Microsoft on Wednesday announced the acquisition of SyntaxTree, the UnityVS plug-in developer, with no word about the financial details of the deal.
In a blog post by Microsoft Developer Division Chief Soma Somasegar, the company has expressed plans to integrate UnityVS into Visual Studio and continue to support game developers through Visual Studio.
SnytaxTree in a blog post said that its employees will be joining Microsoft’s Visual Studio team as a result of the acquisition.
Currently, several developers use UnityVS to debug their Unity scripts and get snippets, wizards and other development tools from the platform. UnityVS also lets developers integrate Visual Studio and the Unity console to get advantage of such integration.
Developers also get support from Unity for Visual Studio C# integration, however, UnityVS provides more support proving the integration to be more helpful to developers. The plug-in currently costs $99 for the personal version, while the professional version costs $249 and it will be available for free from Microsoft.
SyntaxTree has said that its existing users will soon be notified about how the company will support them. Its existing userbase includes Electronic Arts, Blizzard, Valve and Rovio, etc besides Microsoft Studios.
Unity also has about 2 million developers using its platform and most of them use Visual Studio. Thus, the acquisition is expected to benefit them as the tools will be integrated henceforth.
The Unity engine now supports desktop, mobile and console platforms, and with this acquisition, Microsoft might extend support for Windows Store and all Windows Phone apps too.
Microsoft has also entered into deals with Marmalade, Havok, and Corona Labs to bring more games to the Microsoft store.
