unityof (NYSE:U) Game development platforms are one of the most popular platforms for good reason. The company’s suite of creation tools aims to make life easier for artists, designers, and developers. Beyond video games, Unity’s platform is used in aerospace, film, medical, manufacturing, and other industries that require the creation of real-time 3D content.
Unity’s software provides the means to create world-class triple-A video games, but the process is still painstaking and takes years. With huge worlds and high-fidelity graphics, modern video games require a large number of artists and designers to create those worlds and everything within them.
At Unity, we believe artificial intelligence (AI) is a game changer for the video game industry. Not only can AI be incorporated into games to create more believable characters and experiences, but artists can also use AI to greatly accelerate the process of creating video games.
innovative technology
On Tuesday, Unity made two separate AI-related announcements. The first is introducing two new AI platforms, Unity, Muse and Sentis, to help developers speed up content creation and build more realistic worlds. The second opens the door to third-party AI tools.
Unity Muse and Unity Sentis are currently in open beta, with a general availability date planned for later this year. Unity Muse aims to help a less skilled artist or designer create his 3D content quickly. By providing text-based prompts like those used by ChatGPT, developers can let Unity Muse generate and edit animations, textures and 2D sprite assets. The tool also has a question and answer feature to help developers find solutions.
While Unity Muse aims to improve content creation workflows, Unity Sentis aims to make games more realistic. Unity Sentis enables AI models to be used at runtime, opening the door to more realistic characters and experiences. His one of the possible examples is that a non-player his character can use his AI to behave realistically without the developer having to hardcode its behavior.
These tools don’t replace developers and artists, but they do help eliminate repetitive tasks that slow down the video game development process. The result is better games being created faster on the Unity platform.
In addition to these new AI tools, Unity is launching an AI Marketplace to bring third-party AI tools to its platform. These tools include generative AI solutions that enable developers to create content, integration solutions that make it easy to connect to AI services, and behavioral AI solutions that incorporate AI-driven logic into games. There are currently 10 tools on the marketplace, each vetted by Unity.
potential competitive advantage
Unity competes with Epic Games’ Unreal Engine and proprietary game engines built by large game studios. As games become more complex and costly to produce, Unity can stand out by providing AI tools that greatly improve the productivity of developers, artists, and designers. For game studios, as more and more productivity-enhancing features are added to Unity, it becomes more difficult to justify building and maintaining a custom game engine.
Epic Games has its own set of AI-based tools for Unreal Engine, and as Unity goes deeper into AI, the company isn’t sitting still. But this is a case where the first movers are likely to have a big advantage. Developers who decide to use Unity will probably stick with it, attracted by its robust AI-driven tools. Moving projects between game engines has significant switching costs.
Thanks to Unity and other game engines, the barriers to creating video games have already been lowered significantly. AI tools further remove that barrier, allowing people without extensive technical or artistic skills to use Unity to create quality games. Ultimately, it’s good for the video game industry and good for Unity.
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