The world got inspired by some details leaked during the RIM investor call: Unity would be able to build to the RIM Playbook. Well, not quite, as our Union guys pointed out:
- The Unity Technologies / RIM relationship at present is built solely around games distribution through Union.
- We’ve made no commitment to supporting Playbook deployment from Unity at this time. While we’re hopeful that the new platform will emerge as a success that warrants this as a next step, as of today, the path for developers to the Playbook is through Union.
- RIM and Union will start by bringing dozens of Unity-authored titles to the Playbook this year. These titles may just be the first wave to go to this new device, but we’ll be doing our best in working with RIM to ensure that they’re actively promoted and that the platform will be a place where they can flourish and make developers lots of money.
This translates as “Unity won’t immediately allow the RIM’s toy as a build target, please email Union guys if you want to publish to the PlayBook now“.
This may change later on, especially if the PlayBook proves to be a great success. But now the investors seem to not like the direction the company is moving to: shares of the Canadian company tumbled 11%.
I am personally a great supporter of this deal, and I’ve been voting for RIM since “What’s really wrong with BlackBerry” article became a popular topic to say “boo RIM, boo!”. Basically Tomi Ahonen had more time, words and willingness to argue than me. So read on for the yin yang approach.
So when can I push my iOS game to the PlayBook after all?
As soon as RIM makes the PlayBook a great success, as soon as PlayBook users buy enough games to see the six number figures in app sales, as soon as developing, polishing and supporting a new build target is feasible.
What Union is about, is that guys work with selected developers and Unity codebase, to make their Unity games run on the target hardware. The difference is that we don’t polish, don’t perform versatile tests and don’t do the full support of the toolchain. Think early software version that is optimized for some customer needs, but not for the whole Unity users world.
However if you absolutely want to build your Unity game to the RIM PlayBook, Union guys is the right place to express it: union@unity3d.com
Welcome to =)
