Key Takeaways from the Unity Game Studio Report 2018

2 min read

The Unity Team has come out with Unity Game Studio Report 2018 to share insights of its relevant benchmarking data on the existing studios with other emerging studios. The aim is to share information with the emerging studios on how the fellow creative studio teams operate and make successful games.

The Unity Game Studio Report 2018 has been collated based on a study with the leads of 1,445 small and medium independent creative studios (ranging in size from 2 to 50 employees) from across the globe. This includes the studios using Unity as their main game engine as well as the studios using other game engines.

Unity Game Studio Report 2018

Let’s have a look at few of the major highlights of this report.

Studios are recent, independent and compact

As per the 2018 Unity Game Studio report, 91% of the surveyed studios that have been recently established are fully independent and the majority of them are developing their own IPs.

Studios develop, publish and promote games on their own

Unity Game studio report 2018

40% of the existing and emerging studios are focussed on developing AR/VR, which proves that platforms are becoming more established among independent creators. The majority of studios are publishing their project themselves. For marketing, the popular media for these studios are Facebook and Twitter.

The Unity Game Studio report also highlights that 53% of the studios monetize their projects via premium payments, while 36% of them plan on monetizing with the freemium model.

Studios need a wide range of tools to run

69% of the emerging studios use team collaboration along with cloud storage solutions. Less than 40% of the studios use analytics to analyze players’ behavior.

Studios run on a lean budget

Unity Game studio report 2018

As mentioned in the Unity Game Studio Report, approximately 60% of the budget for all studios comes from freelancing and self-funding. But, a small part from their budget still gets spent on training the employees.

The report also highlights the hard work that the majority of the independent game studios put in to continue to establish themselves.

“Not only do (independent developers) bring their creative vision to life, they do so with ingenuity, flair, and lots of bootstraps, overcoming challenges posed by constrained resources with imagination, moxie, and dedication to their love of creating games”, as written by Jen MacLean, Executive Director at the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) in the report foreword.

For more information, check out the complete Unity Game Studio Report 2018.