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Unity, now valued at $6B, raising up to $525M
- lyttlerock 7y agoThe key word here seems to be "up to". It'll be interesting to see how many employees (common shareholders) are actually willing to sell their shares to the investors. If they're holding on and the full $525M isn't raised, then almost paradoxically, I'd wager that Unity is doing really really well. If they're selling, I don't think it necessarily can be construed as good or bad without proper context.
- SeanBoocock 7y agoIt will be interesting to see how the next couple years play out. The growth opportunities in my mind are: expanding their suite of hosted services (https://unity3d.com/services); https://unity3d.com/services); and convincing an increased percentage of large publishers/developers to develop on Unity. While there is a business in building tools for (generally smaller) developers, it is hard to imagine a $6 billion valuation on the back of just developer subscriptions, even the significantly more expensive enterprise arrangements. Services represent an opportunity to scale based on the success of products built on Unity, not just on the size of the developer community.
- daemin 7y agoThey could also be using that money in order to combat Epic and Unreal, especially given that Epic has a lot of money from Fortnite and their owners Tencent. Because out of the engines that any game studio can use for a new project, there's really only Unity and Unreal.* * = If they do not have their own internal engine or it is not applicable to their new game.
- zimpenfish 7y ago> there's really only Unity and Unreal. Is CRYENGINE no longer an option? https://www.cryengine.com/ https://www.cryengine.com/
- jtms 7y agoIt doesn’t get used very often these days to my knowledge
- daemin 7y agoThere's Lumberyard which you could say is a fork of CryEngine. But in general I don't see studios lining up to use either of the two. Also the idTech engine is limited to games that are published by Bethesda. So you can count it as an in-house engine now, just like Frostbite is for EA.
- georgeecollins 7y agoLumberyard really doesn't have the support that Unity and Unreal have. It is hard to recommend using Lumberyard when there are alternatives that are well tested, well documented, and many developers are familiar with.
- dmix 7y ago> If they're selling, I don't think it necessarily can be construed as good or bad without proper context. This is assuming the employees and stock holders are rational and can maintain long-term risky assets. Plenty of people will be looking to cash out as they've held stock for a long period and want to buy a nice house or car or something. I'm sure the wealthier percentage will take a longer term look at it. But I wouldn't generalize the average equity owning employee as you would a typical public market.
- mtremsal 7y agoSelling shares during a tender offer is a perfectly rational move for employees that are cash-poor and faced with the tax implications of exercising their options. Also obviously for anyone looking to simply de-risk.
- dmix 7y agoFair enough, it’s all about how much time and money you have. Rational was a poor choice of words.
- mcmoose75 7y agoI was at a company previously that had a liquidity event, and many of my colleagues (not me unfortunately) had very meaningful stock awards. A lot of people discussed what they should do openly, and recognized the potential for the stock to go up later on- many defaulted to selling half of their holdings as soon as they could to put some cash in their pocket, and holding on to half for potential gains. Not super sophisticated, but it seemed like it made good sense to me.
- golergka 7y agoKeep in mind, that with this kind of sell deal, employees and investors have drastically different risk sensitivity. For employees cashing in their stock options or getting stock, it could be up to a half of their middle-class compensation – not the kind of money a rational person would put into risiker investments. But funds that invest in startups are specializing in high risk/reward, which their customers – other financial institutions who put a minor portion of managed money in such ventures, or individuals who are significantly wealthier than middle class and can afford to lose a lot of money without damage to their livelihood and lifestyle. So, my point is, these kinds of deals are very often win-win, and can't signify that there's something wrong with the company.
- madeofpalk 7y ago> If they're selling, I don't think it necessarily can be construed as good or bad without proper context. Maybe they just want to be rich, now? Of course depending on how much I would get, but my decision to sell would have very little to do with how well I thought the company was going.
- harperlee 7y agoYes. I read some study that stated that, contrary to popular belief, stock selling by insiders is not very informative (due to noise from liquidity needs that stem from personal finance) - whereas stock purchasing is quite so. If someone aggresively moves to buy something (s)he deeply knows, there is something to it.
