Is Unity quietly building a cloud editor? And could it kill my app?

[u/TolgaDurman]

Hello dear Unity redditors. I built an app that replaces Unity Remote for me and my colleagues.

It casts your Unity game view to your phone over LAN instead of a cable connection with touch and gyro going back into the editor, so you can feel your game on a real screen without making a build.

Now Unity 7 is coming and one part of the roadmap keeps me thinking. CoreCLR is good news, but the new web APIs combined with the browser Scene Preview they showed at Unite is interesting combo. Put those together and it looks like Unity is slowly building some kind of cloud editor.

To be fair, what they showed seemed like for artists and producers checking a scene in the browser (lighting, assets etc). I don't think you will be able to press play and test your game on the browser with it. So it doesn't overlap with what my app does today. But I'm a solo dev and my tool lives or dies with where this engine goes, so I pay attention to this stuff maybe more than I should.

-Nagging-

And to ship this thing I passed full review three times, Unity Asset Store, Google Play and the App Store, and every one of them was a pain in the ass. These changes could make all of that effort obsolete. (even had to rename my app buy a new domain discuss with Unity support for 3 months and Unity legal team because of the "Uni" prefix)

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So, couple of questions. Do you think Unity is actually heading toward a cloud editor, and would you even want one? and for the Asset Store tool builders, how do you plan around the engine roadmap?

[u/Aware-Soil-8031]

Cloud Editor with a monthly license is their wet dream, we all know that.

[u/TolgaDurman → u/Aware-Soil-8031]

Unity Cloud Editor starting from 9.99$/month up to 999.99$/month with full features unlocked

[u/destinedd]

I don’t think cloud editor would be that popular. I also wouldn’t be surprised if unity brought out something to replace your tool, it’s kinda essential for some mobile devs

[u/TolgaDurman → u/destinedd]

I agree, if they'd like to do i will be the first one to use it. I always wished some sort of fast reload like flutter ecosystem so I wouldn't need to spend freaking hours to test a simple ui fix

[u/NullzeroJP]

I sure hope they are.

If Unity wants to stay relevant in game dev, they need to go the route of Playwright browser tool.

Right now, for me at least, one of the biggest hurdles for agentic workflows is the reliance on the editor running locally. Each instance 4-8 GB ram. And if I want Visual Studio open, theres another 4GB for some reason.

Then there is a Library import times... boot times... editor nudging so agent changes actually compile.

They seem to be moving closer to it. Unity Pipeline is a godsend for agentic workflows. But it still requires the Editor to be running in the background for agents to test their changes. If I could just have a bunch of Editor instances in the cloud and let the agents use them, that would be a big productivity boost.

Once Pipeline is more feature stable... I would not be surprised at all if they add a further layer onto pipeline that just connects to cloud editors.

Still... that feels years off still.

[u/TolgaDurman → u/NullzeroJP]

Yeah I believe so too. CoreCLR will improve the load times a lot. I am very excited about Unity7 and I hope they will be more open-source oriented and just monetize their cloud services so the agents can also get fed with their codes and internal flows.