Unity kicked off Unite 2026 today with its customary presentation of upcoming Unity 6 features—features closely watched by the Unity development community that’s still stabilizing after the 2023 Runtime Fee fracas.
The company opted for a more conservative roadmap this year with fewer flashy announcements. But the major highlights do follow through on promises of technical and operational stability described by CEO Matthew Bromberg in our conversation at GDC 2025. Two of the most impactful updates include a “Platform Toolkit” that simplifies multi-platform releases and enhancements to its native in-app purchase dashboard. That’s meant to accommodate ever-increasing purchasing platforms developers are using following loosening restrictions on platforms like the Google Play and iOS App stores.
The company has already struck deals with payment processors Stripe and Coda to let developers hook up their external web stores.
In an interview with Game Developer, Unity senior vice president of engine product Adam Smith explained that the Platform Toolkit should enable developers to only have to write one line of Unity C# code for platform-specific features like platform achievements. The Unity engine would then run through the Toolkit’s SDK and convert that logic into the necessary format for each different platform, so developers don’t have to execute the same task three or more times.
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It’s one way Smith says the company can speed up developer “velocity,” a philosophy informing other key updates like new security guidelines Unity Core Standards and AI-based features like Unity AI Gateway and Unity Vector AI (though the jury’s still out on if generative AI can actually speed up what’s slowing down game developers).
Smith pointed to Unity-based games like Peak, BallxPit, and Hollow Knight: Silksong as examples of the kind of success it wants to enable with upcoming Unity updates—and while he praised those games as the “out of nowhere” hits of the year, he stressed the company will represent “studios of all scales” in this year’s keynote.
New “Unity Core Standards” aim to provide long-term stability for third-party tools
Smith explained that the new Unity Core Standards came out of many conversations with studios still supporting 10-year-old games made with third-party tools in Unity. “When you talk to many studios have had a game and live operations that long, they’re kind of stuck with the decision that they made 10 years ago or more,” he said. Older SDKs may not be well supported or become vulnerable to new security breaches, and the Core Standards are designed to shore up the long-term viability of a studio’s technology stack.
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He added that these Standards are also being established to support an increasing number of third-party applications being brought natively into the Unity engine like Stripe, Coda, or AI tools. “As we focus more on extensibility of the engine and enabling the community to be part of the R&D advancement of the engine, we need to make sure that…we’re able to provide visibility over these SDKs and verify meet the same quality standards as our own first-party technologies.”
Smith said that in the last year the most common request he’s heard from Unity developers is to support launching on as many versions as possible and to ensure their games are performing as well as possible on the many iterations of devices like the iPhone. “It’s less about feature-driven evolution, it’s about the iteration time of the editor,” he said, also addressing feedback want more tools to help them deploy faster in programs like Early Access so they can “find the fun” faster and gather sharper metrics to improve gameplay.
“For many of these smaller studios it’s easier to build the front end of the game than all the backend systems,” he said. “Technology is just so much more difficult for for many people who are aspiring creatives that never thought about, you know, network connectivity and player database management and persistence, etc.”
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Simplifying those tasks for developers will, according Smith words, continue the company’s founding mission of democratizing game development.