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Unity is buying Peter Jackson’s Weta Digital for $1.6B
- throwuxiytayq 5y agoUnity is trying real hard to convince investors that it can compete with Unreal in the movie production space, while their actual capabilities are embarrassingly limited. Especially if you want to get shit done out-of-the-box, but also in terms of the max no-matter-the-budget end result quality. Hopefully they can catch up in the long run. The space needs competition.
- Keyframe 5y agoThis is a move in the right direction however, albeit a bit unexpected!
- TxProgrammer 5y agoUnity doesn't have to be an Unreal competitor -plenty of Unity folks in the Indie market (but I guess that's not where the money is) but I suppose you are right-for me, its easier to work with Unity than Unreal as a developer and I hope Unity can catch up technology wise.. not sure how acquiring WETA helps them in that.. its a cool Visual FX studio not a technology company..
- runevault 5y agoI think you missed a key point in the GP's comment. This HAS to be about competing in use for movies, not game development. Unreal has made huge strides in being used for green screen backgrounds rendered in real time and I don't know what else. This feels like a huge whiff to me, Unity needs to focus on games and just make money there. Games is a bigger market than movies at this point and there is plenty of room to grow there, especially if they can continue to make it easier for individuals/small groups to make a game in their spare time.
- hyperpallium2 5y agoYeah it is curious. Unity was the simpler, easier, cheaper disruption to Unreal. It makes sense they work their way up the prestige ladder, but Weta seems a rung too far. But a prestigious flagship does lift the whole company; skills/assets can trickle down to games; and they have been positioning themselves as a rival to Unreal for some time now.
- nettdata 5y agoThis is about being able to package and provide the Weta toolset to Unity developers. Imagine making video games with the Weta toolset.
- rojoca 5y agoIn the unity announcement they go over some of the tools weta have created: https://blog.unity.com/news/welcome-weta-digital https://blog.unity.com/news/welcome-weta-digital
- santaclaus 5y ago> its a cool Visual FX studio not a technology company.. Weta develops metric tones of tech internally, including employing some of the top graphics researchers at various points in their careers. There is tons of tech talent in VFX and animation shops. Hell, I work with libraries open sourced by Pixar as part of my day job at a FAANG.
- depereo 5y agoWeta does also run their own datacenter for local rendering; they use some network automation stuff I put together to run some of the DC switching side of things. They have internally developed render farm scheduling systems, lots of hardware competence and run up against hardware bottlenecks they solve in innovative ways. Unity could see render speed increases, better pipelines and other useful libraries included that will improve the development experience for unity games.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- follower 5y agoThe announcement mentions that the "FX studio" part is getting spun out into "Weta FX" which isn't part of the acquisition, so the part Unity is acquiring is the "technology company" part of "Weta Digital".
- danielvaughn 5y agoI honestly had no idea Unreal was used in movie production. I thought it was only a game engine.
- leovander 5y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUnxzVOs3rk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUnxzVOs3rk
- vernie 5y agoIt's worth noting that ILM dropped Unreal in favor of their own engine for the second season.
- InTheArena 5y agodo you have a source on that? Not questioning, but would like to know the details.
- vernie 5y agohttps://www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/mandalorian-season-2-virtual-production-innovations/ https://www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/mandalorian-season-2-virt...
- vernie 5y agoDamn, that sucks.
- gtm1260 5y agoYeah I hope the continue making films. One of the best out there!
- nyxaiur 5y agoWeta, ILM and Pixar were always some sort of beacon of innovation not only in visual development but also in development in general they usually pushed for standards and compatibility between different software packages, operating systems and so much more. Some of their open sourced tools are now standard like munki https://www.munki.org/ https://www.munki.org/. I am saddened to see that none of them could stay independent.
- caslon 5y agoILM and Pixar both started out as subsidiaries of Lucasfilm. None of them were meaningfully set up for actual independence as much to minimize risk for the companies they spawned from, and it kind of makes sense what happened to them. Parasitic companies make the most beautiful of things, but ultimately can't really be separated for very long.
- elil17 5y agoPixar has never really been independent of Disney. ILM has always been a Lucasfilm subsidiary and has continued to put out great work even after Lucasfilm was acquired by Disney.
