This week, Unity developers from around the world gathered in Barcelona, Spain for Unite 2025. Today’s Keynote packed over an hour of exciting feature reveals and gaming success stories that highlighted Unity’s commitment to supporting you as you develop, deploy, and grow your games. There was also a special surprise visit from Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney, who joined Unity President and CEO Matt Bromberg onstage to talk about how both teams are working together to create more opportunities for the gaming community.
The Keynote was livestreamed on Twitch and YouTube, but we’ve got you covered if you just want the highlights.
“There has never been a more innovative and successful game development community in history than all of you,” said Matt Bromberg, kicking off the show. “Everyone at Unity is working to serve your dreams. To ensure that you have the power and the control to create your vision, we build and maintain a cross-platform ecosystem that will support you from the day you first install the Editor, to the day you find yourself operating a live game with millions of players.”
2025 has been a tremendous year for games, and we were thrilled to welcome the devs behind some of the most exciting success stories of the year onstage, including members of the teams behind hits like PEAK, PGA TOUR 2K25, All in Hole, and social gaming powerhouse SciPlay.
Today we unveiled our end-to-end solutions that allow you to develop, deploy and grow your games in the Unity ecosystem. We announced a new package to simplify publishing multiplatform release builds, incremental improvements to 2D tooling, an industry collaboration tool called Unity Studio, and an upcoming AI Gateway. We also shared more information about recently announced solutions including our new In-App Publishing (IAP) features and partnerships, expanded user acquisition toolset in Unity Vector, transparency in our Developer Data Framework, and how we’re supporting greater safety and speed in your development with our Core Standards and Production Verification programs.
For many, one of the show’s biggest surprises was an appearance by Epic Games’ Tim Sweeney. “Just like the early days of the web, we believe that companies need to work together and respect mutual customer relationships – and that’s why I’m here in Barcelona,” said Sweeney. “Together, Epic Games and Unity are taking steps to build towards more interoperability in the gaming ecosystem.”
Together, the two gaming company CEOs announced several initiatives, including a partnership that will bring Unity games into Fortnite, creating more opportunity and value for players and developers. Unity will also bring Unreal Engine support to our cross-platform commerce platform to give Unreal developers more choice for managing everything from their digital catalogs and payment providers to web shops across PC, mobile, and web. Developers will be able to manage pricing, promotions, and live operations with Unreal Engine, coming early next year.
We’ve evolved Unity to focus on being the most stable and performant solution across platforms, and to deliver new levels of iteration speed by reducing build times and time to enter play mode. With a growing developer trend for more creative games coming from shorter dev cycles, we’re leaning in to meet the industry where it is.
Zorro Svärdendahl shared the story behind the hit climbing co-op PEAK, created by Landfall Games and Aggro Crab. The game came together in just 10 weeks of full-time development, which he credits to fast iteration and constant play-testing to find the fun.
“I’m not sure we would have been able to get there if we weren’t in Unity 6 – we might not have been able to make this game a year earlier,” he said. “The fact that we could just slap a bunch of rocks together and call it a mountain without worrying about how to render it helped us focus on what the game was.”
We’ve changed how we build the Unity Engine, the beating heart of our ecosystem, by implementing Production Verification for everything we ship. This means partnering with studios throughout productions to witness their needs firsthand, work that’s already paying off with far fewer bugs and vastly improved build times – all improvements that will make their way into the Unity 6 series.
We saw how the Unity Studio Productions (USP) team tested Unity tools and features in Survival Kids, Unity’s first end-to-end game development project in partnership with KONAMI. The small team production verified a wide range of technologies while developing the game, but they also tested GameShare, one of the most exciting features introduced by Nintendo Switch™ 2.
Nintendo Switch is a registered trademark of Nintendo.
James Seaboyer, head of HB Studios, joined us onstage as we announced a new partnership between 2K Games and Unity – including a brief video cameo from Tiger Woods to share news about PGA TOUR 2K25. James highlighted the technology behind the game’s stunning high-definition graphics and shared that “our partnership with Unity is allowing us to bring all of this to Nintendo Switch 2,” while Unity continues to develop and production verify new tech.
