Meta and game engine creator Unity announced they’re extending multi‑year platform support and an enterprise agreement that aims to deepen the companies’ VR partnership.
The News
The companies’ collaboration dates back to the early Oculus Rift era of the mid-2010s, when Unity became one of the first engines to support consumer VR alongside Epic Games’ Unreal Engine.
While neither Meta nor Unity has previously disclosed the timing of any sort of formal multi-year partnership agreements, Meta has clearly encouraged Unity in the past to develop tools so developers could more easily create VR games.
Now, Unity and Meta say in a press statement they’re extending this partnership, as Unity has pledged to continue to provide support for Meta’s VR platform.
“Meta is the world’s leading VR platform, and we’re proud that Unity powers the majority of its top‑selling VR games,” said Unity COO Alex Blum. “Great content is what makes VR successful. By pairing Meta’s hardware and OS leadership with Unity’s role as the assembly point for interactive content creation, we’re making VR accessible to more developers so they can develop, deploy, and grow their games and business applications on Meta’s VR devices.”
“Unity is a critical partner for Meta across multiple initiatives, including our investment in the VR developer community,” said Ryan Cairns, VP of VR at Meta. “By extending our long-standing partnership, we’re making it easier for developers to bring high‑quality, performant experiences to the millions of people who use Meta’s VR devices.”
My Take
Meta may be trimming its consumer VR ambitions, but it’s not entirely cutting the lifeline to its biggest, most influential software partner Unity, who is the maker behind what’s arguably the dominant game engine in VR today.
Neither company has specified just what went into the partnership, although I’s hazard a guess that some amount of cash was handed over for Unity to develop tools for VR—which it notably did well before the first big boom in consumer VR.
Unity helped develop things like early VR editors that allowed devs to create and test their games in-headset in addition to some of the more seemingly mundane things we take for granted today, like cross-platform build pipelines, single-pass stereo rendering—things that have benefitted everyone.
Granted, this partnership extension may be just as simple as Meta not actively letting an important partnership wither on the vine, although I’d consider it a promising signal that all is not lost, and that consumer VR will live on, albeit just not at the scale we saw before—because Meta shut down some of its most influential internal game studios.