Unity Engine to support Xbox 360, Xbox One, Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8

Microsoft and Unity have announced that the versatile Unity 3D game engine will be supported on the Xbox One, Xbox 360, Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8. The companies made the announcement at the Build 2013 developer conference.

Unity will be developing new tools that will support Microsoft’s next-gen console and a lot of its new features, including multiplayer matchmaking, SmartGlass, Kinect gesture recognition and Microsoft’s Azure cloud technology. Developers that work under microsoft Studios will get access to the developer tools at no cost.

“I’m also happy to say that the Windows Store Pro publishing add-on will be free when released,” writes Unity CEO and founder David Helgason on the company’s official blog. “You’ll be able to port your games, ads, training and educational apps-any kind of Unity-authored content-to both the Windows Store Apps and Windows Phone 8 platforms with a Unity Pro 4 license.”

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Now on Microsoft’s platforms!

According to, Steve Guggenheimer, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft’s Developer and Platform Evangelism group, “Microsoft’s gaming ecosystem will benefit from the wealth of ideas and imagination flowing from the Unity games development community.”

Unity has been taking great strides by making its developer tools available for different platforms, including iOS, Android and more recently, Tizen.

Back in May, Helgason had announced that the engine will be free to game developers on iOS and Android. According to the company, the decision was made in an attempt to push the “democratisation of game development further than ever before.” Earlier, licensing the engine for game development on Android or iOS would cost $800 (approximately Rs 44,376), but it has now been made completely free.

This, of course, is a great move for game developers, especially because of the popularity of the game engine. A wide variety of different games have been made with the engine, ranging from DOS-styled management games like Organ Trail: Director’s Cut to turn-based RPG Knights of Pen & Paper and even full-fledged 3D games like Surgeon Simulator 2013.