’ are predicated on a long history of developer- and player-oriented videogame-making tools, practices, and communities, and that the engine’s business model is consonant with a broader ‘platformization of cultural production’ in today’s media industries. It describes the emergence of proprietary game engines in the early 1990s in terms of a broader shift from programmer-centric development to content-centric development. It argues that Unity builds on long-standing agitations for ‘democratized’ tools in videogame development, such as those associated with modding scenes and indie development. It then discusses Unity’s platform-based business model, touching on the engine’s licensing structure; its revenue model; its asset store; and its attempt to establish spaces of ‘affective intermediation’ in videogame culture.
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Notes
- 1.
SDKs are software resources that hardware manufacturers and publishers lease to videogame developers in the final stages of a project. Companies such as Nintendo, Sony, and Apple build protocols into their platforms that render it impossible to run a game on their hardware without the requisite SDK (see O’Donnell 2014: 200–207).
- 2.
The political economic tradition in media studies is broadly focused on the following questions: Who owns power in the media industries; how is that power consolidated and filtered through an organization’s supply chains, conditions of labour, and revenue models; and how do these power structures fall upon media audiences, consumers, and users?
- 3.
In the context of war games, this imaginary expressed itself in the desire for a war engine ‘with unlimited scenario generation powers’ (Lowood 2016a: 102).
- 4.
This historical generalization risks erasing other types of labour associated with videogame development. We could, for example, consider the labour of Roberta Williams, who, in 1979, designed the graphic adventure videogame Mystery House (Williams, 1980). According to Laine Nooney (2013: n.p.), Williams ‘was not a programmer; she was a housewife and mother of two’, and her ‘design contained no code, no instruction sets, no sense of how the game she wrote would function on a computer’. Nooney makes the important point that videogame history struggles to ‘make sense’ of figures such as Roberta Williams for this reason.
- 5.
Eric Freedman (2018: n.p.) goes so far as to argue that ‘[t]his industrial division also shaped the field of game studies, placing more focused attention on visual analysis, ignoring certain material relations to study narrative, genre, seriality and other literary and cinematic conceits’.
- 6.
id Software tend to open source their engines after several years, meaning that content produced on their engines after the transition to open source may no longer be considered a proprietary extension.
- 7.
Kristine Jørgensen (2017: 15), for example, discusses a Norwegian studio that adopts a decentralized mode of governance and explicitly ‘restricts extended use of crunch time and other unethical activities’.
- 8.
As this book was going to print, news broke of a sexual harassment lawsuit filed against Riccitiello and other Unity Technologies management by one of the company’s former senior directors. The complainant ‘detailed that her time with the company was fraught with inappropriate comments from male management towards women’ (Lanier 2019). This instance provides a crucial reminder that so-called platforms are not detached from the broader social and political issues at stake in the software and videogame industries.
- 9.
In many countries, developers of gambling software are required by law to submit their source code to a government regulator. Unity therefore requires that developers of gambling software purchase Unity’s underlying source code and use a ‘frozen’ version of the engine to develop their software. Although the gambling licence generates revenue for Unity Technologies, our contacts were careful to stress that it is not a key growth area for the company.
- 10.
Unity’s ‘hands-off’ approach is not applied universally—one noteworthy case is the Unity-developed mobile videogame Pokemon Go (Niantic, 2016), which, when it was first launched, featured a Unity splash screen, suggesting that its developers had developed and published the videogame using the Personal licence. Yet, within days of Pokemon Go’s release, the splash screen was removed, suggesting that its developers promptly switched to a different licensing model.
- 11.
Assets and plugins for Unity can also be distributed between users externally from the Asset Store, and are often made available on a developer’s own website or alternative hosting platforms such as Git or Itch.io. The Asset Store remains the primary location to distribute and source assets and plugins due to its convenient availability within Unity’s editor and the assurance that assets available on the Asset Store are certified to work with supported Unity versions, whereas a file uploaded to a blog might not have been tested on newer versions of Unity.
- 12.
An interesting exception was the director of a Melbourne-based independent studio, who explained that his studio kept records of the various user-developed plugins they had downloaded, in addition to scripts downloaded from programmers’ blogs. Whenever his team implements a user-developed plugin or script, they leave a reminder in their code. Once they are approaching launch, they will trawl through the code, contact plugin developers individually, and ask whether those developers require any further acknowledgement or compensation. He explained that, in addition to being ‘good practice’, this is also a means by which to keep track of any user-developed plugins and scripts that become unstable or, at worst, obsolete as a result of Unity’s software updates.
- 13.
It is also worth noting that Unity developers cannot take a specific fix from a new update and implement that fix in an older build of Unity, because that would require access to the engine’s underlying source code. League of Geeks also explained that, as a studio, they collectively decided not to download plugins from the Asset Store unless those plugins came with source code access. The reason for this is that if a plugin becomes unstable, the studio’s software engineer can make the necessary fixes without having to rely upon the plugin creator to provide support.
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Nicoll, B., Keogh, B. (2019). Unity’s Socio-historical Context and Political Economy. In: The Unity Game Engine and the Circuits of Cultural Software. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25012-6_2
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