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Unity raises $181M round at a reported $1.5B valuation
- tostitos1979 10y agoMan .. wish they were a publicly traded company :(
- marblar 10y agoDo you wish that because you work there?
- Kiro 10y agoWhat makes you think they work there?
- exolymph 10y agoMy assumption was that tostitos1979 wanted to invest in Unity, not cash out.
- tostitos1979 10y agoInvest. I took an OpenGL course in college and it was terrible. Ended up dropping out of the course since it seemed a pointless way of doing things. I tried Unity over the Christmas break (hacking around with VR) and was very impressed. I'm not in the games industry btw.
- michaelvoz 10y agoI wonder, what are the current opinions about the end game for Unity? What is the goal of seeking this new funding? My understanding was they are profitable.
- stevehawk 10y agoSomeone wants to start cashing out or someone wants to IPO and this gives a starting value to the company.
- SneakerXZ 10y agoMy guess would be Microsoft. Unity uses C# and it would fit into Microsoft strategy.
- BigChiefSmokem 10y agoIf that happens, and it is actually very likely, I expect UnityScript and Typescript to be rolled into each other.
- nawitus 10y agoDoes UnityScript refer to a JavaScript variant or the C#-like language?
- damon_c 10y agoIn Unity, you have the option to script in a javascript "like" language. It has quite a few strange syntax variations. You can also use a (as far as I can tell) standard C# and a couple of other languages including one called Boo which is sort of similar to Python. I learned C# to work with Unity rather than have to confuse my brain with strange syntaxes of languages I use in other places. edit: Here is a link http://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php/UnityScript_versus_JavaScript http://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php/UnityScript_versus_JavaScr...
- jimmaswell 10y agoThe C# is entirely standard. It's compiled to normal IL bytecode. You can call any other IL code from it in DLLs as well, compiled in F# or VB.NET etc. You can even use a newer C# version than their supplied compiler supports if you set it up so you build the IL yourself since it uses the same IL. You lose a few conveniences like opening scripts directly from the editor but it works well otherwise if you want the new C# features. I believe it's also a bit more efficient that way to some degree.
- greggman 10y agoUnityScript is so far from TypeScript that would never happen. UnityScript is absolutely nothing like real JavaScript and has none of JavaScript's real features.
- carlosdp 10y agoThey have the chance to be the platform for developing any sort of AR/VR applications. Not just for games, for any kind of application as the medium rises in popularity and eventually starts seeing mass market proliferation.
- macspoofing 10y agoI can see them being picked up by a player like Microsoft, Nvidia, or Intel.
- jessriedel 10y agoThere's no particular reason that profitability means funding should end. Companies should continue to attract outside funding so long as there are investments to be made for significant future profits that can't be covered by current profits.
- st3v3r 10y agoWhy does there have to be an "end game"? Why can't they be a company that just makes good tools and sells them to people?
- nawitus 10y agoIf there's no "end game", why do they need such a large amount of funding?
- dagw 10y agoBecause they just took $181M of other peoples money and those people are going to want a return on that investment. If you want to be company that just makes modest profits year after year selling good tools to people you can't accept large bags of outside money.
- michaelvoz 10y agoBecause it is a business. Actions have to be focused around objectives, where goals are the stepping stones to said objective. "Why can't they be a company that just makes good tools and sells them to people?" That in itself can be an endgame. A profitable game development company that makes great tools. However, if they are already profitable, and seem to already do this - why take the money? Hence my question.
- cloudmike 10y agoBeyond continuing to dominate the indie/pro game dev space, and slowly but surely expanding the scope and capabilities of the Unity Asset Store (devs selling code and assets to fellow devs), they're firmly on board the "democratization" train: make game development available to everyone [1]. Looking to the horizon, post VR hype, they're trying to take this further with experiments like Carte Blanche, which is creating VR from within VR itself for non-technical users [2]. But a consumer-oriented approach isn't in their DNA and isn't well aligned with their core business. Meanwhile, VR/AR startups who are entirely focused on this view of the world will evolve the right DNA and could build significant consumer-oriented value over the next few years. A war chest will come in handy if Unity wants to acquire that value and inject new DNA. [1] http://venturebeat.com/2015/11/13/unity-has-democratized-game-development-but-ceo-john-riccitiello-worries-about-too-much-vr-hype/ http://venturebeat.com/2015/11/13/unity-has-democratized-gam... [2] https://labs.unity.com/article/carte-blanche https://labs.unity.com/article/carte-blanche
- michaelvoz 10y agoInteresting! I wonder If there is a Unity hardware future as a competitor to Facebook or Valve.
