Games technology platform Unity is moving its entire infrastructure to Google Cloud as part of a new partnership with the search engine giant.

Unity claimed that such a move would let developers “benefit from Google Cloud’s openness, security, scalability and innovation through data”.

“Migrating our infrastructure to Google Cloud was a decision made based on the company’s impressive global reach and product quality,” said Unity CEO John Riccitiello.

“Now, Unity developers will be able to take advantage of the unparalleled capabilities to support their cloud needs at a global scale.”

More to come

Also revealed as part of the partnership is Unity’s plans for what it terms ‘connected games’, where it appears the company is betting much of its future.

Connected games are described as single or multiplayer titles that keep players engaged over long periods of time. Unity claims that these are the most influential titles on the market.

During the Unite Berlin 2018 keynote, CEO John Riccitiello said 90 per cent of the top grossing apps on Google Play are titles defined under this category, as are 87 per cent of the top played titles on Steam.

90 per cent of the top watched games on Twitch meanwhile are also connected games, he claimed.

Examples of this could be Rovio’s Angry Birds 2 and its regular live content updates, daily challenges and leaderboards (basically, good live operations); or Next Games’ The Walking Dead: No Man’s Land with its turn-based multiplayer gameplay. 

Mapping the road ahead, first up for Unity and Google is a new open source matchmaking project, set to go live in summer 2018.

Also planned are game server hosting, offering streamlined resources to develop and scale hosted multiplayer titles; a sample FPS of a real-time multiplayer game; and a new ECS Networking Layer.

Effectively, Unity and Google aim to power large online games so developers can create large scalable worlds with low latency.