Cloud computing technology continues to take on an increasingly larger role in the video game industry. Microsoft, a very large player in this space of technology, has announced a partnership with Unity that will further drive the adoption of cloud computing.
Unity has announced this partnership via its official website. According to the announcement, the company has “partnered with Microsoft Azure to bring our Create Solutions to the cloud and develop our cloud infrastructure to better meet your needs and to enhance your games and other experiences.”
Both companies are seeking to streamline the process of building and releasing new games across both Windows PCs and Xbox consoles.
The goal of bringing unity to Unity’s tools with Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform is to “improve workflows, deliver new functionality, provide additional reliability and more global access options,” along with additional, unnamed benefits.
Just as is the case with other cloud-based solutions, Unity and Microsoft hope to make collaboration between creators practically seamless. This should prove to be a huge asset to larger companies that have multi-studio projects (studios that are often located in entirely different regions). Even smaller teams should benefit from these solutions, especially as work-from-home game development has become more common in recent years.
Some of the Unity products that have been mentioned to benefit from this new arrangement are utilities like Plastic SCM and Cloud Build from the DevOps product line. Cloud Build for instance is getting a bump in its repository limits from 25GB to 40GB. Plastic SCM will benefit from a new desktop UI and the in-editor plugin will see some improvements. Unity is working to use Microsoft Azure in order to “create an even more integrated creator ecosystem” that can facilitate larger projects.
Microsoft also released an announcement about this new partnership over on its official website.
In its announcement, Microsoft describes this partnership as the basis of providing developers the means of operating “real-time 3D experiences (known as RT3D) from the Unity engine.”
This technology will benefit not just game developers, but also creators from all sorts of other industries, including “e-commerce, energy, manufacturing, and more,” as Microsoft describes it.
Much like Epic’s Unreal Engine powers quite a number of different titles both large and small, so does Unity’s technology. With the growing number of indie studios that seem to multiply dramatically each year, Unity continues to become more and more of a “go-to” option for a variety of studios. From racing games to simulations and platformers, there are thousands of titles that are currently powered by the Unity Game Engine and more that are currently being developed with it.
Thus, this new partnership between Unity and Microsoft will more than likely have a noticeable effect on the industry’s subsequent output in the years to come. Don’t be surprised to see more of your new favorite games’ splash screens open with a quick “Made with Unity” clip.
