Unity Technologies is proud to announce that the company’s Asset Store is expected to exceed one million users by the end of the year and celebrates its fourth birthday with the Birthday Bonanza Madness Sale.

Today, it offers more than 15,000 content packages and apps – available from nearly 3,800 creators – to developers, delivering exciting content packages for 2D and 3D models, plus other tools and services such as animation, audio, editor extensions, shaders, scripting, textures, and materials.

Unity’s Asset Store is a marketplace designed to give all developers the opportunity to compete in today’s crowded gaming market by increasing quality and lowering costs. It launched in November 2010 and has continued to be a unique, robust resource that offers content, tools, and services like no other engine. Unity estimates that the Asset Store ecosystem, empowering Unity developers to create games and apps with a more efficient and effective production process, saves developers six million workdays over a 12-month period, which roughly equals a savings of $1.4 billion.

The Unity Asset Store was instrumental in empowering Nicolas Liatti to create Stealth, a new mobile game. “Thanks to the Asset Store, I was able to single-handedly develop my first mobile game, Stealth, which offers players a high-quality production value that can compete with larger studios that have multi-million dollar production budgets,” said Liatti. “The content, technology, and tools that Unity has available in its marketplace have made it possible for me to offer unique experiences in the game, which surpass the stealth-based gameplay that have come before it.”

The Unity Asset Store offers a huge array of production ready assets like environment art and Hollywood -quality music and sound effects, as well as cutting-edge technology i ncluding editor extensions and sop h i sticated  shaders. Developers come to Unity first to help them make huge strides forward in their projects. With the Asset Store, Unity is enabling innovative workflows to emerge, attracting avid users like Richard Garriott’s Portalarium and Brian Fargo’s inXile Entertainment to the system. Unity’s extensibility empowers developers to create tools and utilities to extend the functionality of the editor itself and roll their own tools and features into Unity. As a result, developers can easily resell their products in the Asset Store, which makes it a fertile ground for game-enhancing technology, tools, and content.

For many asset creators, the Asset Store has become a primary source of income. “The Asset Store and community have made the continued development of Shader Forge possible to the point where I’ve now been working on it full time for about a year,” said Joachim Holmér, creator of Shader Forge. “It’s absolutely amazing to see what people create with a tool of your own making and watch how an actively helpful community forms around it. You rarely have a chance to add an extra tool in an application and you rarely have the chance to distribute it to so many people.”

“We envisioned the Asset Store as a democratic marketplace that would give developers, especially indies, a way to acquire high quality assets and technology cheaply while also providing a way to make some extra money on the side,” said David Helgason, Founder and EVP, Unity Technologies. “Because Unity is used by so many developers, inside and outside of gaming, around the world, the Asset Store has become a big part of the success the Unity developer community. It’s saving developers time and resources, providing access to assets and tools that would otherwise have been out of reach, and has created incredible new streams of revenue for many. We are very proud of what it’s turned into just four years after launch.”