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I went to Unite 2025

Sat 13 December 2025 #UselessGameDev

Hello everyone! Long time no see. I hope to make more videos again soon, and since I went to Unite last week I thought now might be a great time to tell you all about everything I saw there. Like last year it was quite an event with a lot of cool people and great insights on the future of the Unity Engine.

Unity invited me to the event, so you might think the post you're about to read is biased, but you will quickly discover I have full liberty on what I am writing here.

Unite

This year there's a big emphasis on stability, and continuous stability.

Unity has been partnering with actual studios to dogfood their engine and make sure that every update is fully tested and doesn't break anything. They call that Production Verification (or PV). It's interesting to see this new, prudent approach. Someone from Unity said it best in a private conversation: it used to be that Unity would release a new version, absolutely unstable and bug-ridden, expected early adopters to do QA for them while "serious" projects stayed on the last LTS waiting for the stabilization, and couldn't upgrade for a whole year.

Today it's nice to see them actually testing their own engine in actual games, but also taking steps to make sure each upgrade is painless. Unite 25 Keynote

Little to no mention of Generative AI, which was nice to see. There's still plenty of AI, in places where honestly I don't mind it and I think it makes sense, such as data analysis and marketing. But it's reassuring to see them sort of pivot away from the GenAI hype that I think would lead them nowhere and is very much a bubble.

Unity is building an agent API to let developers interface AI agents with the engine in a "secure" way. To me, that is the right philosophy. Rather than trying to be an everything app with AI, cars, cloud storage, online servers, ads, industry, and whatever else they started without finishing, try to be an open app, that facilitates integrating with other solutions from companies with more funding and focus to make one thing right. Do one thing right, and please let that be the game engine.

The Big Stuff

This year there wasn't much in the way of sensationalism, and I think that's a good thing. Unity mostly showed they're now dedicated to making a better engine for actual developers.

Nevertheless, highlights from the keynote and technical roadmap include:

CoreCLR in Unity 6

This to me will be the biggest improvement accross the board, with better performance at every level. If they manage to ship that without breaking everyone's project, it will be incredible. It's apparently coming progressively in Unity 6.x, with a tentative full release in Unity 6.8.

The Platform Toolkit

looks great. If you've ever tried to develop for consoles, or just different marketplaces at the same time like Steam and the Epic Games Store, you know how painful it is to support each platform, with its own API and stuff. This toolkit will provide an abstraction layer for implementing the common stuff such as Accounts, Save, Achievements, with a code you write once, and they'll manage the specific implementation for each platform under the hood. This looks super cool, I know it will dramatically improve the ability to publish to game consoles, especially since the toolkit will come with additional features such as simulating some certification scenarios.

Unity IAP comes to Unreal Engine

Tim Sweeney shows up An unexpected moment of the keynote was seeing Tim Sweeney show up. Yes, that Tim Sweeney.

Turns out, Unity Commerce is a pretty solid platform and its SDK is coming to Unreal Engine. Personally I don't care for it, but I'm sure it's a way for both companies to make more money, while signaling that they are open to collaboration, which is nice.

If you'd like more details about the general state and direction I recommend you watch the Keynote session.

The Small Stuff

During the roadmap session, there were a ton of features I personally don't care about regarding monetization and marketing and such, and on the technical side there were actually quite a lot of smaller announcements as well, so here's a quick list of all the things I thought were interesting enough for me to write down:

Some of these definitely aren't "small" (ECS for all 👀👀👀) but they're a long way away so they didn't expand much on those subjects.

If you'd like more details I recommend you watch the Roadmap session. Also checkout the Unity 6.3 release post.

Cool talks from Unite 2025

This year I didn't attend many talks, but there are a few I think you should watch if like me you're interested in performance and stability:

The videos are not out yet but they should be soon. I'll put the links everywhere once they are.

Is Unity Back?

Unity 7 seems to be a long way away, but it seems they're actually committed to making Unity 6 a great version first, including some of the features that were planned for Unity 7, before thinking about the actual Unity 7.

It's not all gravy though, and while the event is designed to make you feel excited about the products and the company, Unity as a company is still an entity that I don't trust, and I'm not even talking about the runtime fee nonsense.

It's weird to see how Unity has found a new developer-first philosophy and forgot to tell the Sales department that they should stop being hostile to the users. They are very much still very aggressively trying to get people to move away from the engine with prohibitively high Pro license prices, asking us information about our clients to see if they can somehow force us to switch to enterprise, or just increasing the price because they feel like including this thing you don't use like 50GB of Unity Asset Manager, or Apple Vision Pro support.

It's a shake-down. They see people are leaving for greener pastures and so they're squeezing the remaining users for more money in order to compensate. With Godot rapidly evolving and changing the landscape, there will have to be a reckoning.

So to the big question: is Unity back? I'd say they're not quite out of the weeds yet. It really seems like they have found the right compass again, but they have a looong way to go to come back on the right path, and then catch up with the delay they have accumulated all this time.

Unity still has big issues when it comes to rebuilding the community and trust, and I truly hope they can do it before it's too late, because chatting with people in the industry and even at the event, I totally see a situation where in three years, Godot will be the Blender of game development, and if Unity hasn't adapted to that, even I (and the studios I work for) will move away from it.

I had the privilege to be included in a few behind-closed-doors private roundtables with Unity, and I'm cautiously optimistic with what I'm hearing from Matt Bromberg. If they manage to bring it back, I'm excited for the future of Unity.

The Unity Insiders

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