Microsoft welcomes Unity, Unreal Engine, and Cocos2d into Visual Studio as part of a new partnership

Kareem Anderson

Image Credit: Unreal Engine 4

Visual Studio arguably offers one of the best dev environments available. Microsoft would like to extend that development environment to mobile gaming. As the mobile gaming sector continues to grow and service hundreds of millions of users every day, this is an opportunity too huge for Microsoft to miss or more importantly, mess up. Combing the development areas for developers of Xbox, Windows, iOS, Android and the web is what the Visual Studio teams is aiming to accomplish. Today, that goal just got a lot closer.

Today the Microsoft CVP of the Developer Division, “Soma” Somasegar is announcing some key partnerships with some of the top mobile game engines. Microsoft is now collaborating with premier independent gaming engine providers: Unity Technologies, Epic Games, and Chuckong Technologies. According to Soma:

“Together, we are making it even easier for game developers to use the rich capabilities of the Visual Studio IDE to develop games for today’s most popular platforms. Each of these top gaming engines’ installers will now offer the ability to co-install Visual Studio Community on Windows, along with the plug-ins required for Windows developers building for these engines. In addition, we will make it easier to discover and use the tools for Unity, Unreal and Cocos2d from within Visual Studio 2015.”

Image Credit: MSDN Blog
The key take away from today’s announcement is that developers will now be able to utilize these popular mobile game engines that power prevalent 2D and 3D games alongside free debugging and programming tools in Visual Studios. The three engines already support the most popular gaming platforms, with the aid of Visual Studio, devs can expand their support of Cordova (HTML), Xamarin (C#) and C++ as well.

These collaborations bring an enormous consolidation approach to game development. The Visual Studio continues their focus on optimizing the Unity3D, Epic EU4, and Cocos2D gaming engines and making available the co-installations across all three gaming engines. Soon Visual Studios could become the one-stop IDE for game devs on any platform.