Unity jumping into ad network space with Unity Cloud

Engine maker Unity Technologies is adding a suite of online services that aims to help mobile game developers promote and monetize their apps. Dubbed "Unity Cloud," Unity says the new service (launching in beta today) will help developers with the more complicated business elements of game distribution, such as marketing, analytics and monetization. With nearly 2 million developers using Unity already, and significant mindshare with advertisers, Unity Cloud places the popular engine maker into an enviable position in a market that has so many disparate monetization platform offerings. "There are companies doing all these [cloud services], but we did a survey and it was really kind of depressing," Unity CEO David Helgason told us ahead of the company's Unite conference in Vancouver, taking place today. The survey happened earlier this year and polled 22,000 respondents. "It showed that there were no [cloud] solutions that people were just generally happy with," he said. "…Of course not everyone thought all current solutions were terrible, but there really was no consensus, and people seemed generally unhappy with the offerings." Unity Cloud lets developers run advertising in their mobile games, as well as cross-promotion with other Unity developers. As an ad network, Unity Cloud can also take advantage of scale: Helgason says 100 Unity-based apps are installed every second on mobile, making it one of the biggest ad networks around. Even if a small amount of the total Unity developer base adopts the network, it will still be a force to be reckoned with in the advertising space. Unity Cloud is now in beta, but Helgason said the plan is to ramp up quickly. You can find more info on it at the official website. [Correction: The story originally said Unity Cloud would enable game save states and social features, which is not the case.]