Unity Technologies has revealed that, in terms of user sessions per month, Asian markets are its biggest.
Speaking during his keynote session at Unite 11 in San Francisco, company co-founder and CEO David Helgason revealed that the top four cities worldwide for monthly user sessions were Seoul, Beijing, Shanghai and Nei-Hu (a district of Taipei City in Taiwan).
It's a surprising statistic for the company which, while possessing clear global market ambitions, has a distinctly European personality. The remainder of the top ten list held surprises too, not least the paucity of western cities: Melbourne, Moscow, Sao Paulo, LA, Shibuya and Montreal.
When it comes to revenue, the US still represents Unity's largest market, with China the second biggest. But South Korea and Japan come in at third and fourth, ahead of the UK and Canada's fifth and sixth.
Speaking to us yesterday, Unity general manager of Asia John Goodale revealed the company has seen a 258.7 per cent revenue growth year-on-year in the Pan-Asia region. While Korea's has grown by a relatively modest 50 per cent, China boasts 280 per cent while Japan has seen an astonishing growth rate of 897 per cent.
Goodale puts much of this growth down to the migrations of users to browser and mobile titles, along with burgeoning indie communities, but also cites a more surprising catalyst.
"In China, quite candidly, what is driving a lot of our growth, is piracy," he reveals. "Even through a pirated version of Unity, we can still make revenue from that customer, for example through the Asset Store.
"We don't condone it, but it's also something we don't super-aggressively persue."
The introduction of local sales and support in each territory - with Unity Korea established in July, Unity Japan earlier this month and Unity China mooted for the future - has also established a strong connection with local developers.
"Throughout my 25 years of doing business in Asia, I've seen very few companies be so dedicated to that region, or give me the flexibility and tools that I need to be successful," Goodale tells us. "And as a result, I am just having way too much fun! [Laughs]"
Unity's massive growth in Asia has seen it adopted by many larger teams: NHN, Ten Cent, Sega, Konami and Nexon are all offered as examples of studios with "literally hundreds of seats of licences for Unity". So with that in mind, and Unity's current drive to embrace what it terms the "triple-A" developer, can Asia be seen as a test bed for Unity3D's efficacy in larger teams?
"It's not talked about often, but we have a product called Asset Server that allows large teams to share assets more effectively, and according to the sales reports that I get we sell far more Asset Server in Asia than we do in the west," Goodale reveals. "So I think in part, that's probably a good analogy - that it's probably a test-bed for some of these larger studios."
But Goodale goes on to qualify that EA makes extensive use of Unity3D in its iOS catalogue.
Given that four Asian cities constitute the places where Unity3D is used most, we wonder to what extent the Asian market might influence Unity's development roadmap in future.
"For the most part, the needs don't differ that much," Goodale says. "That being said, there are some things that we have had to add in to our development; for example, IME (Input Method Editor) support.
"Entering Japanese is tough to do on a 105 key keyboard when there are thousands of characters. Take China: you've got more than 10,000 characters you have to support, and that sort of thing wasn't accounted for when Unity was originally built."
Another important attractor, Goodale suggests, is the newly improved particle editor that will ship with the 3.5 update of Unity.
"Particle effects are huge in Asian games, they go crazy with what they do with particles! [Laughs] That's going to be immensely popular in Asia - it's not necessarily why we built it, but it's going to have huge resonance with most of our customers.
"And we can't talk about it yet, but there are some companies that are doing their own APIs for mobile that we're talking about supporting. So we're going to have support of a lot of local tools, too."