 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Google Cloud Next 2018. Brought to you by Google Cloud and its ecosystem partners. Hey, welcome back everyone, this is theCUBE, live in San Francisco at Google Cloud Next 18. My co-host Jeff Frick and I are here with Suhail Dada VP of Cloud Services for Unity Technologies, one of those popular game engines, developers of VR, AR and mobile gaming, as well as game and game developers. A hot use case with Google Cloud, they love the speed, they love the features, we hear in that all the way. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for joining us. Thanks, thanks for having me. So I wish I was a kid again, because the game experience now is so good, and I'm kind of like a keyboard guy, so I'm not a good console player, but now keyboards back in, now you got mobile games. I mean, the games are amazing these days. They are, they are. They're amazing and they're amazing on every kind of platform. You could have mobile games, console games, PC games, input types, keyboards, controllers, VR, it's stunning. I always say I've been observing on the internet, really the predictor of what's going to happen in computing and user experience, really I think gaming leads a lot of it. Look at virtual currencies, look at blockchain and crypto, there's been virtual currencies in game for a long time. So it's a really leading indicator. And certainly as you look at immersive experiences, gaming is not just gaming, it's potentially virtual reality, augmented reality around 3D. This is what you guys do. This is huge. It's not just about gaming anymore. Talk about what you guys are doing. Take a minute to explain the company. Are you beyond gaming? What are some of the things you're working on? I'd love to. Yeah, I think, I said this at the keynote, one of the things we fundamentally believe is the world's better with more creators. So those creators for us traditionally have been in gaming, but more and more we see that also happening in film, all kinds of media animation, but also lots of industries like automotive and others. And so we more and more like to talk ourselves as we're enabling empowering creators to do what they love to do. And we make their lives easier and allow them to achieve what they want to. Continuation of the democratization trend, right? Cause actually all the big hardware companies used to brag about how much time it took to render all the crazy scenes in all these beautiful big 70 millimeter movies. Everybody can't afford that horsepower at another time. So with engines like what you guys have, you've been able to spread that developer ecosystem out or the creator ecosystem out dramatically. It allows so much more points of view and people to contribute and to create all these cool new things. Yeah, and you know, I think Diane actually said this on stage at the Unite event. Our founders may have coined democratized development. And 15 years ago, we've always believed that to be true, right? In a, we've been for the community every size of team for as long as we've been around and it remains the first principle we use in our mission. We do solve hard problems. We do enable our creators success, but democratized development is core to everything we do and we've been able to. The younger generation is gravity in trans games. Obviously it's a gateway drug to software development. You think about it. Your robotics is another one. You're seeing these maker culture kind of things really attracting developers at a whole other level. It's not computer science, software engineering degree, banging out raw machine language. This is like for fun. There's a whole new artistry going on. There is, yeah. What is your view on this new trend around software artistry? Because there's engineering certainly involved. The engines are getting smarter. Extraction layers are becoming available. What's your take on that? Yeah, I think the engineering side of it has always been about raising that level of abstraction so that people can focus on what they love to do. So if you're a game maker, you probably got into making games because you loved games and you loved making them. You probably didn't get into it to make an engine. So that's always been very true for us and we've gotten better at that. But some of the things we've learned along the way of course to your point are the various kinds of artists that are actually just as or more critical to these kinds of creative endeavors. And we've actually been making great strides in not only helping artists of all kinds work themselves in Unity or in other tools, but also then work seamlessly with engineers, which oftentimes ends up being a place where there is friction. But in an environment like Unity, you can't have a lot of separation, right? We have a 3D environment. You put this on your computer, you work in it, you build your models, you write your scripts, you write all of that in one cohesive way because otherwise, games take way longer to build. They have all kinds of issues in communication. So I think it's quite true. I always love to watch the game threads on Reddit. EA and these guys, you know, the corporate's taking over. You're seeing more and more younger artists coming in. You guys have to maintain your relevance. You keep those developers happy. You got to continue to innovate. Gaming is a lot of pressure. Yes. How do you guys keep up? What are some of the things you're doing with tech? What do you bring into the market? How do you keep ratcheting up the capability that they don't flock somewhere else? Or, frankly, so they can create better product. Right, I think probably the highest level principle there is leading on from democratized, but we focus a lot on our community of creators, both in terms of the content, the samples, the learning, the tools, something Google does quite well actually. And that's been instrumental in empowering this community. That's very strong. I mean, it is, in many ways, our greatest strength. We have a huge number of developers and artists and creators that work with Unity. So if you were to want to create something and you were looking for answers, using our services or others, you can go out there. Now, on the technology side, the way we look at it is, in many ways, we've looked at it as your engine team. So performance by default, some of the things that we're doing to make really, really high performance, efficient computing on all kinds of devices, letting you do more with them. But then also, there's a responsible aspect, which is if you think about improving the performance and power consumption on