- dharma1 10y agoMy guess is they want to move much faster in some areas, in particular VR/AR, so that competition (mainly Unreal Engine) doesn't capture the market. That requires more investment than they can currently afford. Unreal Engine is better in some aspects, but Unity has a very active community.
- dudurocha 10y agoMaybe a merge with Valve. So they will become the platform to build and to sell the games. They will have all the developers and resources on the game development world.
- consto 10y agoDoubtful. Valve has Source, their own game engine which their entire game portfolio is built on in one form or another. While rare it has been occasionally licensed out to other developers. Merging with Valve with two different competing big budget engines to maintain and improve. I just don't see how a merger could benefit either company.
- drawkbox 10y agoWell Unreal Engine has been going fast with all the Tencent money[1]. Unity took VC already[2], they put in the EA former CEO after that and it is heavily focused on service based/subscription based now[3]. They recently changed their whole setup to subscription only on June 28th[4]. My guess is they are going mostly subscription and infrastructure for games. They may one day offer a royalty or force larger companies into a royalty but right now not having one to companies like Nintendo is very attractive over Unreal Engine which takes 5% gross. They are taking money to build this infrastructure that has been in progress for 3-4 years to subscription/services. Their mission is to 'democratize game development' so I hope they always think of the smalls and mediums, not just the bigs. Unreal is really competitive now and if they don't take money they could slip. I have used Unity since 2008/version 2 and love it for mobile. I have also use Unreal since 2003 and love the latest version, they removed tons of unnecessary complexity to compete with Unity but still more for advanced devs and bigger PC/console games over mobile -- though they would like to take the place of Unity. [1] http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-03-22-tencent-paid-usd330m-for-48-percent-share-in-epic-games http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-03-22-tencent-pai... [2] https://unity3d.com/company/public-relations/news/unity-technologies-lands-12-million-series-b-funding-led-westsummit https://unity3d.com/company/public-relations/news/unity-tech... [3] https://unity3d.com/company/public-relations/news/unity-technologies-appoints-john-riccitiello-ceo https://unity3d.com/company/public-relations/news/unity-tech... [4] http://blogs.unity3d.com/2016/06/16/evolution-of-our-products-and-pricing/ http://blogs.unity3d.com/2016/06/16/evolution-of-our-product...
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- questionr 10y agofyi their "crunchbase" profile to the right shows the wrong company (its not http://www.unity.hr http://www.unity.hr, but instead https://unity3d.com/ https://unity3d.com/)
- bitsweet 10y agoFor VCs that want to invest in VR this is the logical place; it is too early to invest in apps and too late to get in to the hardware.
- intrasight 10y agoBy no means is it too late to get into hardware. We're very early in the VR/AR wave, and most current hardware sucks.
- netcan 10y agoCurious side question. Does anyone know what (if anything) generally happens to employee stock options in the event of these large funding rounds. Most options schemes are effectively designed around the idea of "liquidity event" which used to mean IPO in successful cases. These days when we see large investment rounds and acquisitions replacing a lot of what IPOs used to do, where does that leave options holders? I suppose this question also applies to early investors and founders too.
- silasdavis 10y agoThe company I used to work for provided liquidity moments around at least one funding round
- ChuckMcM 10y agoGenerally nothing, which is to say that the value of the company is higher so the options are "worth" more, but since there is still no way to sell them you cannot capture any of that value. It also makes it more expensive to exercise the options for employees as AMT will be assessed on the difference between the strike price (what the options cost to exercise) and their new higher "value".
- iblaine 10y agoNothing. $181M at $1.5B sounds pretty good to me. But in reality the employees are no richer today than they were yesterday. If everything goes right and the stars align, in several years there will be a liquidity event for investors, then founders/execs, then employees.
- the_watcher 10y agoThis isn't always the case. In many cases, part of the large, later stage rounds can offer options holders a chance to cash out (at least somewhat).
- SeoxyS 10y agoUnity is getting to the stage where early employees can start cashing out through secondaries. Marketplaces like Equidate[1] can help with that. [1]: https://equidateinc.com/ https://equidateinc.com/ - disclosure: I'm an investor in Equidate, and they're my favorite. There's a few others in the space like SharesPost, EquityZen, etc.
- jakozaur 10y agoUnicorn from Europe (Copenhagen, Denmark). Oh wait, they moved to San Francisco. It looks like there is a lot of talent and founders around the world, but still there is not enough VC and ecosystem to support them outside of Bay Area.
