Dialogue with Zhang Junbo: Unity China is targeting the next big thing in areas like mini - games and in - vehicle infotainment systems.

Text by Ma Xiaodi

Edited by Guofu

Since the first half of 2025, Unity China has attracted a lot of attention. For example, they officially announced independent operation, focused on developing the mini - game publishing business, and were deeply involved in in - vehicle infotainment system development, etc. Not long ago, they also announced a digital twin factory in deep cooperation with NIO.

However, at the same time, many of their decisions have also attracted a lot of skeptical voices.

After independence, Chinese developers may not be able to directly use many new features of the Unity 6 engine, which may be a big blow to domestic game developers who use Unity - especially since Unity is an important engine for developing mobile games, and most well - known products are developed based on it.

On the other hand, although the number of employees in Unity China is not large, it has launched multiple business lines around mini - games and in - vehicle infotainment systems. Some people may think that this will lead to an unclear focus of the company and ultimately fail to achieve ideal results. However, judging from the current progress of their business development, Unity China has indeed achieved good results in various fields, and its market coverage is gradually increasing.

Therefore, during the 2025 ChinaJoy, 36Kr Games also interviewed Zhang Junbo, the CEO of Unity China, to try to understand some of the thinking behind Unity China.

Zhang Junbo, CEO of Unity China

Independent operation is a natural result

Q: Why did you decide to operate independently?

Zhang Junbo: This is actually a natural result of the situation pushing forward.

In 2017, I officially took over the business of Unity China. At that time, the number of registered users of Unity in China might be only three or four hundred thousand, and the market share was only 20%. Later, with the software iteration, Unity China would have six or seven hundred thousand new users every year. So far, the number of registered users has accumulated to 4.8 million, nearly ten times the original number.

Now, most mobile games basically choose the Unity engine. 90% of developers of all - in - one devices also choose Unity. After the introduction of 3D scenes in in - vehicle infotainment systems, a large number of manufacturers and companies will poach Unity technical talents from game companies. To be honest, I'm very glad to see that the Unity product has received so much recognition in China.

But at the same time, we also noticed that Unity in China has always been relatively independent from overseas. Affected by the network environment, domestic developers basically cannot use various online services of Unity hosted overseas. They can only rely on us to deploy corresponding network facilities in China. Millions of user groups are restricted by cross - border data. So in 2019, we consciously started to cultivate a research team to maintain a Chinese version of Unity as much as possible.

There's no way. The Chinese market is really too large and special. Most of the world's glasses are made in China, and later, the Chinese automobile industry has also made a lot of money. Based on mobile games, Chinese developers have contributed more than half of the global revenue.

In 2022, we took a further step. We first split the company to provide resources and services for domestic developers in a targeted manner. It wasn't until this year, when the time was right, that we finally decided to become independent.

Notice of the removal of Unity 6 in China

Q: From the company's strategic perspective, this decision is actually quite far - sighted. But when you announced this decision before, many skeptical voices emerged on the Internet.

Zhang Junbo: There are definitely both advantages and disadvantages to this. For example, in terms of the ecosystem, we need to attract developers from overseas resource stores to create plugins for the Unity engine specifically adapted for Chinese developers. Also, some sharing from foreign developers may no longer be applicable. We need to build a community with Chinese developers and create our own "learning materials".

But after independence, we can more specifically solve the problems encountered by developers. Before the Unity engine for China, if Chinese developers reported bugs, we needed to feed them back to the Unity headquarters. The possibility of adjustment was small, and the feedback cycle was long. As a result, domestic developers had to buy the source code, and then we were responsible for customization and service.

On July 1st, we also announced a new pricing strategy, which is very different from the global version. Originally, Unity had a payment threshold. If the investment was more than $200,000, each team member had to purchase the Pro version. And we added an additional tier. For investments between $200,000 and $2 million, the whole team only needs to buy one copy and pay an installation fee of 2.5% of the principal. In this way, the burden on domestic developers will be relatively much smaller.

On the other hand, the Unity engine for China can also help Chinese developers synchronize with the world.

Firstly, we will provide support for some new foreign technologies, such as future new iOS features or new Android versions. Secondly, the platform operation capabilities of overseas mini - game platforms are relatively weaker than those of WeChat and Douyin in China. This makes it difficult for overseas creators to run Unity efficiently. If we can cooperate with overseas platforms, we can also share the experience and products of Chinese developers.

Q: What is the biggest difficulty in developing a localized product like the Unity engine for China?

Zhang Junbo: The stability of the product. Every time the engine is modified, we have to trigger more than one million test cases, which is very costly. If the product is a mini - game, we also need to do in - depth optimization and modify various modules of the engine. For example, when changing from single - thread rendering to multi - thread rendering, the architecture will change completely, and various problems will arise. Moreover, after the modification, the expected behavior of many existing test cases will also be affected.

Manpower is also a short - term problem. Compared with Unity's R & D team of thousands of people, or even the German company's team of 5,000 people, we can currently only allocate less than 200 people to complete these tasks, but the workload is not much different. Although Chinese engineers are highly efficient, it's impossible to be several times more efficient. We still need to continuously invest more resources as the revenue grows and the market expands.

Q: Specifically in the game field, where will the differences between the Unity engine for China and Unity itself be reflected?

Zhang Junbo: A relatively large difference is that we will continuously invest in high - definition rendering on the PC side. Overseas development teams either focus on PC games or mobile games, with a clear distinction. In China, many games now have cross - platform design requirements, and our current PC - side rendering ability is not the top - notch in the country. We have to admit this. In fact, compared with overseas, we need to do more things.

At the same time, on the basis of providing better services, our current expectation may be to prioritize the development of mini - games and the adaptation to the domestic system and hardware ecosystem.