- gvb 7y agoThey should follow Marc Cuban's example; take some money out of their share holding and diversify their investments. Quoting from https://www.fool.com/slideshow/7-things-you-can-learn-mark-cuban/ https://www.fool.com/slideshow/7-things-you-can-learn-mark-c... 5. Diversification is extremely important It’s important to maintain a diverse investment portfolio, whether you’ve just come into billions of dollars as Mark Cuban did in 1999 or you’re starting with a few hundred dollars. When Cuban and his partners sold Broadcast.com in 1999, they didn’t get billions in cash -- it was all in the form of Yahoo stock. Instead of holding virtually all of his wealth in one company’s stock, he did a great job of diversifying his investments. Cuban spent $20 million hedging his Yahoo stock with synthetic indexes, and shortly thereafter acquired assets such as the Dallas Mavericks and Landmark Theatres. It’s a good thing Cuban did all of that. Yahoo’s stock price dropped by more than 96% from January 2000 through September 2011. To put this in perspective, $1 billion in Yahoo stock would have fallen in value to just over $34 million.
- trimbo 7y ago> Cuban spent $20 million hedging his Yahoo stock with synthetic indexes My understanding is that he used puts. Either way, any derivative strategies he employed back then almost certainly violates any corporate stock agreement today.
- gvb 7y agoThe point isn't how Cuban hedged his stock holdings, it is that he hedged them and that he would have lost a huge amount of money if he had not. Applying this to the Unity shareholders, their smart move is to sell some of their Unity stock holdings and use the cash from those sales to diversify their portfolio.
- soup10 7y agoUnity is great at efficiently producing shovelware.
- tootie 7y agoYou mean games? The company only produces the platform. They're not a game studio.
- soup10 7y agoYes what else would I mean? Unity has proven to be very good at enabling amateurs to mass produce shitty games.
- barbecue_sauce 7y agoAnd also has enabled the production of beloved games like Return of the Obra Dinn, Overcooked, Hollow Knight, Enter The Gungeon, Superhot, Kerbal Space Program, Broforce, etc.
- squeaky-clean 7y agoHearthstone, Cities Skylines, Parkitect, Superhot, Pokémon Go, Cuphead, Beat Saber, Pathfinder Kingmaker, Subnautica...
- ekianjo 7y agoI think the key point here is that percentage wise, there is way more shovelware produced in Unity than gems. They are not wrong.
- dawhizkid 7y agoAmazing when what otherwise sound like dysfunctional/toxic orgs do well. No mention of the sex scandal at the top. Checking Glassdoor as well and seems like a lot of unhappiness in general.
- SeanBoocock 7y agoThe sexual harassment lawsuit is the subject of the penultimate paragraph.
- Thaxll 7y agoThe problem they have is they're growing too quickly.
- martamoreno2 7y agoThe problem they have is that they have retarded management, courtesy of EA. I still find it baffling what kind of breed game developers are and why they let themselves get fisted day in and day out just for eye candy.
- MegaButts 7y ago> I still find it baffling what kind of breed game developers are and why they let themselves get fisted day in and day out Lots of people grew enamored with videogames, so for them it's a chance to work on something they're passionate about and pay the bills at the same time. I don't think many people can say that, including most software engineers.
- golergka 7y agoI have worked in gamedev for 12 years (the only industry I've been working in my entire life) and have never seen anything like the stories you most likely mean. It's not all sunshine and rainbows, and I often think about switching into something else, but overall it seems just like any other tech. Plus, in my experience at least, Unity as a tech stack is one of the best paid, at least around here.
- 7y ago
- trykondev 7y agoI've been using Unity for more than half a decade at this point. Some of their choices along the way have been really frustrating to deal with, but on the whole, they've empowered me and plenty of colleagues to create things we might not have been able to otherwise. (Or at least, certainly not as easily). I know it's popular to hate on Unity for some of the bad games produced using the engine, but I don't really think that's fair -- to me, that's a failure of the storefronts that host subpar games. Creating a tool that makes it easier for people to make games is awesome. Unity has given me a lot, and I root for the company's success.