- cloudjacker 10y agoIt is because Bay Area valuations are indefensible by most US standards and any European accounting standard
- nojvek 10y agoOr may be outside of Bay Area, not many are willing to put money where the mouth is
- adwf 10y agoYeah, they'd laugh at you in London for asking for this kind of valuation unfortunately. (Except for the usual caveat of knowing the right people, etc.)
- fundameen 10y agoIt's got nothing to do with 'accounting' at all, it's a matter of potential. Lots of smug fools laughed at $15 billion valuation for Facebook. A few years later and it's generating more than that in annual revenue. It seems that many people still find it difficult to comprehend what 1+ billion internet/computer users means for technology companies that are capable of scaling.
- autotune 10y agoHow many startups fail every year again? Well let's find out: https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-startups-fail?srid=FEsz&share=0df0ea6f https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-startups-fail?srid=... Technology solves problems, but it doesn't mean every "problem" is actually a problem, or that it's worth solving. There will always be outliers.
- AWildDHHAppears 10y agoIt's a big boost for .NET in general, too.
- himanshuy 10y agoWhy would you say that? Sorry, I don't know much about Unity Technologies.
- Infinitesimus 10y agoYou can use C# in Unity which is huge (and partly why I'm leaning towards unity if I ever get into that space vs Unreal)
- whatever_dude 10y agoUnity's flavor of C# is years behind modern C# though. They're supposed to use IL2CPP to fix that but 2 years later [1] it's still only used in one platform (iOS) and a half (WebGL). They also have some modicum of support for .NET Core but it's unusable since a lot of existing code just doesn't work. They have some super talented people, but I frankly think they're just strapped for resources. I hope this round of investments will allow them to scale their engineering team and get scripting side of things more solid. With all the recent C#/.Net open sourcing, they have a lot of tools at their disposal, but from my perspective they're not using them to their full potential. [1] http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/05/20/the-future-of-scripting-in-unity/ http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/05/20/the-future-of-scripting-...
- Nelkins 10y agoUnity joined the .NET Foundation in April and has publicly stated that they are working on support for the most recent versions of C# [1]. [1] http://blogs.unity3d.com/2016/04/01/unity-joins-the-net-foundation/ http://blogs.unity3d.com/2016/04/01/unity-joins-the-net-foun...
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- xigency 10y agoThis seems like an incredible over valuation for a company in video game technology.
- erikpukinskis 10y agoI think it's undervalued. Unity is the go-to platform for quickly building mobile and VR games. I wouldn't be surprised to see full percentage points of all computing time spent on the platform. A few percent of the world's consumer computer use is definitely worth 1.5b.
- dingo_bat 10y agoThis is my feeling too. Unity is a $10b company if they maintain their tech lead and continue to be the go to engine for almost every mobile game.
- jluk 10y ago1. Why do you believe Unity to only be a video game tech? It obviously has applications reaching much further when you consider AR/VR use cases. 2. Minecraft was bought for $2.5B which is literally a video game. I think its a fair valuation given the current landscape for their domain.
- xigency 10y agoIn this case, video game technology would be a super-set of other applications. Take any non-game usage and turn it into a game, for example. First, I think Minecraft was an over-valuation as well. Second, it's more of a personal affront. When I first saw Minecraft, I thought it was simple and something that anyone could make. I would rather see 15 unique block-building games made by amateurs gain success than one predictable commercial application. Obviously not the kind of success VC's want to see. Maybe this is because when I was the target demographic age (11-14) I was trying to make a Doom renderer. With the amount of time that your average kid plays Minecraft and with that amount of focus, you could easily instruct a child how to make Minecraft from scratch. When I first saw Unity, I thought it was similar to what I was trying to achieve programming. This was back when I was working on making cross-platform (homebrew) games that supported PC, Linux, and Sony PSP, plus doing some Wii development commercially and making WebGL games. When you're thinking competitively, every framework is an enemy. I have to agree that Unity has value, and perhaps this is a fair evaluation of their value, but when I first heard about Unity (2008?), it was unorganized and it didn't seem like the project organizers had the necessary know-how to actually build the project. One of those, I have a really great idea projects. Somehow, they've been able to make connections all over the industry and come a long way since then. I'm not exactly sure what nearly $200 million will do for them now. For the upstarter, the real capital needed in this field is about $50,000 for development kits for each platform and twice that for licenses to develop as well, and a $100,000 education plus about $1000 in library books and about as much time as Unity has been in existence, a decade or so. That's just for one person, but that would be quite a bit of work for one billion dollars. The point is, the product is worthless unless it's built by experts. The whole market of video game engines is upside-down, but that's another issue. Another reason to be upset is that lower entry barriers lead to lower quality commercial releases. Many top-selling games now have terrible performance and crippling bugs. But I'm not an investor.
