On Wednesday, January 26th, 2022, Linden Lab announced that its subsidiary company, Tilia Inc., the licensed money transmitter and end-to-end payments platform, has reached an agreement with Unity for Tilia’s API and services to be made available to Unity developers as an integrated end-to-end payment solution.
Referring to the agreement as a partnership, the announcement from Linden Lab notes that Unity has vetted the Tilia API to ensure it is suitable and optimised for the latest version of the Unity Editor, and developers building in Unity can now access Tilia’s API through the Unity Asset Store to enable in-game and in-world economies, allowing their users to make and receive payments, and even exchange in-game tokens for real money.
This is potentially the biggest partnership deal Tilia has thus far made (customers until now being reported as Second Life, Sansar and Upland – although ” NFT marketplaces” are also listed as being partners), potentially opening Tilia’s three services – TiliaDirect (in-world payment processing), TiliaWallet (capabilities for “stored value” for assets & enables user-to-user transactions) and TiliaPay (enables the redemption of tokens for fiat (real) money, allowing players to cash out) – to Unity’s entire community of developers.
Many of today’s top games and virtual worlds are built using the powerful Unity real-time 3D development platform and increasingly developers want to incorporate significant virtual economy elements that allow for in-game or in-world user transactions. We are proud to bring an end-to-end payment solution available to the Unity Asset Store, and we look forward to seeing how Unity developers will incorporate Tilia.
Brad Oberwager, Executive Chairman of Linden Research, Inc.
It is perhaps worthwhile noting that this announcement does not in any way mean that Unity is buying or otherwise investing in Linden Lab / Second Life or that they are about to do so (a question I have already been asked). This is about leveraging the power of Tilia Inc., and the services it provides to deliver them to Unity developers who wish to utilise them and, in doing so, provide further revenue streams back to Tilia / Linden Lab.
For further context, please refer to the Press Release from Linden Lab in full.
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