Here’s some good news for all those who enjoy gaming, irrespective of the platform.
Unity, the well-known cross-platform 3D engine and game development tool has announced at Microsoft’s Build 2013 conference that it has reached an agreement with Microsoft and will now reach out to support the Xbox One (with Kinect, of course), while also offering completely free support for Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 games.
As reported, the Unity tech on the Xbox One will support Kinect and this will be done via a second screen through SmartGlass, alongside the support for Cloud computing. Moreover, developers deciding to publish their games via Microsoft can use Unity without paying any amount. Licensed Unity Pro 4 developers are also set to benefit from Unity without paying a $1,500 license fee via the agreement with Microsoft.
“For Windows gamers, that’s pretty good news. It means that pretty much any game built on top of Unity can be ported to Windows Phone 8 or Windows 8 with minimal effort, without that developer having to drop a dime on engine licensing to do it,” TechCrunch writes.
As far as support for the Xbox One is concerned, the company has announced that Unity will be deeply supported by the Xbox One, and this includes gesture/skeletal recognition with the help of Kinect. “While tying into the 360′s Kinect from Unity has been possible for a while now, it’s always been a bit of a hack; once Xbox One support makes its way into Unity 4, it’ll be official. Alas, it’s not clear if the One-specific tools will be made available to everyone — while Unity says that they’ll be free to anyone published by Microsoft Studios, there’s no word on how much they’ll cost (or if they’ll even be available) to anyone just looking to tinker,” the report adds.
In response to a mail from TechCrunch, A Unity representative decided to shed some more light on the matter. The rep wrote: “Unity can still be used by [Xbox] developers being published by someone other than Microsoft Games Studios, they’ll just need to pay for it. We ask developers interested in using Unity to publish to consoles to contact us directly to discuss pricing.
Unity, itself, has been on a high for a while now. The last time the company was in news was back in March when it announced about its support for Sony’s PS4.
“In our tireless march towards world domination (okay, perhaps merely game industry domination), we’re proud to announce that we’ve just entered into a strategic partnership with Sony Computer Entertainment to bring out tools for development for every single of SCE’s PlayStation platforms! Of course, we already offer PS3 support and will continue to do so through Unity’s updates. But now we’ll be working with SCE to build out tools for PS4, PS Vita, PSM, and SCE’s upcoming cloud gaming service,” Unity wrote back then.
More details on this are expected to arrive soon.