Developers know that the risk of updating a game engine mid-development is surprisingly high. Because games are often held together by a cord or pixie dust, updating to the latest version of Unity or Unreal Engine to access new features and stability can be very disruptive to a game's workflow, code, and performance.
It’s a process that developers have adapted to: many of them only update their tools every few years during development downtime, while some wait as long as two years before committing to major engine updates.
Unity wants to change things.
In the next version of the engine, called Unity 6, the company is changing the way it releases updates to developers. According to VP of Product Ryan Ellis, not only is Unity slowing down its “major” releases for the engine, with Unity 6 as the major version that will persist until 2025, but it’s also creating a new update system that will allow developers to adopt new features and performance improvements more quickly.
In a conversation with Game Developer, Ellis said that this move is part of his effort to better connect with customers, seemingly another example of how Unity is “become a different company.”
Unity “updates” will be distributed alongside the usual “patches”
The new Unity system will work like this. Instead of annual releases, the new “generational” version of Unity will progress through a series of formalized “upgrades.” (“Imagine that,” Ellis said, referring to the simplicity of the name.)
Starting with Unity 6.1, which will be available in April 2025, developers will have access to support for foldable devices and “bigger screen” formats, Deferred+ rendering in GPU Resident Drawer, and new build targets and profiles.
“We’ve been releasing patches every two weeks for a long, long time,” Ellis said, noting that these were highly stable pieces of software that provided small fixes but no new features. Developers who adopted these patches but didn’t move on to the next annual Unity release often missed important bug fixes and features that could have helped their game.
“This will give us a new mechanism that will allow us to essentially drop a point release… that also has the same stability that they expect,” Ellis explained. He said Unity is still determining the cadence of these releases, with more updates coming in 2025 instead of the next Unity release.
The system won’t be perfect from the start: Developers with long-running games that rely on a specific version of Unity probably won’t make the jump. But Ellis said the idea seems to be resonating with Unity 6’s preview adoption, which is “higher” than any of the company’s previous releases.
Unity 6 updates should improve game stability and game development
Unity 6 will contain a number of new features that the company is eager to promote, but its generational update messaging is heavy with references to improved stability and quality of life for developers. Some will be visible to players, such as improved graphics rendering like the GPU resident drawer and GPU occlusion culling. “These things allow us to move things that were normally CPU-bound to the GPU, which is really helping a lot of developers in [Unity 6 preview] speed up the frame rate,” he said.
On the back end, Ellis said the company has seen “15 percent fewer crashes” in the Unity 6 preview, which it hopes will reduce the number of times developers will have to restart Unity each day. The company also wants to improve iteration time in the editor. “One of the ways we’re doing that is by moving from using Mono to CoreCLR in the .net stack, which has some big improvements both in terms of the editor… and in terms of runtime,” he said. “Another way is we’re moving the content pipeline to an asynchronous process where some of the ingestion work will essentially move into the background.”
So instead of having to synchronously wait for items to load into the content pipeline, developers can load them in the background while they continue to work.
Hopefully developers will have more frequent access to Unity engineers.
Part of the picture CEO Matt Bromberg painted last week was the idea of Unity returning to a stage where developers could easily get help from the company in much the same way they would from a studio tool expert. Ellis offered more detail on the topic, saying the company is making changes to its communications process.
“As Unity 6 comes out, we’re looking to increase our internal support, and that will mean our teams will be much more involved,” he said, noting that many of them already interact regularly with developers, but often through informal processes.
Formalizing opportunities to connect with Unity support and engineers means developers should see more company representatives present in the company’s discussion forums and Discord server. He aimed to present Unite events as another great opportunity for developers to connect with company experts.
Unity still has a long way to go to regain the trust of developers who were burned by the Execution Fee Sagabut it is fascinating to see how its commitment to change manifests itself not only in the language of marketing, but also in changes to its production process.