generally going to revolve around the notion of identity. So you have to anchor to some identity... for example, you know, we’re very proud of Apex Legends. And we’re very proud of the fact that the game is owned by EA. Apex Legends, today is made with Source. It’s a very exciting multiplayer game, and to use cross-play, you will be using your EA account. ... So the idea with multiplayer games is that
you’re trying to bind to some notion of identity that’s transcendent of the platform. UGS supports that through our authentication layers, and the notion of identity being abstractable. So lots of games out there are following this pattern and it’s enabled at the core by UGS having a single notion of identity. Then you can map the players in different contexts
we acquired is being used as part of a moderation package, where we can do transcription of the voice stream, speech- to-text and tonal analysis, and combine those together to see who is behaving badly. What that does is it gives studios agency. It gives them
the ability to make choices on how to respond to this type of behaviour, and either through incentives or punitive measures, trying to create a better, more fun community, a more inclusive community, for their players. This on one hand, from a business perspective, will increase engagement, and on the other hand, is the right thing to do. We see that as a great vision for Unity to be tackling, and that’s part of UGS today.
Why do you think cross-play and cross-progression are so important for games going forward? It reduces friction. Studios are going to live and die off of the engagement of their players and what you really want the opportunity for - especially with a multiplayer game, that’s exciting with fast paced action - you want anybody to be able to compete. So when you’re able to support any platform, you’re going to create opportunities for more players and even different types of players to compete against each other. So it’s just a way of increasing your audience, and increasing the competitiveness in games, and maintaining a larger audience over time.
How much work did you have to do with platform holders and game developers to get those features working? Was it fairly simple, or was there some back and forth? So those features are, you know,
32 | MCV/DEVELOP December 2022
to that identity. So it’s pretty important that any type of service layer supports a notion of global identity like ours does. That’s how those games are built. It’s par for the course. Is it hard? Sure. But it is part of UGS that identity is supported in that way.
What were some of the hurdles that first popped up when you were trying to develop UGS? Obviously it had to grow outwards. How did you know where to start, and where to progress? As Unity, we’ve done a great job of getting some of the “best of breed” products to be part of our company. Three years ago, when we started on the journey to build UGS, we had done a nice job of bringing in Multiplay. In 2019, we also brought in Vivox. We acquired deltaDNA, which was a high-end analytics provider, and then a couple of other tools, including OTO. We then said, “Okay, those are great, but they’re independent products.” They didn’t integrate very well. What we wanted to do was produce a suite of products that was fully integrated, and powered by a common set of data underneath all the products.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64