- mixmastamyk 5y agoVFX houses avoided opening their common tools for way too long, especially after moving from SGI to Linux around the turn of the century. To their detriment, constantly on the border of bankruptcy. Blender is only just starting to get used. They don't use much Apple or OSX.
- tim-- 5y agoThe economics of using OS X for VFX work just doesn't add up. When the machines from Apple are easily double what a machine built by an integrator will cost. Add to that the hardware support has always been flaky (see: Nvidia/Apple spout causing new cards not to work). When your house requires you to have a large influx of contact workers, you want to have the cheapest most efficient setup possible. Apple just doesn't cut the mustard here.
- CyberDildonics 5y agoHistorically visual effects companies have been some of the worst investments possible. They traditionally haven't had much in the way of revenue generation outside of the five major production companies that they rely on to give them work. Fifteen years ago spending even 10s of millions to buy one would have been considered extremely risky.
- tim-- 5y agoWeta is much more than "just" a VFX company. That part is still going to stay with Peter Jackson. What is being bought here is the technology. Similar to any big VFX company, there is a lot of proprietary technology (renderers, modelers, engines, pipelines etc) that Unity is purchasing here. VFX tech is worth millions. Ask Autodesk or Adobe.
- CyberDildonics 5y agoI never said "just" - other companies have had proprietary software, though most of it has been more about customization and scaling then the refinement that sells most commercial graphics software. Some software like Nuke had good internals and had a lot of development put into a polished interface, which then payed off in a big way. I'm not skeptical that weta has some good internal technology, I'm skeptical that it is worth 1.6 billion dollars, especially to Unity.
- tim-- 5y agoYes, sorry, the quotes were meant to be air quotes. I agree that the purchase price seems a little silly. They don't really have too much IP except for the in house tools, and 3d model assets. I wonder how these assets will get licensed for use? Will it be a free for all (awesome!) locked under a pro/enterprise license (not bad) or under a license that will require a royalty-based payment to Unity? If royalty based, the earnings from just the assets alone could be in the tens of millions a year. Some of the Weta software is awesome technology. Weta has a good engineering philosophy, and the ease of use for much of thier portfolio means that you don't require much training to work with it.
- gridspy 5y agoTaking Procedural Movie-quality 3D asset tools and putting them in the hands of small studios to lift their games closer to AAA production values sounds like a smart play by Unity. It's similar to unreal acquiring Quixel Megascans [1] so developers can just import high quality 3D meshes into their levels. Or Ninite [2] allowing artists to work without worrying about system polygon limits. Seems like both tools (Unity, Unreal) are growing even further beyond mere rendering or in-game engines into full game construction tool-sets which empower developers during the entire game's production. As 3D hardware grows in power, what was a "movie quality" asset and too complex for realtime rendering becomes a "standard AAA quality realtime asset." Especially as all engines bring forward a technology like Ninite. [1] https://respawnfirst.com/unreal-engine-5-assets-powered-pakistani-startup/ https://respawnfirst.com/unreal-engine-5-assets-powered-paki... [2] https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/RenderingFeatures/Nanite/ https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/RenderingFeatures/Na...
- ljm 5y agoCan't wait to see indie horror games rendering LotR assets with a PS1-style low-poly effect, VHS tape artifacts, and a banging synthwave soundtrack
- larsiusprime 5y ago> Taking Procedural Movie-quality 3D asset tools and putting them in the hands of small studios to lift their games closer to AAA production values sounds like a smart play by Unity. Is it, actually? I mean it sounds nice but isn't Weta's entire pipeline optimized for offline rendering, yeah? Pre-rendered movies? I've seen a lot of game developers bite themselves in the butt trying to apply that kind of tech (and assets) to games which instead need to be optimized for realtime rendering.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- sk0g 5y agoUnreal has the tech to allow using such assets (Nanite), while Unity does not. It's not a smart idea due to other factors as well, like storage usage.
- hwers 5y agoSlightly sad that their expertise won't be available to the movies anymore I suppose.
- kiwih 5y agoThis one shouldn't be an issue. > The WetaFX team will continue their industry-leading VFX work for major film and TV productions and feed into this asset library for years to come.
- bitwize 5y agoOnly because it takes years for the corporate sarlacc digestion process to complete. Remember when Facebook said Oculus would be independent for years to come?