From "mini - game" distribution to "big - game" transplantation

Q: What do you think of the current mini - game market?

Zhang Junbo: In the past few years, the quality of mini - games in the market was uneven, and it may have relied more on some blockbusters. But now it's different. The mini - game market is in a more normal and healthy state.

On the one hand, many mini - games in the past relied on advertisements to increase the user volume and divert traffic from each other. But now, from the data, the proportion of IP - based games has reached 60% - 70%. On the other hand, with the improvement of the capabilities of mini - games, many APP games have been introduced. These products are more refined as a whole, and they have also diverted a lot of the original existing users, forcing the entire mini - game market to improve the quality. All these mean that only better games can make players willing to pay now.

At the same time, in the future, more experienced producers will bring more mid - to - high - end products into the mini - game market, squeezing the living space of low - quality mini - games. The cost of buying traffic will also increase because the unit price of each game is higher. Of course, as a result, the number of people covered by mini - games will also increase sharply. After all, they are easy to start and have a short novice period, which can attract many non - traditional players.

Q: In this situation, how has the Qianfan Plan announced last year been implemented?

Zhang Junbo: Since the implementation of the Qianfan Plan for more than a year, we have contacted and evaluated more than a thousand mini - games, and more than a hundred games have been launched. The progress is quite fast.

Some of these launched mini - games have become blockbusters, such as "Fantasy Abyss", "Zombie Siege", "Balloon Breakout Battle", etc. "Fantasy Abyss" can now stably generate a monthly revenue of 300,000 yuan.

Monthly revenue of 300,000 yuan for "Fantasy Abyss"

Q: How do you specifically select promising mini - games?

Zhang Junbo: The main factor is the completion degree. For products with a good completion degree, we will provide some feedback and modification suggestions to help them make the mini - games better. Secondly, it is the commercialization ability of the product. If the commercialization ability of the product is not strong, we will suggest not to launch it first and make some modifications to avoid wasting the previous development results and the invested time.

In fact, although we have certain screening conditions, the overall selection threshold is relatively low. We still hope to provide services to as many developers as possible. However, due to limited manpower and production capacity, the number of game products we can accept is really limited.

For this reason, we are also promoting the automation of the distribution process. If we can achieve this in the future, the threshold will be further lowered. Basically, as long as your game can pass the review and has no inappropriate content, we will launch it.

Q: What help can Unity distribution provide for developers?

Zhang Junbo: In addition to providing suggestions on product quality and commercialization, we mainly help developers reduce some unnecessary costs. For example, we are solving the multi - platform adaptation problem of mini - games.

Currently, we are in a synchronous cooperation mode with WeChat, and Douyin is the mainstream channel. We will provide in - depth technical support for adaptation. For Kuaishou, we mainly lead the adaptation work, and for other brands such as TapTap and Xiaomi, we directly provide adaptation services. In this way, the channels we actually need to support are not overly fragmented, and the overall adaptation rate is relatively high.

Unity supports Douyin mini - games

For developers, we are also building a set of sufficiently abstract Unity code logic. Developers only need to write one set of code, and we can help them automatically convert it into the APM form of other platforms without having to write repeatedly for different platforms - especially since the mini - game industry is developing so rapidly. Even if an experienced developer can write quickly, it will still be very annoying.

In addition, we also hope to become a contractor for developers' needs. There are actually many bugs in the drivers of some platforms. Even the young programmers in our own team sometimes don't test their work well, resulting in crashes. So we hope to take on the diversity of platforms and even the uneven quality, at least to prevent developers from stepping into the same pitfalls and provide a place for them to centrally report problems, preventing the phenomenon of mutual blame.

Q: You have also done the transplantation of "big - games" on the mobile side, such as "Zhu Xian Mobile Game" of Perfect World. How is this specifically designed?

Zhang Junbo: We have been cooperating with "Zhu Xian Mobile Game" for two or three years. They had tried it themselves before, but the effect was not ideal, so they later handed it over to us.

Since 2024, we first optimized a large number of duplicate codes and the repeated use of memory according to the 1.1G memory limit of WeChat mini - games, adopted more strict memory unloading measures, significantly reduced the package size, and reduced the memory by hundreds of megabytes. Then, we optimized the performance consumption of the GPU and CPU, improved the device heating problem, and made it possible for low - end models to play the game smoothly. For example, the iPhone 12 can now run the "Zhu Xian Mobile Game" mini - game very smoothly. In addition, we also applied new performance - enhancing functions such as GPU resident and metal support in the mini - game of "Zhu Xian Mobile Game".

Comparison between the mobile version and the mini - game version of "Zhu Xian Mobile Game"

At present, except for a few particularly difficult ones, we should be able to transplant most traditional mobile games. In the future, more products of mature medium - and large - scale manufacturers will be launched on the mini - game platform with our technical support, such as "Tian Long Ba Bu" and many large - scale games whose names are temporarily inconvenient to disclose.

Q: But the mini - game industry also announced data this year, indicating that the overlap between mobile game users and mini - game users is very low. Can transplantation really achieve ideal results?

Zhang Junbo: The differences between mini - games and traditional mobile games are actually quite obvious. Traditional mobile game users are more hardcore. For example, SLG players are willing to play games like going to work on a regular basis. This type of users is definitely not very suitable for mini - games. But there are also products like "Endless Winter" in the mini - game field, which players are willing to experience in their fragmented time.

At the same time, I also observed that many of our colleagues in the company, who used to play few games and would never spend money on games, have gradually been converted into core users by mini - games. From paying to remove ads, to buying ordinary monthly cards and large monthly cards. It's not realistic to ask them to download large - scale games of several gigabytes, but they can accept products that are easy to start and have a short novice period. The needs of this part of users were previously concentrated on some casual products such as Dou Dizhu and Mahjong, and now they play mini - games