devices is very important to us. And then an area where we're really putting in a lot of effort now is the cloud and with Google on connected games, which is why... Yeah, so let's talk about that because we're here. And it's interesting, the creator conversation because obviously Google owns YouTube, which has spawned a whole different kind of class of creators that are disrupting the media business. So you're here, what does Google give to you guys? Why are you partnering with them? What's kind of the story? Right, of course. So we talk about connected games, right? So what we mean by that, of course, are games where players can connect to each other and or to the developers that create them. Oftentimes, we use the term multiplayer, which of course is a particular subgenre of connected games. They run the gamut from a game that you might play on your phone and then you interact with other players through leaderboards and chat and things like that. So they're connected, not necessarily real-time multiplayer. And on the other side of the spectrum, you might have a game where you run around and interact with each other in real-time in a 3D environment or a massive multiplayer game where you stay in that word for many, many, many years and you act as a character. So all of, because Unity has so many creators, the entire spectrum of those games, connected games are important to us, important to our users. For all those games, you need massive amounts of infrastructure. You need lots of infrastructure. You need performance, you need the best network. And you need lots of services that help you, again, to the earlier point, focus on making your game. This is an area that both Unity and Google care deeply about. If you take a small studio or even a large studio, for that matter, that got in the business to create their game, they don't want to spend all of their time learning how to make an engine or set up a bunch of infrastructure. So the area where we're focusing a lot now is that marriage between Google and Unity where you can, because of our alliance, we can raise that level of abstraction to your earlier point and let them build connected games in an easier way. Talk about the role of data because, actually, you look at the data that's generated, I mean, which could be user, gesture data. I mean, everything's tracked. So, I mean, that's a big data solution. Yeah. Problem opportunity you guys have. Yeah, and I think, so one of the things we like to say, of course, is we're a platform. We enable our users to build and run successful games. And our users, being the developers and artists, that data's theirs. And then they are able to then do really wonderful things with that data if they so choose. And so, you're right. For the games that have so many players online and all these actions, there is an amazing amount of data, but fundamentally in an anonymized way around what makes games more fun. And that's a hard problem to solve. It's why creators have the hardest problem of it all, right? Is make something fun, where data can play a huge role in that. How's the relationship with Google Cloud and your engine with those developers? Do they get the magic of Google? You pass that through, or is it built into your product that's abstracted away from it? Yeah, it's a combination of things. So, I think there's one side which is us building services that run on top of Google Cloud. So if, for instance, you need a matchmaker which is a very common piece of technology, but quite complicated piece of technology for games, is to match players into games quickly. We are working with Google. We're collaborating on an open source project that called Open Match that comes out later this summer. And then we're building a service on top of that that our users can just pick up and use. It runs on Google Cloud. At the same time, Google brings many other capabilities to bear, things like maps and other capabilities from GCP that they can then bring to our users in a more direct way rather than building a product together. And then, of course, Unity actually now runs quite a few cloud services and we're going to migrate all of those to Google Cloud as well. So, it's sort of three aspects of that. And what's your vision for Unity? If you look for, looking at what's coming on with Google, also the future of your engine, looking at the creator market, Hollywood. Just at Sundance, I did a panel with Intel on the future of entertainment. And we talked about the new areas coming in and that you have the social networks now reforming. This game connector concept is pretty huge. This is a new dynamic. So, you've got to build new services. What's your vision of how you're going to build out these cloud services? Can you share your vision and thoughts on... Yeah, we can. I think within the space of connected games, of course, like I said, there's many different categories of these games, but there are some fundamental building blocks that you can build, that we can build together, Google and Unity can, to empower all of these kinds of games. Matchmaking is a particular example. But at the end of the day, games that blur the lines between they're running on a device, they're running on a PC, they're running on a console, or they let players pick them up wherever they go, but also interact with each other. Because as AR and VR and these virtual worlds come to fruition, more and more it's going to be about us interacting, not just in the virtual world, but also in the real world, and able to do that. And most of those things are predicated on this world that exists online and it's all running on infrastructure. There's a lot of infrastructure that's required there. So we've got a really rich roadmap over the next many, many years to continue to invest in this area and help our users create these kinds of games because they are, in the games world, the most influential kind, but more and more in other areas of our life, they're also going to be the same technologies that are applied there. Right, I just love to get your perspective. You've been in this space for a long time gaming, but also 3D specifically, and the 3D is so still nascent, it's hard to do for most people, the experiences are still being developed, but it's come so long, so as you look at kind of where 3D has evolved, both to create it as well as to experience, what are your general thoughts of where we are on that path, and what do you see kind of in the short term and near term, in terms of how that's really going to change the way we do things, whether it's work, gaming, or experiencing other types of things. Sure, I