I was planning on writing up another tutorial today but decided to take a time out to bring you some interesting statistics regarding the Unity 3D plugin. These are all from the third quarter of 2009.

If you remember the days when Unity was a mac only authoring environment, there was some opposition to bringing it to windows. While it was always able to publish content to the Microsoft OS, everything had to be made on a mac. Since it came to windows (only a few months ago), sales of Unity have doubled (100% growth).

While no one outside the company has exact details regarding the number of plugin installs, some Unity staff have hinted that, as of writing, it is in the 8 figure range with around a million installs a month.

The following stats are based on system information at the time the plugin was downloaded.

Interestingly, Vista is catching up to XP, not that it affects how you work. Admittedly, I'm still using Windows XP and am intending to skip vista altogether if I can. Of more importance are the stats below. Here we can see which shader model (for Windows users) plugin users have. It's important to make sure that, when publishing your content to the web, that it's likely to run on peoples machines. Thankfully, Unity has a useful little tool which allows you to emulate older graphics hardware ('edit' > 'graphics emulation'). From there you can see if your shaders are likely to be visible on older machines.

Something else which is good know are the most common desktop resolutions of plugin users. Widescreen resolutions are doing quite well, but a lot of people are still using 1024x768. This isn't an issue for me as, these days, I design my webplayers to expand to the full width and height of the browser window.

That just about covers it. The moment that the concrete number of plugin installs becomes available, I'll be sure to update the blog.

Update

The following comment was made yesterday by Aras Pranckevičius, a Unity developer. Having two staff commenting on these statistics gives the numbers a little more credence.

Comment from: Aras Pranckevičius [Visitor] · http://aras-p.info
The number of web player installs is about 14 million since 2008 February. We don't have definite number of installs that were before that.

Thank you to Aras for for confirming the figures.

Thanks for your time and happy dev'ing!