On Thursday, Unity Software (U 3.47%) delivered its second quarterly earnings report as a publicly traded company. The video game design platform purveyor still isn't profitable, but it managed to pare its loss and deliver better results than many expected.

Revenue for the company's fourth quarter was $220.3 million, 39% higher than the Q4 2019 tally. The company managed to narrow its non-GAAP (adjusted) net loss slightly across that stretch; it came in at $27.2 million for this latest quarter, or $0.10 per share. The year-ago quarter's shortfall was nearly $28.7 million.

Young man playing game on smartphone.

Image source: Getty Images.

On average, analysts were modeling revenue of $204.2 million and an adjusted per-share net loss of $0.14.

Unity is a real force in its business. The company said that mobile games made with its tools comprised 71% of the most popular titles for that media during the quarter. On the player end, the number of monthly active end users who played games made or operated with Unity hit an average of 2.7 billion, a robust 63% increase over the same period of 2019.

The company proffered guidance for both the current quarter and the full year. For the latter, it believes its revenue will total $950 million to $970 million, which would represent year-over-year growth of at least 23%. As with Q4, it anticipates an adjusted loss but one that is narrower than the 2019 showing, at $90 million to $105 million.

Looking past that, Unity said that "Our goal is to build a company that delivers revenue growth of approximately 30% over the long run."

It added that "it is likely that some quarters and years will be higher or lower than we expect, but even so, we believe the opportunities in front of us make such a goal achievable."