Unity launches Unity Asset Store

Engine outfit Unity has used its own Unite conference to launch a new marketplace called Unity Asset Store.

The marketplace, accessible in Unity through a special panel, launches today with 70 ‘products’ in store, and will grow to include a range of offerings such as individual assets, open source libraries, and entire new Unity features.

The store, which formalises the existing fledgling market formed in the Unity user community, allows developers to both sell and buy assets. Taking a form that will be familiar to App Store users, the Unity Asset Store already includes asset packs, tutorials and Unity upgrades as ambitious as a new graphics assets shader.

"We noticed that users were already building business like this themselves," said Unity CEO David Helgason of the process that led Unity to conceive its Asset Store.

"Unity Asset Store is a platform for sharing and trading between users, and it’s a pretty wild piece of software," he added on stage at Unite.

Unity is offering a 70/30 per cent revenue fit in favour of the developers who chose to sell assets and goods on the store. Some in store items will be offered for free.

The Asset Store is available now as part of the Unity 3.1 update, which is available today to download, and also includes minor bug fixes.

unity3D.com/assetstore

Update:

In a separate statement to the press, Helgason stated: “Even after we made the Unity tools as simple as we’ve made them, game development is inherently hard.

"But by launching the Unity Asset Store, we’re giving developers a way to easily combine their work with that of others, making game development easier than ever before.

“Because Unity is so widely used inside and outside of the game industry, it is becoming a standard around which developers collaborate, learn, recruit and share and trade assets,” Helgason continued. “And not least, individual developers can now monetise their skills in an entirely new way!”