With more than 1 million developers already on its books, Unity Technologies has signalled an intent to make a mark on the Chinese market, opening up a new office in the country's largest city, Shanghai.

The new base, announced in front of 800 attendees at the Unity Asia Bootcamp in Beijing, is designed to - in Unity's words - "investigate specific needs of the area" and will be supported by new partnerships with local technology firms China Cache and Qihoo 360.

Partner power

"We've been aggressively expanding Unity into Asia for over a year and opening offices in Shanghai is a big move for us to meet high demand in China," said CEO David Helgason.

"Partnerships with key Chinese internet firms, agreements with local software resellers, and opening of the China office are all part of a dedication to support the Chinese development community as intensely as we've supported it in the west."

Said partners will be tasked with cementing the distribution of the company's Unity Web Player, with China Cache delivering 12 thousand servers to support demand and Qihoo 360 distributing the platform to its 240 million Safe Browser users.

The new China office - which will be headed up by ex-Microsoft's regional director of business development Allen Foo - is the ninth country in which Unity has opened up a base, joining Canada, Denmark, UK, Japan, Korea, Lithuania, Sweden, and the United States.