The commitment to strengthening the ecosystem extends beyond production verification. We also announced that we’re rolling out Unity Core Standards, a new set of technology and guidelines to make implementing third-party tooling safer and more reliable than ever. And to accelerate every part of your workflow, we also unveiled our upcoming AI Gateway, which will bring agentic assistance to everything from prototyping to performance optimization.
The Develop portion of the keynote wrapped with a look at new incremental improvements to 2D tooling, including new features that power greater creative flexibility, like streamlined workflows for 3D characters in 2D worlds.
Extensive platform support has always been our priority, helping you reach your players wherever they are. Unity supports over 25 platforms, and was ready with launch-day support for both Nintendo Switch 2 and Android XR so you can target both of these new platforms from day 1.
Unity’s new Platform Toolkit is one of the most exciting announcements at this year’s Keynote. Designed to simplify multiplatform development, this new package helps you integrate common SDK features like account management, achievements, controller ownership, game saves, and more – implementing them just once, with the toolkit providing support for all major console, mobile, and desktop platforms, including Steam.
Platform Toolkit also provides in-Editor tools to help you test and iterate more quickly during development, while also helping you to more reliably pass platform certification.
We also shared our new approach to data, the Data Developer framework, which gives you greater control over how your data is collected and processed. We described how this framework offers you configurable, easy-to-understand data collection and usage settings in Unity that you can extend to your players via intent-based consent APIs and controls.
Data from inside and outside your game is incredibly valuable – information about your game and players is critical to scaling your game’s reach and playability. Take, for example, Diagnostics, which lets you tap into game health data to tweak game performance on specific devices to unlock unparalleled performance and stability.
We recently extended our In-App Purchasing (IAP) solution with a new cross-platform commerce platform that lets you choose web shops and third-party payment processing systems to lower platform fees and keep more of your revenue. Our system is designed for flexibility, so you can choose how to optimize your pricing and business model using a single integration to manage payment providers and storefronts. We’ve already partnered with payment providers Stripe and Coda, and it will work with games built in both Unity and Unreal Engine. You can register for Early Access here.
Forrest Stowe and Tim Moore from SciPlay joined Unity’s Rambod Kermanizadeh onstage to talk about why they opted in for IAP.
“The rules around digital commerce are evolving, distribution models are in flux, and suddenly every gaming company is being asked to solve problems that used to belong squarely in the platform’s domain,” says Forrest. “So the value of Unity’s ecosystem isn’t about a single feature; it’s about a partner who’s investing in the unglamorous, deeply operational parts of the stack.”
“People talk about global launches like they’re one event. They’re not. They’re a thousand micro-launches wrapped in legal, cultural, and behavioral nuance,” Tim explained. “So having the ability to tune an experience by region (legally, behaviorally, and operationally) isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s table stakes.”
Greater flexibility remained the central theme in a discussion of how Unity Vector is powering user acquisition with intelligent matches between players and in-game ads.
It draws upon insights from how developers build games and visibility across billions of player sessions around the world, driving around 15-20% increase in installs and up to 20% boost in in-app purchase spend by acquired players.
Naveen Mawani from Homa came onstage to share his team’s experience with Unity Vector for All in Hole, which helped the team double their percentage of players buying items and their spend. “When we launched All In Hole with Unity Vector during soft launch, everything changed,” he said. “In the very first month, we were getting better‑quality players, who stayed in the game and spent more time in it, at a lower cost than other networks.”
The Keynote closed by returning focus to you, our community. We shared two new templates to help you develop multiplayer games: a third-person gameplay sample that uses Netcode for GameObjects and Building Blocks for quick iteration, and a new multiplayer first-person shooter template that’s extensible and networked by default, leveraging the same bridge between GameObjects and Entities that the USP team developed to ship Survival Kids. Both templates will be available in the Hub with the GA release of Unity 6.3.
We also took a look at some of the absolutely incredible nominees for the 2025 Unity Awards, with just a few days of voting left for you to help pick this year’s winners before the November 21 deadline (ahem). Seeing the incredible creativity of all those games felt like the perfect way to end our Keynote and kick off the rest of Unite 2025.
Watch the Keynote on YouTube, and check out our livestream coverage of the event. Stay tuned for more from Unite as we bring all the event’s sessions to you on demand in coming weeks.