think that, I'd like to go back to one of the things you said where, when you're playing games, you have to stand up. I mean, we've come a long way, so we have come a long way. You look at some of the content, the games that have been produced, you even look at just the kinds of content and the interactive content that's being created in Unity. It's amazing if you look at how far we've come. I think, to your point, you're right, there's a long way to go, there's lots of, I mean, all hardware, all our hardware capabilities just continue to get better. Like the latest phones, the latest consoles, they're so powerful, right? We have these supercomputers in our pockets with amazing capabilities, and consumers demand that kind of stuff, the latest level of graphics. So I think all of that stuff continues. I think our CEO, he, John talked about, you know, in the sort of AR and VR, we're kind of going through this level of excitement and then we have the trough of disillusionment and all these kinds of things, right? So we're, you know, we've got some elements of that, but there's a lot of great companies doing a lot of fantastic stuff, and I think that's going to come to bear. And so, I think Unity is there with them, and we're really well positioned. The tele-signs are there, you're seeing people using VR in areas that give them a unique thing. So it's a scarce areas where there's pharmaceutical doctors, I've seen, even heard Tom Brady use VR to look at defenses before he plays games. But this is an interesting question for you, though. I want to get your thoughts. Do you have a unique position to see the data, what your game engine's doing? For the folks out there, the young kids who are in elementary school, high school, that love games, okay? That don't necessarily want to be computer science major, maybe they don't even have a direction at any time, but want to start hacking away and start coding. What patterns do you see that would help someone get started and so they don't drop out or abandon it, get addicted, if you will? What are some of the things you could share that you've seen successful, getting someone involved in either coding games, getting involved in the community? What are some of those best practices or patterns that you've seen? Right, so I think there's probably a technical answer to that and then there's a non-technical one. I think your word community resonates with me a lot, right? So for anyone starting out, I think there's a lot that an individual creator can accomplish, but given the world we're in, we have these extremely rich communities that are helping each other, whether it's the open source community in a more general sense, for web or servers, but even in machine learning, if you hear the guy from Kaggle Talk that we're talking about in the machine learning community and it was pretty amazing to hear him talk about that. For us, it's the creator community and we have a really rich one and there's lots of people there that bring many skills to bear, which ends up being way more critical than things like very specific technology trends for this kind of thing. So I think that's really important. So there's mentoring and stuff going on in the creator community. People are helping each other big time. There's a huge amount. I mean, this notion of developers and creators helping each other, sometimes not for any money, is a trend being seen everywhere, not just... So advice is jump into a community, get a check-in. I think it's probably cliched a little bit if you can find a project or a set of projects or a type of thing that you really enjoy doing. You'd be surprised at what skills you can bring to bear and everyone needs help. So... Download the emulator, get some code in your hands. Jump into a community. Download it. It's easy to get started and then work with the community. I think almost always it's find a project that you really care about and start helping. Final question for you to wrap this segment. For the people that are not inside the ropes in the industry that are looking at Google, see Google Cloud. Wow, a lot of buzz on Google Cloud. Knowing what we knew two years ago, OG, the original app engine kind of concept was Google Cloud. Now so much more. What would you say that the people watching know? How has Google Cloud changed? What's different? What are they doing right? And where do they need to improve? Yeah, so even before Unity, I've been a user of aspects of Google Cloud and App Engine. And I think they have come an amazing way in terms of the way they're approaching every other aspect that isn't just the technology aspect. I think the tech, it's Google. They've always been incredible, right? So their network is incredible, their server's incredible. So they've always been extremely good at that. But the things that are so much better, the level of support, they're working with us very closely all across their organization. We are enjoying working with them a lot. And they're really trying to help us be successful much like we help our creators. So that's resonating with us a lot. And we found that to be great. And I think that everything I see makes us quite happy that we partners with them. And they're bringing some goodies to the party. They've brought open source contributions. Pretty phenomenal. I mean, Kubernetes, I mean, that's just game changing right there. You got BigQuery. I mean, they got some, they're contributing some jewels. They have some amazing tech that can be brought to bear on a lot of different things, right? So we're a heavy Kubernetes user and have been for a while even before we were Google partners. So I think this is great. Things that they announced with GKE, this conference really mattered to us, GKE on-prem. And then they're also a very partner-driven company. And I think they recognize our knowledge and expertise in games. And I think that that's an area where their expertise in cloud and our expertise in games can be very, very good. I think it's a great opportunity for Google to make the market on the partnership ecosystem side. They have a lot they can bring to the table. You know, they make people successful and make people can make money and deliver great products. That's a winning formula, right? So we'll see. Congratulations on your success. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for sharing the insight into Unity Technologies. It's theCUBE. Bring you all the action here out in the open with Google Cloud. More coverage. Stay with us. We're a day three of three days of live coverage. I'm John Furrier with Jeff Frick. Stay with us, we'll be right back.