- gourneau 10y agoJust wanted to chime in and say Pokemon Go is another Unity game. Unity games seem to be doing extremely well on mobile.
- nathancahill 10y agoThanks, I was wondering if that was the case.
- thearn4 10y agoI've been playing with it a bit in the last few days, that's pretty interesting. I've got an older android phone, and it runs really smoothly for me. I'll have to give Unity another look I think.
- mathattack 10y agoVery well timed. I wonder if they held on to get more valuation on the positive PR.
- jim-greer 10y agoUnfortunately for Unity, they don't make any more money on a hit game than on a big-budget failure. All that matters is how many seat licenses they sell. Selling developer tools is not a great business.
- gourneau 10y agoThe Unreal Engine has an interesting license. There is no upfront cost but there is a 5% royalty that starts after the first $3,000 of revenue per product per quarter. Which is great for smaller shops, but seems like it would scare away the larger organizations.
- jsheard 10y agoEpic still offer completely upfront licensing with no revenue splitting, although the price isn't published. UE3 was supposedly in the $500k range so I imagine UE4 is similar. https://www.unrealengine.com/custom-licensing https://www.unrealengine.com/custom-licensing
- rcheu 10y agoSeems a bit low for a company that seems to be doing so well. Does anyone have insight into why the valuation isn't higher? For those unfamiliar with it, Unity is the go-to game engine for most smaller companies, and many cross platform (mobile/desktop) games. It also has some of the best support for VR.
- hyperpallium 10y agoI suspect that people aren't yet convinced that Unity will triumph over the more sophisticated, more popular, established competitors like unreal and frostbite, even though unity is well-placed for, and well-executing, a disruptive "democraticising" play.
- jack9 10y agoI thought it looked about right. From a developer's standpoint, it's about as crufty as a lot of other less developed options. I personally would invest in Corona before Unity.
- sjg007 10y agoQueue Microsoft acquisition.
- ozy23378 10y agoAnyone else thought this post was about Ubuntu's Unity and thus relieved?
- georgestephanis 10y agoI was thinking Rick James -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yLJ5NHARMk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yLJ5NHARMk
- georgestephanis 10y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yLJ5NHARMk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yLJ5NHARMk
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- synaesthesisx 10y agoAfter trying Hololens (of which all the demos I tried were built on Unity) I could see it becoming HUGE for AR/VR.
- cwkoss 10y agoIn-browser Unity has horrible performance.
- shmerl 10y agoI hope they'll catch up on Vulkan support soon.
- dcw303 10y agoGreat, now please use some of that cash to hire more developers. We've been waiting for a modern .net runtime update for years!
- mratzloff 10y agoCongrats to Unity. Maybe they can use some of that case to fix the UI. At modern resolutions it's unusable.
- mathattack 10y agoCan you be more specific?
- Stratoscope 10y agoThe text in the Unity Editor is much too small on a high-DPI display like a MacBook Pro Retina or a high-DPI ThinkPad. In Windows, the only way to run the Editor with any kind of readability is to let the Windows compatibility scaling kick in (as it does by default). So the text is bigger but really fuzzy. If you turn off compatibility scaling the text is much too small to read. On OSX it's not quite as bad, but the text is still a lot smaller than other OSX apps on this display. Adding to the trouble is the very poor contrast in both the "personal" (lighter gray) theme and the "pro" (dark) theme. The pro theme is just awful - so little contrast between the text and the background that I can barely read it. The personal theme is better, but still seriously lacking in contrast. Every other development app I use offers a theme with reasonable contrast and has been updated to work properly on high-DPI displays - except for Unity and Unreal Engine.
- aphextron 10y agoUnity Editor is awful. Why would you ever use that over VS or an actual text editor?
- mintplant 10y agoBecause Stratoscope is working on a Unity project?
- Stratoscope 10y agoI wonder if we're talking about the same thing? The Unity Editor I'm referring to is Unity's graphical environment where you edit your scenes and stuff. Of course I use Visual Studio to edit my C# code. And I'm fortunate to be doing more "systems plumbing" than 3D graphics, so I get to spend more time in VS2015 than in the Unity Editor. But there's still no avoiding the latter.
- pdeva1 10y agoUnity makes no money off the games themselves. Its equivalent to a dev tools company. Does $125/dev/month really make that much money?
- gohrt 10y agoIs Unity Web Player ever going to work in Chrome again?
- aev3O 10y agoI think they are focussing on WebGL
- aphextron 10y agoHow are they only valued at 1.5? Unity is the most advanced game engine in existence. Leaps and bounds above the competition.