Unity's (U 3.47%) game development platform is one of the most popular for good reason. The company's suite of creation tools aims to make life easy for artists, designers, and developers. Outside of video games, Unity's platform is used in aerospace, film, medical, manufacturing, and other industries where real-time 3D content needs to be created.
While Unity's software provides the means to create world-class, triple-A video games, the process is still a years-long slog. A modern video game, with enormous worlds and high-fidelity graphics, requires an army of artists and designers to create those worlds and everything in them.
Unity sees artificial intelligence (AI) as a game changer for the video game industry. Not only can AI be infused with games to create more believable characters and experiences, but it can also be used by artists to greatly accelerate the process of making video games.
A transformative technology
On Tuesday, Unity made two separate AI-related announcements. The first will bring two new AI platforms to Unity, Muse and Sentis, that will help developers speed up content creation and build more realistic worlds. The second will open the door to third-party AI tools.
Unity Muse and Unity Sentis are currently in open beta, with an expected general availability date later this year. Unity Muse is aimed at helping artists and designers create 3D content quickly, even for those without advanced skills. By providing text-based prompts like those used with ChatGPT, developers can have Unity Muse generate and edit animations, textures, and 2D sprite assets. The tool also features a question-and-answer functionality that will help developers find solutions.
While Unity Muse is aimed at improving content creation workflows, Unity Sentis is aimed at making games more realistic. Unity Sentis allows AI models to be used at runtime, opening the door for more realistic characters and experiences. One potential example: non-player characters can use AI to behave realistically without that behavior needing to be hard-coded by developers.
These tools won't replace developers or artists, but they will help eliminate the repetitive tasks that slow down the video game development process. The result will be better games made faster with Unity's 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 will include generative AI solutions that allow developers to create content, integration solutions that make connecting to AI services simple, and behavior AI solutions that infuse AI-driven logic into games. There are currently 10 tools available in the marketplace, each vetted by Unity.
A potential competitive advantage
Unity competes with Unreal Engine from Epic Games, as well as proprietary game engines built by large game studios. As games become more complex and more costly to make, Unity can stand out by offering AI tools that greatly increase the productivity of developers, artists, and designers. For a game studio, justifying building and maintaining a custom game engine becomes more difficult as Unity piles on more productivity-boosting features.
Epic Games has its own set of AI-based tools for Unreal Engine, and the company won't sit still as Unity dives deeper into AI. But this is a case where the first mover will likely have a big advantage. A developer that decides to use Unity, perhaps drawn in by robust AI-driven tools, is likely going to stick with Unity. There are major switching costs involved in moving a project between game engines.
The barrier to making a video game has already come down tremendously thanks to Unity and other game engines. AI tools will further chip away at that barrier, allowing those without vast technical or artistic skills to use Unity to create high-quality games. Ultimately, that's good for the video game industry and good for Unity.