- mkl 5y agoFrom the article: "The VFX artists will be spun out into a new entity, “Weta FX”, which Peter Jackson will continue to own the majority of." There are two different Weta companies being talked about. Weta Digital, which makes VFX tools and does VFX, is being split. The Weta Digital name and the VFX tools, assets, and software engineering have been bought by Unity. Weta FX has been created, is not owned by Unity, and will continue doing VFX. (There is also a third big Weta company, Weta Workshop, that does physical props, costumes, models, etc.)
- MikusR 5y agoAnd it did for 4 years.
- karmasimida 5y agoWhy? Isn't the point Unity buying them in the first place to try to get into the VFX market?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- nyxaiur 5y agoIn the last 10 years Weta, ILM and Pixar lost their independence. With their big in house R&D they pushed for interoperability of software packages, operating systems and defined standards for their industries. You could say they had a common enemy - the deadline - and worked together to beat it. But they not only pushed in regards of VFX a lot of their other in house packages are now de facto standard like https://munki.org https://munki.org as a software package manager and so much more. Their technical studies and presentations may not be found at your standard tech conference but if you had the chance to grab some of them at FMX or SIGGRAPH before they got bought you know what will be missed. I am saddened to see that none of them could stay independent.
- karaterobot 5y ago> Weta Digital’s 275+ engineers will join Unity. The VFX artists will be spun out into a new entity, “Weta FX”, which Peter Jackson will continue to own the majority of. The two companies expect to continue working together, with Unity noting that it sees Weta FX being one of their “largest customers in the Media and Entertainment space” moving forward. So, Weta FX will continue doing effects for movies, and the engineers from Weta will work for Unity, likely continuing to develop the tools they've already got, as well as contributing to Unity proper.
- erichocean 5y agoWeta's internal tooling is really, really good.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- larsiusprime 5y agoHow good? My typical expectation of in house tools is they're extremely powerful but full of interlocking dependencies and hard for outsiders to use without considerable training. Is Weta significantly above the waterline here?
- tjpnz 5y agoBased on my experience there six years back it really was. It had to be given how many artists would be entering the company at a given time.
- mkl 5y agoThere is some kind of continuing relationship between the two: Weta FX will keep contributing assets to Weta Digital's (i.e. Unity's) asset library. Maybe that's in exchange for being able to continue to use the software? I haven't seen the deal spelled out anywhere. From the Unity blog post [1]: "Another exciting element of this acquisition is the asset library we’ll inherit from Weta Digital, which includes urban and natural environments, flora and fauna, humans, man-made objects, materials, textures, and more. The WetaFX team will continue their industry-leading VFX work for major film and TV productions and feed into this asset library for years to come." [1] https://blog.unity.com/news/welcome-weta-digital https://blog.unity.com/news/welcome-weta-digital
- 41209 5y ago>Meanwhile, Unity will be taking over the development of Weta Digital’s many built-in-house tools — things like City Builder I'm so excited about this, while an array of 3rd party tools exist, I'd love something straight from Unity. The existing city builders are basically hobby projects by a single dev. That said, you can do some amazing things with them. As is Unity is much more accessible than Unreal, I'm beyond happy to see this
- movedx 5y agoSorry to sound negative, but what makes you believe you're going to get access to those tools? Do you believe they're just going to plug them into Unity and off you go? My take is they're not going to see the light of day within the consumer market.
- retox 5y agoNot sure why it got downvoted but there is a dead post below this from SoundandPicture >Unity made a video about the acquisition titled "Bringing Weta Digital’s tools to all creators" https://youtu.be/hRCFTWA6j-c https://youtu.be/hRCFTWA6j-c
- SoundandPicture 5y agoUnity made a video about the acquisition titled "Bringing Weta Digital’s tools to all creators" https://youtu.be/hRCFTWA6j-c https://youtu.be/hRCFTWA6j-c
- tim-- 5y agoWow. Weta works on some really big films, so it will be exciting to see the work that they have done become available in the asset store. In the PR they say: > [...] the asset library we’ll inherit [...], which includes urban and natural environments, flora and fauna, humans, man-made objects, materials, textures, and more. The WetaFX team will continue their [...] work for major film and TV productions and feed into this asset library for years to come. Peter Jackson (of LoTR fame) is one of the founders of Weta. Sad to see another one of New Zealand's large, well known employers get sold.
