Unity: Piracy Driving Huge Growth In Asian Regions

Unity Technologies said this week that its revenue intake is up 258.7 percent year-on-year in the Pan-Asia region, noting that piracy is helping to drive demand for the Unity tools. Speaking to Edge during Unite 11 in San Francisco, Unity general manager of Asia John Goodale explained revenue growth in the region has been helped along by piracy of the software. "In China, quite candidly, what is driving a lot of our growth, is piracy," he explained. "Even through a pirated version of Unity, we can still make revenue from that customer, for example through the Asset Store." "We don't condone it, but it's also something we don't super-aggressively pursue," he continued. He revealed that the company has seen revenue growth of 280 percent in China year-on-year, while it has seen even more significant growth in Japan of 897 percent. Goodale also noted that the top four cities for monthly Unity user sessions are currently Seoul, Beijing, Shanghai and Nei-Hu, all part of the Pan-Asia region. Earlier this week, Unity unveiled version 3.5 of its popular game development environment, to be released later this year with a raft of new features.