Welcome to David Lau-Kee

Dear Unity community,

I want to give you all a heads-up on a cool development at HQ. But let me first digress for a minute.

2008 was a wonderful year for Unity. We launched support for two major platforms (Wii, iPhone), our userbase tripled, there's probably more than 10 times more games out with Unity now than in 2007, and some very hard-core teams started or announced they were doing extremely ambitious things with Unity (Cartoon Network, Funcom, Disney, loads of others in the woodworks). And with more business, we could afford to more than double the team: core development, platform development, and QA support.

But another wonderful thing happened. On a trip to London in September, I was introduced to a guy called David Lau-Kee, and we decided to meet over coffee.

David had been co-founder and CEO of a company called Criterion Software, which some of you might know as the company behind the Burnout series of racing games. But more importantly Criterion developed the Renderware engine, which more than any other game engine established and ruled the game engine market for a decade. Eventually Electronic Arts took over, which by the way was seen by the industry as very damaging for Renderware... and which may have allowed Epic to finally establish a stranglehold on the AAA engine space. After that David stayed with EA as vice "president of worldwide development", a sort of "head of game engines" at EA.

I didn't really know what to expect, but set aside an hour in an otherwise tight schedule. I was worried that I would meet someone from a different era, that would tell me (interesting) stories of times past and, if I were able to convince him of how cool Unity is, perhaps be able to give me introductions to some key people in the industry.

Three hours later I was still there, in intense discussions. At some point I had decided to just not look at my watch and risk missing my plane back to Denmark). He really got it, often ahead of me explaining. And he was voicing ideas that we had just barely started thinking about. We didn't agree on everything (still don't), but it was intense and creative disagreement. It was reminiscent of when Tom Higgins joined us: a person with a very deep experience of a similar product yet having a different and with interesting angle. Additionally this guy had the experience of building a company from 2 people (in a closet, reminding me of our own story) to a team of 400 across multiple geographies and the works.

David was looking for the "next big thing" to apply his skills and experience to. And we were looking for a veteran like David to vet our crazy ideas with, and to advice our strategy and growth plans. 

I did make that plane, and then one thing took another. David was sneaking around at Unite, and has made several trip to Copenhagen. And now, we are finally ready take on David Lau-Kee as non-executive chairman. He's smart, knowledgable, and him being able to call every senior game industry exec won't hurt either

David believes in what we're doing just as much as we do, and his strong support can only make us more bold in executing a plan to be a very serious player in this industry, to be a new kind of software company, and to make Unity into a growing and well supported package for a long long time to come.

I'm thrilled.

 

Wow guys - congrats. Welcome to unity David!

: )

 

Exciting news

 

I agree! SPECTACULAR!!!

G

 

Nice, curious about the new opportunities/ideas this will bring to Unity.

 

Great! Welcome Daivd!

 

Congrats and welcome to the club David

Good news indeed!


Thomas

 

I read the article at http://www.developmag.com/interviews/329/One-for-All, and really liked what he had to say, especially:

"I love the idea of a player-creator or creator-consumer", which is what I consider myself now that we have Unity.

"Unity is more like using, say, Photoshop than a game engine". Sounds about right.

"You’ll also see us enabling our community in some extremely powerful ways". Can't wait to see what that means!

 

Welcome aboard, on a trip to an interesting and bright future

 

Awesome addition! Welcome David!

 

David Lau-Kee is an incredible guy to boot, he's extremely nice, cool to hang out with and of course knowledgeable/experienced/well connected. It's great to have him on board!

 

A big huge welcome. It will be damn exiting to follow Unity into 2009 and forward :-D

 

i'm new and about to enjoy Unity.

 

Awesome stuff, y'all, welcome aboard DavidLK.

AaronC

 

That's sweet news. Welcome to our world David!

Nick

 

Welcome David, nice news

Lars

 

Its news:

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=21815

Gamasutra is so tacky with all those animated advertisments. Irritates me no end.

AC

 

<off-topic>
We had one of those animated ads for Unity running in December, and another is likely on the way...
</off-topic>

The "DLK" news is bringing some great attention to us, w00t!

 

welcome but whats his user name on the forum or is he just "there @ unity HQ" or "there"

 

While I can't speak for David Lau-Kee with certainty, I don't expect to see him here on the forums in particular (he was at Unite '08 ).

 

oh well

*sigh*

 

Awesome addition to an already stellar team!

Welcome aboard DavidLK!

joe

(who's hoping Unity doesn't go the way of RenderWare...)

 

Does anyone read the blogs? There are very few comments there, but here, there are a lot. Exact same words, too.

 

I do.

Different folks use different channels for information, and I suspect that forum readers don't feel compelled to comment on the blog as this is their playground. The blogs appeal to a different audience (many non-forum users) and so post volume is obviously going to vary between the two.

<shrug>

Read, post (if you want), enjoy (hopefully!).

 

I actually read the blog post before I read the forum announcement thread. Possibly the blog post hit the net a few seconds earlier? I then went to the forum to talk about it because I found it a more suitable medium for that.

 

Congrats to all, and thank you so much for pushing Unity higher and higher !

 

Fantastic! I was a Renderware academic user back in 1995.
This was a great piece of software - way ahead of its time.

 

While I may not post that much, I certainly have been, and will be, following the forums. One of the things that most impressed and inspired me about Unity is the strength and passion of the community. I really believe strongly that the future of the games industry is a collaborative one - there is no place for barriers or labels separating users /creators / developers / publishers... it's one community with many stakeholders - and these forums provide a powerful space for us to share our thoughts and ideas.

I can't begin to tell you how much I'm enjoying being part of the Unity world!

David

 

Legendary first post :wink:

Welcome to the forums!

 

Yeah, legendary!!!

Welcome David!

(It's kind of funny for me with all those "David"s - I had used David as name myself for a couple of years until I switched to Jashan ... so it always feels a bit like "old home" ... and since David was a name I also consciously chose for myself, that was "my home" ;-) )

 

welcome dlk! i was as excited as anyone to hear you became involved with UT. a great bunch of people with an amazing grasp on both the tools and business. i was disappointed to think you might not participate in the community. i'm really glad to see you are. it's something that sets UT apart. david h, joe and nich were all active and accessible at the onset. that foundation continues to hold true today and, speaking for myself at least, has built tremendous confidence in the product and company. i'm looking forward to what the future holds!

 

Well, how 'bout them apples folks? Welcome to the forums David!

 

Hello David,

parsing your career makes UT now bigger and stronger to my eyes.
That's why I'm introducing my wish here, as a pro dev myself, to see Unity becoming the main visual standard, as Macromedia Flash succeeded to become. Actually Adobe became very slow in 3D (and even 2D) updates for Flash.

Seeing the 3D becoming the forthcoming main interface standard, the dev business scene needs a new tool to answer that future.

Unity3D is actually the most welcomed engine across the web, according to several blogs, forums, and tests.

Strong, stable, fast, easy to understand, cross platform, on the edge of the latest technologies, and a nice proximity between devs and users. Everything is cool in Unity project, really.


So it's IMHO the best candidate to become that good.

SWF support would be the nail in the coffin, to be honest, if Adobe accepts a partnership.

Well, even without that awesome feature, please, bring Unity to the frontline, and make it the next audiovisual pllayer standard ...

Please, some magic trick y'know :*)