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Today Unity released the beta of its Unity 4 game engine for Windows 8 which allows game developers to target their games to any Windows 8 device including Windows RT.

Windows 8 has already welcomed a number of Unity-authored games to the Windows Store according to Unity, including Orcs Must Survive, Drift Mania Championship 2, Pettson’s Inventions, Gunpowder, Rumpelstiltskin 3D, Snow White Prequel, Razor Salvation, Siegecraft, Qbism, Hungry MonstR, Fling Theory, Experiment HDBig Buck Hunter, Living Stories: Das Verlorene Herz.

According to John Richards, the senior director of Windows App Marketing for Microsoft, the beta of the Unity 4 game engine for Windows 8  means “the entire Unity community of 1.5 million developers can get started quickly building games for Windows 8. The number of high quality Unity-based games already created for PC, Xbox and mobile devices is impressive, and we’re excited to see the amazing games the community brings to Windows 8 with Unity.”

The standard warnings about this being a beta, likely containing bugs and not being feature complete is heavily emphasized on the Unity blog post but if you are a game developer they are looking for your feedback on the system.  However, having access to the beta means it could “open up a new global platform for you to reach even more people eager to play great Unity-authored games and interactive content.”

I think that makes risk versus reward pretty good in the long run.