Mozilla announces partnership with Unity Technologies

PanARMENIAN.Net - Firefox-maker and Javascript-manager Mozilla is announcing a partnership with Unity Technologies, according to VentureBeat.

The gaming giant known for its multiplatform gaming engine will be releasing its newest version, Unity 5, later this year and it will be equipped with a Web Graphics Library (WebGL) add-on. This partnership will bring Unity-authored games to the browser without the need for players to download plug-ins.

This announcement is coming at the heels of Mozilla’s partnership with Epic Games, the game-engine market leader, revealed just last week.

The partnership is aimed at furthering Mozilla’s efforts of bringing gaming to the web, courtesy of WebGL and the high-speed and performance Javascript dialect, asm.js. Both partnerships will eliminate the user friction caused by plug-in downloads as players can now directly play games in near-native speed.

“This was easily the most requested thing from developers when we started talking to them [about web-based gaming],” said Mozilla game platform strategies Martin Best about bring Unity to the browser.

Unity’s biggest draw is that it enables multiplatform publishing of games along with its “Assets Store,” which is akin to web development’s front-end libraries (web developers can assemble these instead of coding a project from scratch). The release of the WebGL add-on will essentially make the browser an additional platform on which Unity-authored games can be played, VentureBeat says.

Unity also has over 2.2 million registered developers, according to Best, making it an attractive partner to Mozilla.

“We develop 100 percent open-source code,” said Best. “So the more partners we work with, the more robust we can make this platform. The more partners we work with, the more appealing it becomes to adopt these standards across the web.”