
Partnership between Unity and Google - PhilipA
https://www.blog.google/topics/google-cloud/powering-up-connected-game-development-through-our-alliance-with-unity/
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tmpz22
So Unity is moving their own infrastructure to Google Cloud, Google and Unity
are collab'ing on a large open source initiative coming out this Summer, and
Google is integrating Google cloud features directly into Unity.

I wonder if this will create a trap for new game developers to ONLY use google
services for networking, by virtue of various plugins, frameworks, and
tutorials, which abstract everything until you start to scale and your stuck
with the bill and no viable means of switching to another vendor.

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funkaster
Not really. Most of the services will be released open source, and they are
not tied to the GCP, so you could use your own infra if that's something you
would like. I think the first such service to be released will be matchmaking.

Multiplay is also cloud agnostic, although it uses Google by default.

Source: I work at Unity.

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jay_kyburz
Hey funkaster!

I have a prototype MP game I am working on right now using HLAPI. I host a few
other web games on GC already.

How easy is it to set up a dedicated server right now that I can run my game
on? Documented anywhere?

Edit: to clarify, I don't need matchmaking at this stage, would be happy to
hard code an IP:Port and have a button connect to it directly.

~~~
funkaster
Hey! A lot of the connected games folks are in Berlin right now, for the
conference. I'll ping them because they might have a better answer for you (I
work at Analytics). If you want, shoot me an email: rolando at unity3d.com and
I'll try to contact you with the right team.

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icu
Seems like a missed opportunity for Microsoft's Azure... afaik a lot of Unity
games are in C# which seems like a stronger fit than Google. Maybe Google sees
this as a synergistic move with games on the Play Store?

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megaman22
I'm kind of surprised Microsoft has never made a serious push to buy Unity. I
know that I would be happy to be able to use Core and more modern C# than
Unity's rather old version of Mono.

~~~
icu
Well they still might. Nothing I've read so far about the Unity/Google
alliance makes me think that it's impossible, just unlikely. The Microsoft M&A
team will obviously be busy with GitHub but I would be surprised if no one
there thought of it already. It does however seem to me like Microsoft know
that Window's dominance is on the wane and they are pushing to be a software
developer's 'tool' vendor. Considering how important Unity is to game
development, from grass roots up to big triple A games, it does seem like an
aquision target.

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ralusek
For those unaware, I'm sure this is in competition with AWS's partnership with
CryEngine.

[https://aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/](https://aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/)

~~~
droidist2
So now it's time for Microsoft to partner with Unreal I guess?

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funkaster
for reference, here's the announcement on the Unity side:
[https://unity3d.com/connectedgames](https://unity3d.com/connectedgames)

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esturk
It's interesting they mentioned "...navigating 3D space in VR..." Because this
leads me to think that Waymo's driving simations are written in Unity. As
oppose to say Uber whose simulation appears to be written in Unreal from their
demo in GDC.

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mort96
That seems to be a pretty weak link? Literally every VR game involves some
amount of navigating 3D spaces.

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andrewingram
Is this tangential to what Improbable is building with Spatial OS, or
potentially a competitor?

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kotlin
Unity editor comes with Google Analytics and you can't even disable it in the
free version.

They're also collecting information from games built with Unity.

I feel Google just wants more data and Unity is already okay with that.

