Unity Tools Coming for PlayStation Developers

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Unity Tools Coming for PlayStation Developers
Unity for PlayStation

Today, all of us at Unity Technologies are thrilled to announce a partnership with PlayStation that will see Unity tools developed for PlayStation platforms! We’ll be making games built on Unity deployable to PS4, PS3, PS Vita, PSM, and SCE’s future cloud services.

So what is Unity? Well, it’s only the most widely used game creation toolset and engine in the world. It’s so popular because it’s based on the idea of democratizing game development. That means making as many awesome and powerful tools available to as many developers as possible, regardless of how big or small their company or team. Unity is elegant, efficient, approachable, extensible, and affordable. Unity makes it easy to iterate and Unity does the heavy lifting when porting games to other platforms. Code is automatically converted, and just polish and optimization for that specific platform needs to be added. But all the other stuff — the art, the game logic, artificial intelligence, sound — everything else, remains the same.

Unity for PlayStation

Plenty of huge publishers like EA, Ubisoft, Kabam, Square Enix, and Nexon are using Unity for a variety of projects, but even more exciting is the massive number of independent developers enjoying incredible success in their creative and business endeavors. Its incredible that we’re now able to work with PlayStation to help many of these studios find success across its powerful platforms.

In fact, we have supported PS3 for a while now with several great titles already shipped, though the rest of the PlayStation deployment tools are not yet ready for public consumption (although Funbits did do some great work themselves to bring the beautiful and clever Escape Plan to PS Vita).

Unity for PlayStation
Unity for PlayStation

For just a fraction of the hundreds of games currently being developed by the Unity community, visit our gallery. There’s a great cross section of games to give you an idea of the incredible breadth of talent developing games with Unity.

SCE and Unity will have more info to share in the coming months, so keep an eye out!

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53 Comments

  • Wow this is a great announcement! So, does this mean the Unity SDK is essentially free to licensed PS4/PS3/Vita developers?

    As well, the PlayStation Mobile SDK is currently free to everyone, regardless of one’s status as a PlayStation developer. Will the Unity tools also be made available to those who have signed up for PSM without incurring a fee?

    • Pricing and delivery of Unity for PlayStation will likely differ by platform, and is something that we’ll be sharing with developers when ready. This is a very exciting announcement, though, and has great potential for all platforms impacted, as you’ve mentioned.

      Thanks for the question and thanks to David for this great announcement!

  • I like the sound of that: democratizing game development. Endless potential. That can only be a net plus for gamers.

  • maplestory for vita/ps4? i think yes

  • I can only imagine the possibilities with a partnership like this! Not only does it mean that even more developers will be able to make their games available to the PlayStation Nation, but it also means that making games available for PS3, PSVita and PS4 will be easier than ever!

    So similarly to all of those great cross buy PSN titles (hotline miami, lone survivor, Binding of Isaac, etc), even more great games will be available in my living room and while I’m on the bus.

    I can’t wait for the future of vidja games!

  • Wow this is amazing! I have used Unity for school projects and its awesome that it is PlayStation supported. Hopefully this means now that there will be a lot more games coming! :D

  • YES! I just started using Unity this past month. Great news to hear.

  • STOKED! There is much more hope for my game!!! AHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

  • $1,500 …. ouch

  • @Paul Sullivan

    Thanks for the reply!

  • Yes please.
    Also, PSM support is really exciting and unexpected!

    • You’re right, this is exciting. People involved with all of the listed platforms see great potential here. But I agree with you Ouren, the PlayStation Mobile piece to this announcement is very cool.

  • @ItaChu Well…. looking at Unity’s site… that’s $1,500 for the basic pro version, then “Console publishing is not included with Unity Pro – you will need a special Unity license for each platform on a per-title basis.” Looking at their iOS and Android Pro pricing as a benchmark, that’d be another $1,500 per-platform, per-head. So, if you had a 5 man team, and we’re releasing on two consoles, you’d probably be looking a a minimum of $22,500 in licensing.

  • Looking forward to see how Unity will work with the PSM SDK.

    There are a lot of limitations that would need to be worked around for getting unity games to run properly.

  • When is this going to be available?

  • so wait, does this mean that it would be easier to make a game for PS3? if so why this late? this couldve been great years ago. PS always got the crappiest version of games. and why do it now. if the PS4 will be easy to make games for whats the point of doing this now?

    • This announcement covers more platforms than just PS3. As David mentions in the post, Unity have supported PS3 for a while now.

  • This mean more games for Vita? Can’t wait.

  • My love for Sony grows by the day :)
    am looking forward for Unity works this is great news

  • Don’t know what that is but…cool?

  • Sorry Unity, but you lost me when almost every successive release removed features we were actively using, and the custom MonoDevelop version contained bugs long-fixes elsewhere that drove us crazy. I wouldn’t be so upset if it wasn’t such a large amount of money for an indie developer to pay, or if the licenses were transferrable. At this point, I paid thousands for something that I literally can’t even give away.

