How to play Unity Games offline

Martin Brinkmann
Nov 23, 2014
Games
|
14

When you play games in your web browser, one of the following four technologies is being used usually: Adobe Flash, Java, Unity or HMTL5.

There are exceptions to the rule but the majority relies on at least one of the technologies listed above. When it comes to Unity, it is necessary to install the Unity Web Player add-on on the system which web browsers pick up as a plugin.

The Unity team works on a plugin-less version of the player currently so expect this to come out in the near future. The advantage of it is that it does not require plugins to run which should improve stability among other things.

While it is possible to play Unity games in the browser directly, you may have noticed that performance may not be the best. This is usually because you are playing the game on older hardware but partially also caused by it not being a native app but running inside the browser.

This means usually that you get other elements on the screen not related to the game. A website may display ads for example, media, textual contents, images and other elements which at the very least may be distracting.

Play Unity games offline

unity games offline

It is possible to play Unity games offline, or separated from the website they are hosted on. Offline is of course only an option if the game is not purely multi-player.

Good news is that you can download many Unity games and play them on the computer regardless of an Internet connection. Another benefit is that it is usually faster than playing the games in the browser.

Here is what needs to be done:

  1. You need to install the Unity Web Player plugin on your system. It is available for Mac and Windows.
  2. Download the latest version of Unity Player from this website. It is available for Windows and the tool used to play the Unity games on the computer.
  3. Optional: Install a cache browser for easier access to Unity Player files. Firefox users can check out CacheViewer

All steps above are one-time processes. To download and play a Unity game offline, do the following:

  1. Open the game in your browser of choice. This downloads it to the cache of the browser.
  2. Use a caching extension or browse your browser's cache manually to locate the .unity3d file in the cache.
  3. Drag and drop the file into the Unity Player interface.

That's all there is to it. (Thanks Ken for the tip)

Summary
How to play Unity Games offline
Article Name
How to play Unity Games offline
Description
A quick tutorial that explains how you can Unity games offline on your computer using a program called Unity Player.
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Comments

  1. Asker said on January 22, 2021 at 1:16 pm
    Reply

    What is the name of the game on the picture? btw u can use an easier alternative called flashpoint to play these games.

  2. Shawn said on December 22, 2019 at 9:43 am
    Reply

    Uniplayer only works on a unity3d file if the unity web player is able to play a specific version of the unity3d game, for example: If you have unity web player version 5xxx installed then it would be able to play games made with the same version and possibly a little higher but not games made as lets say, 4.6.8 versions and can’t run them with backwards compatible with lower versions. Ive managed to get most of my games to work on Uniplayer somehow but it was a lot of trouble installing various webplayers and fooling around with the files in the instillation folder. Took about six hours to make them all work and all the unity3d files/games I have are made somewhere back in 2014 and 2015 with lower versions and other games I have are higher so its does play mixed files but I have three different web players installed or that Uniplayer must be finding to use to load the games. But I think it could only use just one webplayer but somehow it might be using all three to play each game with the intended versions that match with each webplayer. I don’t know how I manged to get it to work like this? But it does work anyhow. Now much higher versions of Unity games do not work for me under the type of instillation of the webplayers, the way I have them installed but they are newer games that were made in 2017 and and even some for 2019 but on my VM workstation windows I have installed the the more higher version of the unity webplayer so I can play some newer stuff made VIA from my virtual Windows XP machine. So yeah it really all varies how Uniplayer handles the games of being played offline, really depending on the type of version of unity webplayer you have installed it must really match the version of the unity3d file or it might not work.

  3. Liz said on July 16, 2018 at 1:48 am
    Reply

    Hey! I downloaded the .unity3d file and it will start loading in the Unity Player, but the screen just goes plain black after the loading bar is finished instead of the game loading. Any idea what I might be doing wrong? I uninstalled and reinstalled the Web Player (32 bit as suggested by Brian) and it’s still not working.

  4. Videogamer555 said on April 14, 2018 at 11:48 am
    Reply

    Where does Unity Web Player store its cache? For example when playing a unity game (whether embedded in a webpage or playing with UniPlayer) one of the first things the game does is download needed resources (textures for buttons, background images for various screens, even some audio files). These get stored to the Unity Web Player cache. Where on my harddrive is this cache stored?

  5. Brian said on March 14, 2017 at 3:23 am
    Reply

    Uniplayer doesn’t work for me. When I open it, it just asks me to install Unity Web Player even though I already have it installed. I tried reinstalling it and it did nothing. The File-View-Tool-Help bar at the top doesn’t appear either. :/

    1. Brian said on March 14, 2017 at 12:24 pm
      Reply

      Nevermind about that, I got Uniplayer working again. The thing is, I had to download the 32-bit version of Unity Web Player in order for it to work. For some reason, installing the 64-bit version of Unity Web Player from their website won’t let you use Uniplayer. Just a heads up for anyone who’s trying this.

      1. Martin Brinkmann said on March 14, 2017 at 1:24 pm
        Reply

        Brian, thanks for the tip. I’m sure it is helpful to other users as well.

      2. Dumitru said on December 22, 2019 at 7:04 am
        Reply

        I got the exact same problem…im going to search for the 32 bits version,thanks!

  6. TerryHocking said on February 28, 2016 at 7:18 pm
    Reply

    great and this used to work. I aswitched to windows 10 and now the browser clears the .unity3d file as soon as it stios loading. trying to figure out how to over ride.

    1. Jay said on March 10, 2016 at 9:51 am
      Reply

      In Firefox try [CTRL+SHIFT+I] to bring up the web inspector on the game page. Click on the search box (left of the “Rules” tab) and type in ‘unity3d’. Keep pressing [Enter] until you get a chunk of Javascript code. Double-click on the highlighted text and look through it for a file path that ends in “.unity3d”. Now just copy the path into the URL bar. If it doesn’t include a domain, then simply add the domain you’re already on. (ex: http ://thedomain. com/PATH/TO/GAME/FILE.unity3d). Load the URL and your Browser should download the file.

      1. Kacper11PL said on January 20, 2019 at 8:07 pm
        Reply

        Thx Jay

      2. Jason Ross said on November 9, 2017 at 5:08 am
        Reply

        What do you do if the inspector can’t find the unity3d file? There’s a “title” page and a game page. The title page has no unity3d file and the inspector wont work on the game page. What do I do?

  7. pog said on February 20, 2015 at 7:11 pm
    Reply

    uniplayer doesn’t work, it hangs while loading a game.

    1. tzer said on November 27, 2019 at 3:43 am
      Reply

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