One of the initiatives from Microsoft as part of their indie game push is to make the Unity engine and all its development tools available on the Xbox One and its software development kits (similar partnerships with Unity were also announced by Nintendo for the Wii U, incidentally). For those (developers and consumers) who were awaiting Unity on Xbox One, however, there is some bad news, reports OXM.
“During an interview with OXM in July, I misspoke and suggested that Unity for Xbox One would be available sometime in 2013,” Unity CEO David Helgason said in an email statement. “At that time, work had only just begun on those tools so while there will be a very few developers in very early testing phases this year, the Xbox One tools for Unity will not be widely available to developers until 2014.
“We are currently hard at work on the technology and are making great progress but we are not yet ready to announce any specific release windows. I apologize for any confusion my statement may have caused.”
He also about the relative advantages that Unity Engine would allow Xbox One developers.
“From a technical perspective the idea is that you work on your game once and then you can bring it to any platform,” he explained. “But we also make sure you can really make use of the hardware. So if you’re running a really high-end device, you want to go crazy with shaders, you want to go crazy with particle systems, you want to really use what is there.”
Looks like it will provide developers a genuine advantage once it goes live next year.