Twitter woos game makers by integrating its Fabric development suite into Unity

Twitter is shifting toward mobile services, and now it’s teaming up with one of the most popular game-development engines to expedite that transition.

The social-networking company announced today that it is integrating Fabric, its suite of development tools, into the Unity software toolkit. This means that developers can now build hooks to Twitter from directly inside of Unity with the click of a few buttons. This also enables studios to quickly integrate Twitter tools into their games. These include the intelligent bug-reporting features of Crashlytics as well as the ad network MoPub to help a free game generate revenue. Twitter is positioning this as its way of helping developers working in the $34.8 billion mobile-gaming business.

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Fabric first debuted in 2014 as Twitter began bundling together the various mobile services it had acquired in the preceding years. Up to this point, the company has primarily targeted general app developers, but Unity enables it to make a concentrated effort on convincing game studios to use its tech.

The general pitch from Twitter is that it can help people building games in Unity to make a stable game with understandable metrics while also easily acquiring players and making money. These are areas where developers typically look for outside help, and Twitter is claiming that it can solve all of these problems in one swoop.

Here’s a walkthrough of Fabric from 2014 that shows a lot of what the services are capable of:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8FoTrrxpNA

But the quick rundown is that Crashlytics is able to quickly collate and surface reports on the glitches that are causing problems for players. Twitter also added Answers to Crashlytics, which is a tool for understanding how gamers are using and interacting with an app.

For player acquisition, Twitter claims that studios can use its social-media platform to generate word-of-mouth marketing. It points to developer Asher Vollmer, creator of beloved puzzle game Threes, who built a “Tweet my score” button into the game. Vollmer says this helped people discover Threes. Today, Twitter also has built-in ads that will take players directly to the App Store or Google Play, and Fabric can help facilitate creating those campaigns.

Finally, MoPub is already popular with developers. It is an exchange where marketers and game makers can buy and sell ad space in games. MoPub has existed for five years, and now Unity developers can pop it into their games instantaneously.

And Twitter is expecting that the studios that go to use MoPub might also begin using Crashlytics, Answers, and its other tools since they are all a part of the same Fabric suite inside Unity.

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