What kinds of games are Unity CEO Matthew Bromberg and CTO Steve Collins playing these days?That may seem like an idle question, but when you're the leaders of an engine company serving developers across the industry, it's helpful to know what games are top of their mind. In a conversation with Game Developer at the 2025 Game Developers Conference, Bromberg said he'd spent time recently playing Camouflaj's Batman: Arkham Shadow. Collins, meanwhile had been playing Black Salt Games' Dredge on the way into San Francisco.Each had praise for the games, but also explained how Unity's close work with Camouflaj and Black Salt was part of its new post-runtime fee strategy. Bromberg said that Unity worked closely with Camouflaj as almost a "co-developer," helping the team tackle complex VR challenges like Batman's high-speed flight across Gotham.Collins, meanwhile, spoke about Unity's mission to make Dredge play as smoothly on Android devices as it did on console. Doing so doesn't just bring Dredge to a mobile audience, it also introduces the Lovecraftian fishing simulator to audiences playing on devices like the NVIDIA Shield or the Ayaneo Pocket. "It's a great story about taking an existing property and broadening its reach," he said.A "broad reach" is certainly a part of Unity's pitch to developers in its rollout of the Unity 6.1 roadmap. The company seems to be telling developers who were eyeing the door after the 2023 runtime fee debacle that staying with Unity isn't just about having a reliable game development tool, it's a great porting partner to expand your game to a wider audience.Related:It's a fine pitch in an era for developers struggling to survive in a tough market. But many have been asking if staying with Unity means putting themselves at risk for another existential anxiety attack down the line.To hear Bromberg and Collins tell it, that answer is hopefully "no." That brings us to the biggest part of their pitch: that under their watch, Unity is on track to deliver more stability for partners and customers. But are they talking about technical stability, or organizational stability?Their explanation to Game Developer: "it's both."'Stable' versions of Unity should hopefully be more stableThe runtime fee bombshell wasn't just a story of a development community fearing for their financial safety, it was also a body blow to a community that was feeling the weight of years of tech debt under the engine. Scroll through the list of acquisitions Unity made in the run-up to its initial public offering and you'll see a number of intriguing tools that could be usefulbut as Godot co-founder Juan Linietsky observed in our conversation last year, a company loading up on new tools at that speed is creating a mountain of tech debt really fast.Related:Launching and maintaining all those services can mean older favored tools might fall by the wayside. Unfortunately Unity chose to address this problem by laying off 25 percent of its workforce in 2024, and terminating another team in February 2025.Those layoffs, for better or worse, are a byproduct of Unity's decision to narrow its focus, Bromberg said. "We made a series of choices on at the product level around what we wanted to focus on," he said. It was painful for some folks and painful for us, but there were impacts."Any such future cuts in 2025 would be done with a similar mindset, he asserted. "We're not looking to cut costs for financial reasons," he said. One can understand that winding down products and services means a company has no need for the people who brought them to lifebut it does little to ease the sting that hardworking developers are still paying the price for executive mistakes.Still, Unity is, as Bromberg explained in a 2024 blog, shifting its technical strategy. Beginning with 6, Unity is reshaping its strategy for "stable" and "experimental" builds. Previously, both labels advanced with new versions of Unity. Now the company is slowing down the rollout of "stable" builds, "blessing" certain builds as ones that receive long-term support and bugfixes while progress advances on new features for the following few months. If say, Unity 6.4 were to receive that blessing, the next "stable" version would not be designated until Unity 6.5, .6, and .7 had already rolled out.Related:Unity customers want something "simpler" than how things used to be done, said Collins. That means developers can make a clearer choice between testing new features early in development and locking in to a stable build that will serve them during production proper.Developers hoping for news on long-awaited initiatives like .NET modernization and block shader initiatives might have to wait a little longer. Collins said they are 'very important' to Unity, but they're focusing on Unity 6 rollouts this year. "The work we're doing on AI, the work we're doing on performance, the work we're doing on increasing the number of platforms we're supporting...that's the thing we're focusing on, helping developers deliver the titles and the games that they're delivering right now.""The core work we're doing around stability is to enable us to be in a place where developers don't feel like they have to choose between...new features and stability," said Bromberg.Re-engaging with developers who made Unity what it isAnother pain point for developers burned by Runtime Fee is the feeling that Unity ignored the community that helped make the engine such a prolific tool. The service evolved through user-developed plugins and features that became mainstays. In a post-IPO world, does that kind of open-source mentality still hold up?Hopefully. In Unity's quest to focus on its strengths, Bromberg and Collins said the community-sourced services (many hosted on the Unity store) should be something that fills the gap for users who need more than the company's offerings. "We want to work more closely with those partners," Collins said, referring to developers who dedicate work on those plugins and other systems. "I'd say a lot of what we're talking about here [is] in terms of 'focus.' Focus is about choosing what [we] do, and don't do, but also to not do things that are very well served by the ecosystem.""There are great solutions out there where we can just get better at interacting with those, and we do plan to do that. We do plan to be a better partner in our own ecosystem in the coming months."Grand promisesbut developers around GDC certainly still had the feel of a wounded animal warily making their way to an outstretched hand when the topic of Unity came up. Perhaps it's worth wondering what goal Unity is trying to serve with its services. Under John Riccitiello's leadership, he landed in hot water preaching the need to "make money by testing monetization early" (and saying some developers are 'fucking idiots')Bromberg and Collins didn't say anything about monetization in our chat, though they talked broadly about reaching new audiences. The pair company were buzzing with excitement about WebGPU as a new platform for developers, and seemed to have a hint of exasperation at the platform fees on Steam, the App Store, console platforms, etc. Bringing that kind of opportunity to more types of developers seems to be part of the new promise."That where's the sweet spot in the market is, right? Beautiful games, on any platform," he said (quickly acknowledging 'beautiful' might be a loaded word that means too many different things). I think the industry in general is realizing that's where it wants to be."Game Developer and GDC are sibling organizations under Informa.