GREE, Unity extend business partnership

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GREE, the leading mobile social gaming platform in Japan, has announced an extended business partnership with Unity Technologies, creators of the Unity Pro all-in-one game creation tool that allows for efficient cross-platform development of interactive 3-D content. The agreement, which allows GREE to provide licenses to most of its developers, encourages the creation of even more diverse game content for GREE’s mobile social gaming platform.

The comprehensive business partnership grants GREE the exclusive right to redistribute the “Unity for GREE” professional license for Android and iOS, currently distributed for a fee, for free in Japan. As a result, development partners who provide social applications for the GREE Platform will be able to significantly reduce their initial cost for app development when using “Unity for GREE” for Android and iOS.

Further, GREE and Unity Technologies will continue offering the popular free technology seminars and consulting sessions that the two companies began offering earlier this year.

Used by over 500,000 developers worldwide, Unity is a game engine and authoring tool that can be used on multiple platforms including PC, Android, and iOS. The tool takes advantage of an integrated development environment that combines a game engine and game editor to enable one-source multi-platform development. Unity 3.4, the latest version released in July 2011, features the Allegorithmic Substance Integration procedural texture generation tool based on Substance technology that allows the conversion of user bitmaps into seamless materials. It also supports the development of higher quality apps by providing stronger technology solutions.

This agreement further solidifies the relationship between GREE and Unity Technologies that grew in March 2011 when the two companies entered a technology alliance that provided the Unity Plugins for both the GREE Android SDK and the GREE iOS SDK, which allows functions provided by the GREE SDK to be easily embedded in games developed with Unity. In addition, in June 2011, GREE announced a plan to develop and distribute original 2-D and 3-D apps for Android and iOS using Unity.

GREE will continue to provide the leading mobile social gaming ecosystem for users around the world, by creating high-quality content in collaboration with established global partners, and enable deeper person to person interaction within games.