Unity's David Helgason

In terms of acquisitions it's been really crazy. The question is whether it's maxed out. There are still acquisitions going on, Google is acquiring a couple of companies every month and even Apple is acquiring companies. Maybe it's just because the big companies are sitting on a lot of cash that they want to be a part of this new market. I suspect they think that by taking those skillsets and those penetrations and by putting their high-brand know how they can unlock value, but it hasn't really shown itself yet.

So we think this is the best trend ever, and it of course goes against our indie ethos. But I think it's going to be good for everyone, including the indies, because the thing is we have not gained significant traction with the real social games companies. Zynga has not launched a Unity game, Playdom hasn't launched one, Playfish never did. However, all the big media companies like EA, they're using it. With a brand you have more installation power. The combination of a better installed rate, which we're hoping to launch very, very shortly, and strong brands and the social game knowledge has got us very excited. Once that is out it also levels the playing field a bit more for the smaller companies also using Unity. Because Unity for a lot of games turns out to be cheaper to use than Flash. If you're doing something with reasonably high-end graphics you're using 3D models anyway, and people are going through those torturous experiences of fitting that in Flash. You end up with larger file sizes, slower loads, torturous update cycles. I think Unity can level the playing field there as well.

It's hard to answer that because it's such early stage for those guys that we haven't seen any traction at all. We've never encountered a customer that's said "we're going to go with one of the others". The only thing we can really do is run faster and faster. We're in this incredibly lucky position in that we're profitable, we're 75 people with a 55-person engine team and the other 20 providing infrastructure, sales, marketing. With Unity 3, which is almost ready to launch, it really bumps up the quality and improves the workflow, provides better tools, but also enables us to run on low-end hardware.

Maybe. We were organically grown from zero to last year, so we're profitably grown. So we took in $5.5 million last year and we've not spent it at all really. We don't feel any urgency and we've doubled the company in a year, head count-wise. We could be a lot larger, we're hiring 25 people right now and we should definitely have them by the end of the year. We haven't really seen where we could deploy money to scale us beyond new technology. We're doing some stuff that we haven't announced yet that could change that and we're talking to venture capitalists as we go. Our sense is that we'll understand the world a bit better a few months from now based on some activities we're doing.

When you're running a business like this you're always thinking "how can we make ourselves uncompeatable". We feel we're developers of polished, integrated technology and there isn't a lot of high innovation in that. It's really just humble, solid craftsmanship.

As for competition, there's a real strength to having a unified platform and a real meaning to everyone using the same technology. The know-how, the knowledge base is the strong reason. So long as we don't put the price so high that we turn people away, so long as we can support all the platforms that a reasonable amount of people need, and as long as we support all features that are needed by most people, we can maintain the competitiveness of this and not be open to being flanked.