Unity ‘amazed’ as installs triple to 750,000

The number of registered developers for the Unity engine has tripled in about 12 months to 750,000, the engine vendor has revealed.

Unity Technologies added that 200,000 of those users remain active on a monthly basis.

“We’re amazed at how rapidly Unity continues to grow in popularity globally,” said Unity CEO David Helgason.

“The continuing growth of the platform demonstrates that when provided with excellent tools, developers will embrace them in numbers that surpass anything anyone imagined.”

The number of Unity Web Player installs has also doubled over the last year to more than 80 million, the company added.

The announcement comes a year after Unity launched the Asset Store digital content marketplace and Union distribution service.

There are now 50,000 registered users of the Asset Store, with 2,200 “high quality, royalty-free” packages available to them. The tech firm says that latest sales numbers show top vendors are now grossing more than $10,000 a month.

“The Asset Store has proven to be a fantastic way for developers to gain access to benefits that only the largest studios used to have,” said Unity CCO Nicholas Francis.

“I think this is an awesome way for small developers to be able to focus on what they do best and to get work from other creators that complements their skills.”

Unity Technologies is currently readying the release of Unity 3.5, which will add features such as multi-threaded rendering, improved occlusion culling and an integrated GPU profiler.