Virtual reality is set to explode in the coming years; it could an $80 billion industry in the next decade, according to Goldman Sachs. But how do we get there? PCMag chatted with Clive Downie, CMO of Unity Technologies, to find out.

The company is best known for its Unity game engine development platform. This allows an "author once, deploy everywhere" process which has all but replaced the headache of creating purely native games and apps that require staggered, costly, and complex rollouts across a myriad of platforms.

"We see our role at Unity as providing the opportunity to create an ecosystem for developers and creators to be successful in VR/AR," he told PCMag. "If you don't know a lot of scripting, you can still build stuff and that's powerful. But when you've created something, you need to know how to get it to market and how to ascertain success. To this end, we've built integrated analytics tools, advertising tools, and so on to enable developers to have a real business."

At the recent Vision Summit in Los Angeles, the company was pushing the "Made With Unity" tagline. But it's not something Unity is thinking of releasing as a certification to drive sales.

"It's all about discoverability," Downie said. "It's hard for creators to get their games found, especially in the mobile arena, and so we wanted to support the development community and prosumers by building the Made With Unity site, using our reach...so they can tell their story."

Currently, Unity offers a free Personal edition, which gives users full access to the engine and all 24 Unity-supported platforms if they earn less than $100,000 in revenue per year. The paid version, Unity Pro, provides additional features like analytics, simultaneous builds across platforms, and more customizable features. Unity Pro costs $75 per month for the core product and an extra $75 per month for iOS and Android support.

Some independents have been grumbling about Unity 5.0's development agreement, which states that Unity Pro perpetual licenses will expire on March 2017. We put this question to Downie.

"We believe in democratizing game development and so we will always have a free product," Downie pointed out. "You can make wonderful things and release your games across all the platforms we support using that free version. But we are constantly evaluating our product lines to support our 4.5 million registered developers."

Don't expect a marketplace or app store from Unity; it isn't interested in taking royalties off people's games to share in their success. "We think that's punitive," said Downie. So what's next?

"We have a division called Unity Labs, which is involved in cutting-edge engineering tasks, to push what's possible. Its HQ is in SF but there are teams around the world who are are tasked with experimenting to improve the main Unity platform. We will be rolling out a website for Unity Labs at GDC in March."

Earlier that day, onstage at Vision Summit, Timoni West, principal designer of the Unity Labs team, previewed Unity's Scene VR tool, which allows developers to build games in virtual reality, rather than on a computer screen. She almost overwhelmed the massive CPU but it all came out right in the end. There was much sharp intake of breath and auditory encouragement in response from the packed auditorium of developers, a fine geek moment.

Unity now has a 30 percent market share worldwide of the top 1,000 grossing mobile games and over 90 percent of the VR content for Samsung's Gear VR. Games "Made With Unity" are downloaded 1.5 billion times a month. Many of them, but certainly not all, come with some kind of paid version. Whether it's enough to reach analysts' projections remains to be seen.

This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.