Q&A: UNITY GAME SERVICES


Vince Pavey spoke to Jeff Collins, senior vice president of engineering at Unity Technologies about the UGS vision for the future of cross-play, and how the company are making it happen


Jeff Collins senior vice president of engineering at Unity Technologies


I’m sure people are familiar with Unity, but for the benefit of our readers, can you explain what Unity Game Services are? It’s a modular set of services to build, run and grow your game. It spans the set of tasks from building and constructing a live and connected game - everything from multiplayer services to identity to server list computation, and the ability to save cloud profiles, all the way through to the analytics and operational capabilities to run live ops for your game. It’s also inclusive of ways to monetise and grow your game through in-app purchases, and ultimately, ads.


What would you say is the unique selling point that differentiates you from Epic Online Services or nWay Play, or similar competitors that are in the same ballpark? So when we thought of making UGS at Unity,


30 | MCV/DEVELOP December 2022


we saw an opportunity in the market to make something a little bit more comprehensive. Still modular, but covering a broader set of tasks, across the whole game lifecycle. I already described how it goes from building, to running the live ops, all the way to monetization. It’s hard to find an offering as comprehensive as that out there today. So we always thought of UGS as solving the whole game development and operation problem.


You said it was modular. What are the advantages of UGS being so modular? We never wanted to make it so that in order to use any of the capabilities of UGS, you had to adopt all of them, or make choices as a developer of a game that you didn’t want to. Having to bring in extra libraries - having to bring in extra code, or try to understand a


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