All told, then, it’s no surprise that year on year Unity has been growing from a secret success story into an ever more public one. As Helgason reveals, Unity is currently being used to create three game portals, five virtual worlds, and two MMOGs (Cartoon Network’s FusionFall and an as-yet-unannounced casual game from Age Of Conan publisher Funcom), while there are also several venture capital-funded projects making use of the technology, not to mention the thousands of licences sold to everyone from bedroom coders to established game studios.

“It’s a interesting situation because while the bigger professional teams will be spending tens of thousands of dollars on licences, it’s still not really enough that we’re married to them,” he laughs. “They don’t have a lot of power over us and the volume of licences we sell to the indies means they’re just as important to us as the bigger companies.”

There are other business implications from the model too. The 20-strong company, which splits development duties between studios in Denmark and Lithuania, plus a sales office in San Francisco, has only one full-time support person. It’s something that’s forced it to focus on ensuring the stability of releases, as well as nurturing a strong community.

“Because there are a lot of people who pay us not much money, we have to focus on documentation, stability and community,” Helgason says. “So if there are problems, people either fix it themselves or get support from the community and everyone benefits. Of course, maybe it’s our fault so we fix the bug and, again, everyone benefits.”

What makes Unity particularly emblematic of today’s gaming culture, however, is the way it has moved from its web-player roots. First up was the ability for developers to create standalone PC and Mac games. Nothing too difficult there, although neat crossplatform features such as optimized graphics pipelines for DirectX 9 and OpenGL helped. Meanwhile, June saw the announcement of the company’s official status as a middleware provider for Wii, while there’s a current internal push to complete support for iPhone.

“IPhone is really interesting,” Helgason says. “It seems Apple is incredibly open to the development community so it’s a great platform for us, and the nice thing is people can start using the current version of Unity and know their code will work on iPhone. There will obviously be some extra channels in terms of multiple input and touchscreen so there will be some adaptation, but there are lots of possibilities. For example, you’ll be able to hook your iPhone into your Mac and prototype directly inside Unity using the iPhone as an input device.”

Of course, iPhone provides the clearest path for casual web developers to get their games on another relatively open platform, but studios are also using Unity to develop Wii titles. And the company expects to add support for other consoles. “With the consoles, we’re not looking to run in the browser,” Helgason points out. “We’re standalone on Wii. We expose the shaders so you can access them directly and we’ll try to do the same on the other consoles in terms of their specific features.”

But perhaps the biggest shift in terms of Unity’s professional status and number of commercial users is also the most prosaic. Currently a Mac-only platform, Helgason knows it must finally embrace Windows. “It’s a very, very high priority,” he grimaces. “It’s a lot of work and it’s having to happen alongside all the other development work, but being a Mac-only tool is limiting. Our most pessimistic view is we’ll triple sales on the day we release the Windows version.” Bill Gates would be proud.