Unity wants fewer developers to park on older versions of the engine

Developers know that the risk of updating your game engine mid-development is surprisingly high. Because games are often held together by shoestring and fairy dust, updating to the newest version of Unity or Unreal Engine to access new features and stability can be majorly disruptive to your workflow, your code, and your game's performance.

It's a process developers have adapted to, with many only updating their tools every few years during downtime in development—some waiting as long as two years to commit to major engine upgrades.

Unity wants to change that.

In the upcoming version of the engine, called Unity 6, the company is changing how it releases updates to developers. According to vice president of product Ryan Ellis, not only will Unity slow down its "major" releases for the engine—with Unity 6 being the major version that will persist through 2025—but it's creating a new update system that will let developers adopt new features and performance improvements on a faster basis.

In a conversation with Game Developer, Ellis said this move is part of its effort to better connect with customers—seemingly another example of how Unity is "becoming a different company."

Unity "updates" will roll out alongside the familiar "patches"

Unity's new system will work like this. Instead of annual releases, the new "generational" version of Unity will progress through a series of formalized "updates." ("Imagine that," Ellis said, in reference to the simplicity of the name.)

Related:Unity CEO Matt Bromberg says Runtime Fee reversal is part of bid to become 'a fundamentally different company'

Starting with Unity 6.1, which will land in April 2025, developers will gain access to support for foldable devices and "larger screen" formats, Deferred+ rendering in GPU Resident Drawer, and new build targets and build profiles.

"We've been doing patch releases on a biweekly basis for a long, long time," Ellis said, noting that these were meant to be highly stable bits of software providing minor fixes but no new features. Developers who adopted these patches, but didn't advance to the next yearly version of Unity, often missed out on major bug fixes and features that could help their game.

"This will give us a new mechanism that allows us to drop essentially a minor release...that also has the same stability that they've come to expect," Ellis explained. He said Unity is still determining the cadence of these releases, with multiple updates coming in 2025 in lieu of the next version of Unity.

The system won't be perfect right off the bat—developers on long-running games that rely on a specific version of Unity probably won't be making the jump. But Ellis said the idea seems to be resonating with the adoption of Unity 6 preview being "higher" than any of the company's previous releases.

Unity 6's updates should improve stability for games and game development

Unity 6 will contain a number of new features the company is eager to promote, but its messaging about the generational update is laden 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 over to the GPU, which is really helping many developers in [Unity 6 preview] speed up their frame rates," he said.

On the back end, Ellis said the company has seen "15 percent fewer crashes" in Unity 6 preview, hopefully lowering the number of times developers will need to restart Unity on a daily basis. The company also wants to improve iteration time in the editor. "One of the ways we're doing that is moving from using Mono to CoreCLR in the .net stack—that has some big improvements both in terms of the editor...as well as on runtime," he said. "Another one is that we're moving the content pipeline into an asynchronous process where some import tasks will essentially move into the background."

So instead of developers having to wait synchronously for things in the content pipeline to load, they will be able to have them load in the background while they continue working.

Developers should hopefully have more frequent access to Unity engineers

Part of the picture that CEO Matt Bromberg painted for us last week was the idea of Unity getting itself back to a stage where developers could easily get help from the company in almost the same way they would with an in-studio tools expert. Ellis offered more specifics on the topic, saying the company is making changes to its communication process.

"As Unity 6 is going out the door, we're really trying to ramp up our internal support, and that will mean things like having our teams be much more engaged," he said, noting that many are already regularly interacting with developers, but often through informal processes.

Formalizing opportunities to connect with support and engineers at Unity means developers should see more company representatives present in the company's discussion forums and Discord server. He pivoted to pitching the Unite events as another great chance for developers to connect with company experts.

Unity still has a long way to go to earn back trust from developers burned by the Runtime Fee saga, but it's fascinating to see how its commitment to changes is manifesting not just in marketing language, but in shifts to its production process.