Every quarter, most public companies make up an earnings call that shows how well they’ve been doing, what some areas of concern may be and the best areas to capitalize on. As for game development suite Unity, however, they put out a slightly different report. Known as “Games By The Numbers”, Unity’s report shows the use of the platform as it pertains to mobile gaming. The report shows analytics data pulled from games made in Unity to give insight into data that runs the gamut from basic and widely useful to niche enough to help an indie developer’s success with a single game.
Among the basic information, as you can see in the banner below, 220,000 unique games made in Unity were out in the wild in the first quarter of 2016, when the data for the report was pulled. During that period, 4.2 billion unique installs of Unity-made games took place on mobile devices, across 1.7 billion devices. In the mobile space, Unity is well-represented as one of the top game development tools in use, giving them a fairly unique opportunity to examine the gaming market at large and come up with unique data such as the fact that China was responsible for about 31 percent of all mobile game installs in the world, putting them at the top of the mobile gaming list. Android also took home a mobile gaming install volume crown, winning over 81 percent of global game installs. Of the iDevices that did install Unity games, the 5S and the 6 outpaced their higher-end brethren and the low-end 5C model by a wide margin.
The key figure of the whole report, of course, is that mobile gaming on Unity in general has grown about 30 percent since the last quarter of 2015. Whether that speaks to the growth of the platform or the growth of mobile gaming in general, by the nature of the data gathered, is impossible to tell. On Android, the biggest platform for Unity games, data also showed that Android versions 4.4 KitKat and 5.0 Lollipop dominated the install charts, signaling that developers would do well to ensure compatibility with those platforms despite their relative age. The iOS download numbers, on the other hand, point to versions 8.0 and 9.0 being the most popular. The report is geared toward developers, publishers, businesspeople, industry analysts, journalists and just about anybody else with an interest in the mobile gaming market at large.