In technical business parlance, Unity has had a shocking few years. Having established itself as almost the de facto game engine for indie and mid-tier developers in the 2010s, it had already begun to burn its reputation for misjudging platform development before falling into complete pariah status. based on proposed execution fee in September 2023. Developers were charged a fee every time someone installed their game, subject to certain thresholds being met.
Following the response Unity has made some changes to execution fees. before you end up preserve the entire circuit. This dispute ended John Riccitiello's tenure as CEO. (he resigned in October 2023), before that current CEO Matt Bromberg took over the top job in May 2024..
Despite the backlash against the company, Unity is still widely used. This year alone, it has powered breakthrough hits like Peak, Schedule IAnd Megabonkand also Hollow Knight: Silk Song.
Talking to GamesIndustry.biz ahead of Unite 2025 (and the shocking announcement Fortnite supports Unity games), Adam Smith, Unity's senior vice president of engine development, admits the company made mistakes, but argues that the engine giant today is a very different beast.
“Some of the decisions made by previous management didn't really feel like they were made in terms of the value of a product that would make life better for developers and lead to a better gaming experience for everyone,” he says. “We now have a 100% new management team in the company. With Matt's arrival the situation has improved significantly. I believe in the future again thanks to the experience and empathy he has for developers, as well as the complete management overhaul he has made. This leadership team is made up of people from the industry who understand what it means to be a developer.”
Regardless of the changes that have occurred in the leadership and spirit of Unity, there will be those who are skeptical. When the execution fee was announced, many developers turned their backs on Unity in favor of competitors, particularly the open source Godot. Emilio Coppola, Executive Director of the Godot Foundation, said GamesIndustry.biz earlier this year, Godot saw a “huge increase in popularity” following Unity bugs..
All of this begs the question: What is Unity doing to win back the hearts and minds of developers? In Smith's opinion, focusing on what the company has historically done best—helping developers launch their games on as many platforms as possible—is as good as any start-up. This includes several new features the company announced at Unite 2025, such as the Platform Toolkit, which makes it easier to run projects on multiple platforms.
“At the end of the day, it's all about focusing on the end users of our end users, the gamers, helping them create a fun, social community that they want to come back to and invest in, and allowing them to build that community on whatever range of platforms and devices they want,” explains Smith. “The simple short answer is to focus on our developer players, putting runtime performance and community-building capabilities in the hands of up-and-coming creatives.”
Part of the negative reaction to the proposed execution fee was that it was simply a feature that the developers didn't intuitively want. In their minds, this went against the grain of Unity, and that what was once a useful tool had become something that could siphon more money out of their hard work.
But the other part of the run-fee controversy was that developers felt betrayed by Unity. Whatever social contract existed between the engine giant and its customers was broken because Unity was about to make seismic changes to the terms of their relationship with developers after the fact. You can remove features you hate and try to charm developers by offering them technologies that will make their lives easier, but trust is a more fickle beast.
“There is no trust, especially after such a violation of the social contract,” Smith says. “It's earned. I firmly believe that we are on our way to conquering it. Unity 6.3 is the absolute culmination of specific areas where our developer community wanted to be better, with more stability, more iterative workflows, access to more platforms in new ways, new supported XR devices, a web interface, and a web GPU. In fact, this is an opportunity to bring your creation to a wider audience than ever before.”
Question about AI
Unity is no stranger to AI. In 2023 the company introduced the Muse and Sentis tools. At that time, The firm said it is pushing for “responsible” AI tools..
Now the engine giant is introducing a few more features in this area, namely AI Gateway and Vector AI. The former allows developers to use third-party AI tools in their workflow, while the latter is an ad quality tool.
Proponents of using AI in game development generally fall into two camps. Many people on LinkedIn and Twitter – including Elon Musk – insist that this technology will soon be able to create entire games, while more balanced voices suggest that it could be used as a tool to help speed up certain processes. Unity's Smith falls into the latter camp.
“They skip the permitting and prototype stages and go straight to the assembly stage.”
“We're seeing developers use AI to ruin […] the game development lifecycle, which included concept, prototype, greenlight, pre-production and then launch into production,” he says.
“What we're seeing now is that developers can test ideas so quickly using AI tools that they find the core gameplay loop faster. It may not be the final implementation, but they can find fun faster and iterate on the core idea, perhaps within a day or two rather than months, acting like a tech company just to make the core game loop work. We're looking at AI right now as an earlier stage accelerator. Studios know what they want to create and they just start creating it because they have the tools to speed up the process, skipping the permitting and prototyping stages and going straight to the assembly stage. They are developing and implementing faster than ever.”
While tech companies continue to embed artificial intelligence features into virtually every software imaginable, there is very loud reaction. When asked about this gap, Smith says AI is simply part of the future.
“Players will accept this method of development,” he insists. “It will become increasingly common that some studios are lacking in their production capabilities and they will use AI to exploit it. There is a huge difference in what the critical reaction to the game is and what the player reaction to the game is. The world is developing.”
Basic Standards
Another addition to the Unity ecosystem announced at Unite was the “Core Standards”, essentially a verification process that third-party products on the company's platform can go through to ensure they meet certain criteria.
“Because we're using this ecosystem of third-party tools that exist natively within the engine, we need to make sure that our community has confidence that we're not just implementing these things; they meet the same implementation standards that we adhere to in our own technologies,” explains Smith. “Because we use third-party tools included in the engine, this is a method for us to demonstrate to developers that it meets the same threshold that we adhere to for implementing our own technologies.”
Despite the amount of negative press and attention Unity has received, Smith is optimistic about the future. The company announced a partnership with Take-Two to bring its games to the Nintendo Switch 2 using engine technology, starting with PGA Tour 2K25. But Smith believes that, in addition to attracting large publicly traded companies, Unity will continue to be the driving force behind the many unexpected indie hits that appear on Steam.
“It's not just 2K and the bigger studios,” he says. “In 2026, the vast majority of games like Schedule I, Peak, Megabonk, Ball X Pit, etc.—breakthrough hits that came from unexpected places—will come straight from the Unity community. That's what I'm most excited about.”
