This is a strategy to attract game developers when they are inexperienced so that they are loyal to Unity. Unity captures value through subscription pricing. As more developers join, more hardware players are incentivized to integrate with Unity and this in turn attracts even more developers. On the VR device side, it has integrated with all the major devices (Google, Oculus, Sony). Unity has more than 1 Million developers on its platform. Capturing mechanism # 1: Content creation platform (refer to exhibit 3 above) While it captures most value from its main platform (content creation platform), it also has 2 other platforms through which it captures value as well. Unity uses network effects to capture value. Thus, developers can build once and release to multiple devices (Oculus, Vive) with very minor changesĮxhibit 3: Unity’s Content creation platform How does Unity capture value? modifying a game from one platform to the other). By allowing developers to release games to various devices: Unity eases the porting process (i.e.Similarly, one can also drag and drop elements like “physics law” into the content so that all objects obey the law of physics like gravitation, Newton’s law of motion etc. if one wants to add a football in a VR application, one can easily “drag” a sphere from Unity’s database and “drop” it into the application. By providing a platform through which game developers can easily create games: Game creation in Unity is as simple as dragging and dropping elements.Pathways to a Just Digital Future Watch this tech inequality series featuring scholars, practitioners, & activists

Unity is a platform that enables developers to create VR games/content that can then be released onto various VR devices. This has led to a jump in Unity’s valuation it raised $181Mn in Series C financing in 2016 at a valuation of $1.5Bn. Exhibit 1: Unity’s dominance of VR content creationĩ0% of all VR content for Samsung Gear and 85% of content for Oculus has been made using Unity. Therefore, Unity has become the largest VR content creation platform in the world. A game is typically a 3D environment and the same tools can be used for creating a 3D environment in VR. How is a game engine relevant for VR? It so happens that many elements of a game engine are also useful for VR content creation. Unity is a game engine – a tool that lets game developers build games for different devices. Irrespective of who succeeds, there is one company that will come up on top – Unity. No one knows which headset will become the dominant headset. The VR space is crowded by many players – Facebook, Google, HTC.

Asset store unity vr object viewer