Unity, the gaming engine that’s on almost every major gaming platform at this point, has yet to announce any sort of support for Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 OS. According to Unity CEO David Helgason, that’s because Microsoft’s won’t open the platform up for developers. He explained that Windows Phone 7 “is a relatively closed system so you can’t run native content, which means we can’t really support it”.
“We could, in theory, do what we’ve done with Flash, which is to rewrite the engine so it works inside a non-native environment. So it could be done in theory, but it’s very much in theory because that would require a huge amount of work an uncertain results,” Helgason told Develop.
Any third-party applications for Windows Phone 7 must be based on proprietary Microsoft tools like XNA or Silverlight. Unity would need an exemption to this rule to add support.
“We talk to Microsoft a lot, and we were involved in looking at Windows Phone 7 early on, but they couldn’t open up the platform, and that led to us deciding to not support it,” he said.
Fortunately, Helgason hopes Microsoft’s next shot at a mobile platform will allow Unity to put its full weight behind the OS.
“We’re looking at Windows Phone 8 and hopefully it will be easier to work on that system,” he said.
