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How Unity3D Became a Game-Development Beast
Nerval's Lobster writes "In the early 2000s, three young programmers without much money gathered in a basement and started coding what would become one of the most widely used pieces of software in the video game industry. 'Nobody really remembers how we survived in that period except we probably didn't eat much,' said David Helgason, the CEO and co-founder of Unity Technologies, maker of the Unity3D game engine. A decade later, untold numbers of developers have used Unity3D to make thousands of video games for mobile devices, consoles, browsers, PCs, Macs, and even Linux. The existence of Unity3D and similar products (such as the Unreal Engine and CryEngine) helped democratize game development, making the kinds of tools used by the world's largest game companies available to developers at little or no cost. This has helped developers focus less on creating a video game's underlying technology and more on the artistic and creative processes that actually make games fun to play. In this article, Helgason talks about how Final Cut Pro helped inspire his team during the initial building stages, how it's possible to create a game in Unity without actually writing code, and how he hopes to make the software more of a presence on traditional consoles despite Unity3D being several years late to supporting the PS3 and Xbox 360."
Too many layers of abstraction. Think of this as the SDL of 3d game engines
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
SDL is actually quite thin, close to hardware, abstraction layer.
Unity3d can build a target application that runs on Linux, but the development environment only runs on Windows or Mac
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
but you're comparing unity with CryEngine... when you should be comparing it with Irrlicht or Ogre or similar.
Because when a game is released they tend not to plaster "Made with Unity" on it.
However, if you look at the games list there may be a few on there you'd recognise: http://unity3d.com/gallery/made-with-unity/game-list
Sure, there's alot of mobile games on there, like Bad Piggies and Temple Run 2, but there's a few really good PC indie games, like Dungeonland, Pid, Guns of Icarus and Endless Space