In the world of social games everyone is wondering what game is going to be the next biggest hit. What social game developer is going to start the newest trend? Many have decided that Zynga’s Treasure Isle and zSlide‘s Treasure Madness are the games to watch at the moment. Well not for me. My game to watch right now is Paradise Paintball 3D developed by CMUNE. Why am I watching this social game every second of the day? A game which was released in 2008 and does little to innovate on the social design front. It’s because Paradise Paintball is a guinea pig experiment for the future. Not because it’s a real-time game, there have been plenty of those. It’s because it is using Unity.

For the longest time I’ve been exploring the possibility of developing social games in Unity. Yes, the Facebook integration in Unity makes it a bit more attractive, and the benefits of working in a proper 3D engine rather than working with Papervision3D is a dream – but the biggest barrier of all stands in my and most likely every other social game developer’s way. Unity’s install base. So naturally day after day I look at AppData like a hawk to see what Paintball 3D is doing. So far the statistics aren’t astonishing but they’re not atrocious. Seeing some slow but steady growth, Paradise Paintball 3D is now at over 51,000 monthly active users, averages out about 3,700 daily active users, which equates to about 7% of monthly active users being daily active users. Like I said, impressive? No not really.

What does this mean for social game developers? It means that we’re still stuck with the likes of Papervision 3D and aren’t available to leverage the power of Unity 3D to our advantage due to the barrier of a simple plug-in. Will this limit the industry? Not yet. There are still plenty of interesting things we can still due with isometric views and Papervision 3D but in the future it’s going to be essential for the growth of social games. So what should be done? Unity needs to look for a way to distribute their plug-in to the masses. By increasing the install base to at least half of the 400M Facebook Audience I could already see many social game developers jump on board with Unity. Whether Unity does this through a partnership or some clever method of their own is up to them, but in order for Unity to become a viable option for social game developers Unity must lead the way in this forefront. Until then, I will continuously watch AppData statistics of Paradise Paintball 3D until the day comes that I know we can start developing our social games in Unity.