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Best Unity game engine alternatives in 2024
Plenty of fish left in the sea even if you skip out on Unity
You may have heard of the latest Unity fiasco of the new download fees targeted at (successful) developers. Unity plans to charge for every app download (including re-installs) that uses the Unity Engine. Although this only targets a lower threshold of games (and even Unity has retracted on some of the original plans since), it still may impact some of Android's best games. There is also the worry that developers may even find a way to make you think twice before downloading a title to benchmark your new gaming phone.
Unity's blatant display of greed may have a silver lining
If everyone stops using the engine over poor pricing, we may see fewer asset flips on the Play Store
You might have noticed in the last week that Unity Technologies is in hot water thanks to announcing plans to change how it charges developers that use the Unity Engine. To nobody's surprise, the big-brain idea to charge developers a runtime fee on a per-install basis for games that can easily be installed by millions, where the fee could easily add up and harm a small publisher that goes viral, hasn't gone over so well. The internet proceeded to drag Unity through the mud, with game devs popping up left and right to announce plans to move away from the engine. The whole thing is a mess, with Unity currently working on changes to the policy as it tries to walk back the anger it brought on itself, having walked things back even further in the last 24 hours. Ultimately, Unity has outed itself as a risky partner for developing video games, which may very well be a good thing when it comes to mobile gaming.
What is Unity?
Unity is the game engine for just about everyone: Here's what it includes, how much it costs, and everything else to know
Indie and newly budding developers dream of making their first big game exactly how they picture it in their minds. These days, barriers have never been higher. Time, investment, and performance demands are enormous, even for mobile games. One of the most popular tools to handle those challenges is the Unity game engine. It's not only for small-time devs, either. If you've played games like Call of Duty Mobile or Pokémon Go, you've played a Unity game.
Your Chromebook may finally be a real gaming machine soon
Google partners with one of the biggest gaming platforms around
Demand for affordable, dependable PCs has never been higher as much of the world still reels from pandemic fallout, including chip shortages everywhere. Chromebooks have proven to be a winning formula that helped Google's platform get a leg up over Windows and macOS. As sales continues to shatter volume records, publishers are teaming up with Google to include their products in its thriving ecosystem, including one of the biggest gaming platforms around.
Activision and Tencent have teamed up to bring Call of Duty: Mobile to the West as a free-to-play release. The shooter was recently announced during a Unity keynote at the 2019 Game Developers Conference. This upcoming release is expected to bring together fan-favorite maps, modes, weapons, and characters from across the Call of Duty franchise, and it's currently available for pre-registration on the Google Play Store.
More than half of all new mobile games are built on Unity's development engine, with 3 billion devices reached across both Android and iOS. That's an enormous potential audience just waiting to be served with high-quality advertising, something Google seems to have cottoned on to. Companies using Google's AdMob platform are getting access to Unity's vast catalog of mobile games after the two announced a new strategic partnership.
Unity, if you're not familiar with game development, is a popular cross-platform game engine. Although Unity games can most often be found on PC and consoles, Android games utilizing the engine include Crossy Road, Monument Valley, Lara Croft: Relic Run, and more. Today Unity has announced the Vulkan Renderer Preview, finally allowing developers to use the Vulkan API with their games.
Star Trek fans who want to play video games based on their favorite franchise are constantly frustrated. Trek games are few and far between, and they seem to range from terrible (like the recent Faux Trek game for consoles from back in 2013), to promising but ultimately destroyed (like Star Trek Online), to blatant, lazy cash-grabs (like Star Trek Trexels). Is it really possible that there's a decent Star Trek game on the horizon? Signs point to "maybe."
Solitaire and sword-and-sorcery fantasy wouldn't seem like an obvious combination, but the rookie Android game from Arnold Rauers does just that. Card Crawl has you facing a giant troll in an oddball card game, mixing elements of solitaire, battle card games like Magic the Gathering, and roguelike dungeon crawlers. It's an interesting little game that lends itself towards more strategy than might be immediately apparent.
Game developers integrating with Google Play Games have seen a lot of improvements since the service was launched a year and a half ago at Google I/O 2013. There have been a lot of refinements to the experience for both players and developers, and new tools have made many of the tedious and time consuming chores much easier. Google has just launched a new Play Games Publishing API inspired by a similar interface that was added to the Play Store earlier this year. There is also a new Leaderboard feature that should help to prevent falsified scores. Finally, the Unity Plugin and C++ SDK have been updated to support more devices and add additional features.
Have you felt the call of video game development? Maybe you've seen some game featured in the news and thought, "That sucks, I can do way better." Well, put your money where your mouth is and prove it. StackSocial is giving customers the opportunity to name their own price and pick up two courses offered by Udemy on the topics of game development and design, or pick up two additional courses by beating the average price.
[Bonus Round] Enterchained, Tower Dwellers, Cricket Captain 2014, And The Boxtrolls: Slide 'N' Sneak
Welcome to the latest entry in our Bonus Round series, wherein we tell you all about the new Android games of the day that we couldn't get to during our regular news rounds. Consider this a quick update for the dedicated gamers who can't wait for our bi-weekly roundups, and don't want to wade through a whole day's worth of news just to get their pixelated fix. Today we've got a unique hack-and-slash brawler, a premium take on Clash of Clans, a game about some mystical and strange sport with insects and bats, and a licensed endless runner. Without further ado:
Today, the CEO of Unity Technology David Helgason announced a collaboration with Intel to add x86 support to the company's wildly popular Unity 3D game engine. The news was presented during the keynote speech at the Unite 2014 game developers conference alongside announcements for upcoming support of Samsung's Smart TVs and Google's Android TV.
The Unity game engine is one of the most common platforms for developers to create cross-platform games. It powers games like Shadowgun, Rochard, and Bad Piggies. Things are about to get much more attractive with version 5 of the Unity engine, which was just announced at GDC.
You may have noticed that we cover a lot of games here. That means that there are lots of developers who contact us hoping for some coverage... and some are more deserving than others. I literally cannot count how many half-hearted endless runners we've been shown, and it's only gotten worse since the rise and fall of Flappy Bird. So when someone shows us a game that turns the entire genre on its head and lets you play against those annoying running jerks, we stood up and took notice.
Blizzard released Diablo seventeen years ago, and its effect on the dungeon crawler genre is still being felt. Take Archangel for example: ostensibly a technical demo for the cross-platform Unity game engine, this title could have used almost any kind of format to show off its graphical prowess. Instead it's a pretty brazen Diablo clone, including the supernatural themes and "kill everything that moves" gameplay.
Today, in a post on the Android Developers Blog, Google announced two new tools that might be of interest to quite a few of the game developers out there. Among the releases is a new open-source 2D physics library called LiquidFun and a Unity plugin for adding Google Play Games support. These releases coincide with the news of additional game categories coming to the Play Store in February, which we covered earlier today.
Some of the features found in Technogym's newly announced UNITY Android-based cardiovascular user interface are nothing we haven't seen before. Things like tracking a user's heartbeat, how many miles they've ran, and how many calories they've burned have been around for years. Other aspects, like its gesture-based Android-based interface and app support turn a treadmill into a tablet competitor. The UNITY interface is built on top of Android 4.0, and the apps will be distributed through Technogym's own App Store.