- baud147258 7y agoThat reminds me of a discussion around a good (in my opinion) game called Mechanicus that had some poor performance. Unity got the blame for this, but as Subnautica (and plenty other games) has shown, good-looking and performant games can be developed using Unity, it's more an issue of available ressources (Mechanicus had like 1 full-time dev vs +- 6 for Subnautica) and skill. And without Unity, I don't think the Mechanicus team could have developed their game or it wouldn't have been as good.
- Stevvo 7y agoI wouldn't call Subnautica good looking; it has the worst LOD implementation I've seen in a game for 20 years, and performance was quite unremarkable.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- franknine 7y agoYou have to constantly fighting Unity to get the performance you want, which is extremely frustrating. The time spent on figuring out "WTF are you doing Unity" and coming up with a workaround is huge. Inside had a talk about how they achieve smooth seamless gameplay which involves purchasing access to Unity source code and mod it.
- 7y ago
- appstorelottery 7y agoI've been developing in Unity since V1.0. Back then you could ring David Helgason and complain about the water shader not working when you run it for 12 hours straight - and get it fixed. It blows my mind how much they've grown - but not just that - the tool itself is capable of AAA these days. The only real competition at that level is probably Unreal - and that's so very different to get into if you're an old-school unity developer. When you compare the Asset store (where you can practically buy any solution to your common problem) and compare it with Unreal's store - it doesn't really compete. These two points make me think Unity has such a moat built around developers mindspaces that it's probably super-hard to dethrone at this point. I'm interested if anyone else has an alternative point of view on unities sustainable competitive advantage.
- Keyframe 7y agoI'm gonna offer you another angle. Custom engine. You CAN almost always beat these general solutions if you specialize with your engine. Question is, should you? Would that specialization offer an advantage vs developing something with a general solution like that?
- georgemcbay 7y agoThe biggest problem with custom engines is really the tools -- it isn't that hard (relatively) to build a modern feature-rich 3D gaming engine. OTOH, it is very difficult to build a full tool pipeline that supports that engine. Most of the value of Unreal or Unity is that the tools are already there and they more or less Just Work and a lot of people know how to use them.
- ausbah 7y agoWhy does a private company trying to go public need to raise money from investors?
- bin0 7y agoA large part of this is allowing their employees to cash out. When a company goes public, there is often a clause that prevents sales for a certain number of months, and who knows what the share price will do by then. This is actually a really good thing for Unity to do, trying to make the "stock compensation" perk into a meaningful cash-out. It also means employees don't have to deal with holding shares in a public company if they don't want to, as that's hassle.
- appstorelottery 7y agoThey stated one of the reasons was increased liquidity. But if you look at the jobs - they’re hiring pretty intensely at the moment - it looks like they’ll increase their workforce by around 7%.
- juskrey 7y agoSo now it becomes another overfed sacrificial VC lamb. Bye bye Unity I guess.
- dptd 7y agoOkay, so most of us are aware of Unity vs Unreal battle. Are there any other engines which are being used or worth checking them out? I heard a lot of good things about Godot Engine: https://godotengine.org/ https://godotengine.org/ Someone also mentioned here Grid Engine (which I never heard of): https://www.planimeter.org/grid-sdk/ https://www.planimeter.org/grid-sdk/
- rubinelli 7y agoUnity could potentially get squeezed between Godot in the low-end and Unreal in the high-end. I've played around with Godot, and for small, performance-insensitive games, like a Candy Crush clone or indie puzzle platformer, it is a nice, license-unencumbered option.
- echelon 7y agoBeginner question! I want to use a game engine in my video editing pipeline. I want real time video acquisition, real time shading, real time camera manipulation, depth / fov tools, object and scene management, etc. I want to extend it to do all sorts of things, but basically the gist is to mix video editing and game engine, and put actors into complex virtual scenes in real time. Which engine should I use? Which one supports more video things out of the box? Ideally it works on Linux, but that isn't a hard requirement. Also, if you can answer my questions on Skype/Hangouts (or in person in Atlanta), I'd be happy to pay $$$/hr. I want to get a broad overview of the space.
- WrtCdEvrydy 7y agoIt depends. If you're fully on a professional pipeline (all professional tooling for 3d work), Cryengine can deliver breathtaking stuff. If you're a little more open source geared, Epic is a little better than Unity. Unity behaves like a framework where you buy the rest of the features from the Unity Store.