Game Dev

Unity games IN Fortnite!

The biggest surprise of the Game Engine industry has just happened! Unity and Unreal working together!

This week was Unite, Unity's annual conference, and during the keynote the Unity CEO, Matthew Bromberg, introduced the CEO of Epic Games, Tim Sweeney, onto the stage. The reason? Two things.

First, Unity's In-App Purchases system will be available to Unreal Engine developers. This is a system that Unity built which allows you to directly charge your players (using Stripe) which avoids the Google and Apple 30% cut, which is only possible because of Epic's legal wins.

Secondly, Tim announced that soon in 2026 Unity Games will be available directly inside Fortnite. This is MASSIVE news! You probably already know that Fortnite is massive with over 100 million monthly active users. Nowadays discoverability is one of the biggest challenges of any game dev, it's hard to find players for your games, so the fact that soon you will get access to a bonus audience of 100 million people is a MASSIVE deal!

In terms of details there isn’t much right now, there is a blog post on the Unreal Engine blog but no mention on how this will actually work. Perhaps Fortnite will launch an executable? Or maybe Unity will add a new Build Target to build some file that runs directly inside Fortnite?

Regardless of how they implement it this will be massive news. Soon enough there will be stories of a game made with Unity and running inside Fortnite that found massive success!

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Game Dev

The Future of Unity

Other than that very surprising Epic news, there were lots of awesome stuff talked about and announced at Unite.

First is how Unity Next Gen (or Unity 7) is no longer a thing. That might sound bad but it's actually a really great thing. Instead of making a massive version change that would break almost every project, instead of that they are just continuing to build upon the solid base of Unity 6.

Breaking changes always suck but I was willing to accept it considering all the benefits of Unity 7, I thought it would be impossible to implement all their goals without breaking changes (DOTS x GO, CoreCLR, Asset Importing) but apparently it is possible! So I'm definitely very happy to see this. All the benefits previously mentioned for Unity 7 are still coming, just coming in incremental updates without breaking changes which is awesome!

CoreCLR (which has a ton of benefits) will be coming in various stages, starting with an internal prototype in early 2026, and an experimental release by the end of the year with 6.7 LTS.

ECS for All (merging Entities and Game Objects) is on track for 6.6 (H2 next year)

Platform Toolkit is a set of tools to implement a single API once, and easily test and build your games to all consoles. This is a massive change that should make game porting much much easier while also making the process of going through certification much more painless.

Production Verification is what Unity calls their program where they work with select developers to validate new engine versions in a production environment. This leads to more stable versions of both Unity itself and various packages.

UI Toolkit continues improving (tutorials soon!) BUT importantly Unity UI is NOT going away. This is a very welcome change considering how last year they mentioned that Unity UI’s days were numbered, so I'm happy to see them go back on that since I still love working with Unity UI for runtime, and UI Toolkit for Editor tools. This is again another instance of them prioritizing NOT doing breaking changes to the engine which is a very good thing.

The Render Pipeline merging goal is moving according to plan, with URP and HDRP sharing more and more in 6.3 until in the future URP reaches feature parity with HDRP and only one render pipeline remains.

Two multiplayer templates will be coming soon, one on a third person action adventure platformer, built on Netcode for Game Objects; and one on a First Person Shooter using a netcode that merges NGO with Entities, just like Unity's own game, Survival Kids, used.

Unity Version Control is also getting updates as did the Unity Hub, Unity Core Standards is a way to securely validate packages, the Editor is improving in various ways, Graph Toolkit becoming a core module, Graphics improvements, etc.

So yup a lot of stuff coming in the future, and most importantly is the change in the way that Unity themselves see the future. More incremental updates and fewer breaking changes, I think that's an extremely good thing!

There is a video of the Keynote and another one for the Roadmap.

Gaming

The Game Awards Nominees!

The Game Awards has unveiled their nominees for all the categories! As always they are all absolutely excellent games.

Here are the ones for the big award, Game Of The Year:

• Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

• Death Stranding 2: On the Beach

• Donkey Kong Bananza

• Hades II

• Hollow Knight: Silksong

• Kingdom Come: Deliverance II

There are 29 categories total with hundreds of games nominated. You can vote for your favorites on the website.

And there's also some interesting controversy around one nominee for Best Debut Indie Game. There were five nominees and one was Megabonk, however after being nominated the developer went on Twitter to say:

Which of course just adds more fuel to the fire of speculation that the dev behind it is actually Dani. I wonder if this is just a clever marketing plan.