Huawei and Unity alongside developers

Huawei and Unity collaborate to save time and resources for UDP developers

What is Unity?

Unity Technologies is the manufacturer of Unity, one of the most popular graphics engines used in 3D and 2D games. Unity is a cross-platform graphics engine that allows the development of video games and other interactive content, such as architectural visualizations or 3D animations in real time.

More than 1.3 million developers leverage its tools to produce high quality graphics games for iOS, Android, consoles, PCs and online games.

Following the release of Unity 5, Unity Technologies was criticized for the large amount of games quickly produced and released on Steam by inexperienced developers. CEO John Riccitiello said this has been one of the many effects of Unity's success in democratizing game development, even though most people are technology consumers and not creators.

Unity offers users the most powerful and accessible tools to create, use and monetize gaming experiences. Applications created with Unity are already used on 3 billion devices around the world and have been installed over 37 billion times in the last year. Today, 50% of the 1000 best mobile gaming apps in the world are built with Unity, and half of all new mobile games are made with Unity.

The challenge of Unity and Huawei

The gaming market is increasingly becoming global, with the Asia Pacific region accounting for over 50% of global revenue even though the Android ecosystem in the Asia Pacific region is highly fragmented. For game developers, this global distribution presents both huge opportunities and new challenges.

In general, this means that developers have to manage different software development kits (SDKs), proprietary payment systems, as well as governance and regulatory conditions for each app market in which they publish their games. Furthermore, developers must take this into account whenever an update is available on the store.

Unity Distribution Portal (UDP) is one of Unity's most powerful apps. The app allows smartphone game developers to reach and interact with their players with less effort but more efficiently across various distribution channels. With UDP, developers can deploy across multiple store platforms through a single hub, truly enabling "build once, publish anywhere". Launched in open beta about a year ago, UDP already hosts more than 700 apps with a total of 20,000 developers from over 2,000 organizations active on the app.

How Unity and Huawei collaborate to help developers

Huawei and Unity have teamed up to help developers create great games and unlock new opportunities by collaborating on the UDP app.

Unity has integrated Huawei's game services kit in UDP. This means that if UDP developers have already published games on other stores, they don't have to review the SDKs again but can publish to AppGallery with just a few steps. It also allows developers to easily create features such as achievements, leaderboards, player logins, and stats linked to Huawei AppGallery. Currently, this is the first and only UDP integrated game service kit. Unity has also integrated the Account and In App Purchases (IAP) kits into UDP. Overall, this saves developers a significant amount of time and resources when posting to AppGallery.

As part of this process, Huawei provided Unity with round-the-clock technical support to ensure the integration was completed in a timely manner.

In the future, Unity will integrate more features of the HMS Core Kit into UDP, further reducing costs and saving valuable time for developers who wish to publish and play their games on Huawei AppGallery.

How to connect your game with HMS in 5 easy steps

1. Register your app on Huawei Developer

2. Import the plugin into your Unity project

3. Configure your manifest

4. Connect your game with HMS managers

5. Connect HMS callbacks to your game

If you are a developer, log in with your Huawei ID and follow the instructions at the link https://developer.huawei.com/consumer/en/verified/enrollment

Sources

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_(motore_grafico)

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_Technologies

https://developer.huawei+.com/consumer/en/notice/20200506/