    We’ve switched to MonoTouch + MonoGame, and it’s been awesome. Literally 1/10th the cost, contains all the features Unity slowly removed over the last few years, and is *extremely* well supported regardless of the size of the customer. On top of this, it’s even easier to take our code over to the PSM SDK, Xcode, Visual Studio, Android SDK, etc and just generate a package without any trouble whatsoever. It’s everything I wanted Unity to be from the beginning.

    Maybe large publishers can spend the thousands and thousands to get a properly supported product, but I can’t recommend Unity for even medium-sized budgets — you’ll lose whatever you gain in lack of support, weird crashes, and an ever-dwindling feature set designed to force you to upgrade.

  • I think that at this rate, the only thing that needs to be beefed up is the marketing side of PlayStation… things like PS Mobile, PS Plus and several PS Vita and PS3 games keep going on with out any marketing support.

  • Well for the PS Vita this is a must, because that is the system that’s struggling.

  • This is great news. flipping awesome I just hope that PlayStation keeps quality in mind with titles.

  • Phenomenal News, cant wait for the fruits of their partnership.

  • So if this had been used with both sonic & allstars racing & mortak kombat komplete addition for vita, would they have had better graphics? Also does this mean it would be easy to port something like Far cry 3 to the ps vita?

  • Will I have to make sweeping changes to code I’m presently working on in Unity in order to reach these platforms? In the wake of this announcement, I’m not sure whether to keep getting programming done, or whether I should focus on asset creation. Any ideas?

  • This is great. My friends and I are working on our first game outside of our classes in Unity.

  • PlayStation store please get Digimon card battle, Digimon World 1,2,3.4 and Vandal Hearts 1 and 2. your loosing my money.

  • This is fantastic news. It is great to see Sony going out of its way to ensure that the Playstation ecosystem is open to as many developers as possible. The more developers that sign on to develop for Playstation products the more confidence that gives me as a consumer to purchase Sony products.

  • Great news! A number of my favourite games are on Unity so it would be neat to see them moved over the Vita and PS3! Also, I agree with CJB-4, I would LOOOOOVE to see Digimon World 3 on the store!

  • This is great news for me as a future game dev currently in school with several game projects on holed.
    I have been waiting for something like this and so have my games;
    say.out(“Hello!”) + PSVita, here I come!
    Now all I need to find out is the cost per dev and/or system.

  • So if I Use the Unityscript it will run on PS4 ???

  • This is fantastic news!!!! Thanks guys!!!!

  • Good job. Thank you. endless great game ideas and new concepts on the horizon. :)

  • so how easy is it to use if a guy with zero experience bought it could he get the hang of it and is it free to publish your games…I want to make vita games! :)

  • This is great news, we wish you luck and will be featuring you on Portable Gaming Region tomorrow!

  • Please clarify:

    Will this be accessible by indie developers with low costs like the Playstation Mobile SDK, or will it require livensing and devkit hardware like PS3/X360 Unity development?

    Thanks

  • not good crap i used this app it slows down my pc and to meny game bugs when useing it if sony gets this pepplpoe are going to be pissed when they have bug problems

  • @liammill18:
    Nop. Like with existing Unity platforms, the majority of your code remains the same, while things like input and resolution might need adaptation. Additionally, you might need to add code to interface with various platform specific services.

    @TwoFrostedGuys:
    Yes. Regardless of which of the supported languages you use in your project, Unity will compile it to run on the target platform.

    @thebombdrop:
    The base version of Unity is free – supporting publishing for Mac, PC, Linux, WebPlayer and Native Client. Why not try it on for size? If everything is going great, moving your project to any of Sonys platforms listed here requires very little additional work. This should help you get started: http://unity3d.com/learn/

  • @36: I’d love to know that, too. If it doesn’t require a Devkit or an expensive license this will be MUCH better than Microsoft XNA. I’ve had some experiences with XNA development for the PC, and at the time wished I could’ve ported my game (a Bomberman clone) to the PS3. But if this does what I’m hoping it does it will be amazing. I can’t wait to read more about it. :D

  • This is great news for people like me that want to work on the Vita very excited about this. I really hope this gets releases sooner than later XD.

  • How about giving some kind of hobbyist access to PhyreEngine? How about some more non-Microsoft .NET dev options?

  • 这个主意绝对不错! 但是PSM本身就有很多限制,PSM能放开限制的开发游戏吗?! 这是关键!
    而且看看SONY的尿性,PSM上一个月能出一个新游戏吗?毫无推广!

  • Hey guys, just wondering if this’ll be available to everyone as a purchase or will it be PS licensee-specific? Thanks

  • @3 I think not.

  • Awesome post! Totally relevant to the gaming community, yet very different from your usual material.. Keep them coming!

  • This is such a great news for devs!

    I hear some very good things about the engine and their community.

    Having Unity engines on PS4 will bring a lot of potential to the indie developers as well as smaller, innovation-centric studios. Oh, and pricing will be very competitive – all good for consumers.

    Cannot wait!

  • LoL

  • Awesome

  • i have yet to move to Unity 4. still on a project in 3.5 but i’m excited about this. hopefully, they’ll announce some sort of indie deal in the coming months.

  • I wonder if you can finally change your PSN id with the PS4

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