Now, a new partnership between Unity and Chrome OS will now allow developers to enable direct Chromebook support in just a few clicks. vĪll of this and more is a part of Google’s master plan to unify its operating systems as far as gaming experiences go.
Starting today with the alpha release of Unity 2021.2.0a14, any developer can begin building for ChromeOS.Īdditionally, by the end of 2021, the same features and toolset found in Unity’s Android environment will be available for Chrome OS.
In fact, in August, the Play Store will stop serving 32-bit apps to devices that are capable of handling their 64-bit versions to help improve things. However, while Chromebooks have many ARM devices available on the market, there are also tons of x86 devices as well. You see, most Android phones are built on ARM CPUs, so most games are built to follow suit since the Play Store and its contents always only existed for this type of hardware. Over the past year, it’s has enabled ARM games to run on Chrome OS with something called Houdini and continues to invest heavily in Android gaming performance improvements.
It’s clear that Google wants Android apps and games to suck less on Chromebooks. I discussed this at length earlier today when we spoke about the ‘Inputs matter for Chrome OS’ session held at Google I/O yesterday. Even with the year-over-year monthly usage of Android apps and games on Chrome OS tripling, Chromebooks still get the short end of the stick when it comes to these experiences. Most games you’ll find on the Google Play Store were created with Unity, but up until now, these titles are mostly just built for phones. Right next to Unreal Engine and smaller tool kits like Godot, it’s directly responsible for some of the most popular video games in the world. Unity 3D is one of the most popular game development engines in the world.