- pixel_fcker 5y agoVFX companies don’t own any of the assets that they create for films, the studio does. I don’t know what Unity think they’ve bought there.
- follower 5y agoPresumably Weta has a contract with studios that means the company retains rights to "generic" assets they create.
- ByersReason 5y agoThe are competing with Epic, which has a huge presence in the VFX industry - including Unreal being used on the real-time VFX for the Mandalorian. Weta was using Unreal at one time, as well. This is likely a more strategic move to a) obtain more studio tech to integrate with Unreal to make sure they do not loose the "high ground", b)obtain people in the loop who really know about high end rendering engine tech, in which they are behind Unreal and c) make sure Weta stays well away from Epic.
- Slartie 5y agoThis is exactly on point. Unity is behind Epic in many respects relevant to both areas of business - classic game development and the nascent gaming-tech-used-for-movie-VFX business - and this acquisition is an attempt at fixing this deficit by throwing a chunk of money at someone.
- strider3g 5y agoSo they paid $5.8 million per engineer…nice.
- movedx 5y agoAnd then on going wages, Superannuation (3% more), etc. Yikes.
- morepork 5y agoThey're mostly New Zealand staff, so cheap. Source: I'm an engineer in NZ.
- LAC-Tech 5y agoStop working for NZ companies. Look for remote Aussie ones. I would tell you to look for remote US ones, but I haven't cracked that code yet. Source: also in NZ.
- flerp 5y agoLink is so riddled with ads I can't even load it. Alternate link: https://blog.unity.com/news/welcome-weta-digital https://blog.unity.com/news/welcome-weta-digital
- swalls 5y agoI wish they'd focus on fixing the things they've left broken and scattered throughout their engine rather than buying up companies in a space already absolutely dominated by their direct competitor.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- aronowb14 5y agoYep, as a long time unity user I really think Unity is just spaghetti all the way down to it's core. The number of strange memory leaks and graphics bugs you find once you really get into the engine is appalling. Frankly, it's probably the worst software I've ever had to develop on, and was a huge reason I ended up leaving VR/AR development and just went back into regular software engineering. This is a tangent, but I have been thinking a lot about why Unity is valued so highly and maybe it makes sense. I wasn't quite old enough to even stand at this point, but based on what I've read, Unity does actually seem similar to .NET + Microsoft early monopoly on certain software stacks. That is, it was horrible to use, but did address a niche.
- nickthemagicman 5y agoJust curious but are the other better game engines like unreal or somesuch? I'm looking into game dev and wondering what to get started on.
- reitzensteinm 5y agoI'm literally reading this comment at 10pm because I'm sitting here doing a bunch of VR builds isolating why lighting is fine in the editor and broken when built.
- hyperation 5y agoWould this also be a move to establish itself for the "Meta-verse" market?
- usrusr 5y agoIs Unity anywhere close to earning as much as you'd naively expect from a company engaging in billion dollar takeovers or is that simply another venture capital bonfire? I feel very much incapable to guess with even the tiniest glimpse of "educated" in it, and that's despite usually being far in the "more confident than I should be" corner when it comes to stuff like this. Both seem rather unlikely to me, but it has to be one of them, if not both.
- spywaregorilla 5y agoIt's a public company already. They do about a billion in revenue, growing quickly, and a net loss of about $60M.
- tim-- 5y agoInteresting enough though, much of Unity's profit derives from ads and payment processing. https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2021-08-11-unity-revenues-rise-to-usd274m-but-losses-remain-high https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2021-08-11-unity-reve... > the company noted that it's the 11th consecutive quarter during which revenue growth reached 30% or more.
- spywaregorilla 5y agoI think that just means revenue sharing with developers that use their engine. Not that surprising.
- ClimaxGravely 5y agoDo they have a revenue sharing model? I was under the impression it's a monthly subscription. https://store.unity.com/compare-plans https://store.unity.com/compare-plans
- spywaregorilla 5y agoI think the monetization stuff (put ads in your game) is a separate service. I could be wrong.
- Rd6n6 5y agoSpeaking of making films in unity: The first feature length animated movie made in a game engine (unity) just came out last week. What’s more, it was made by a solo filmmaker. It has a fully interactive version released on itch.io as well (link is in the description) https://youtu.be/d0vsn2PGwwI https://youtu.be/d0vsn2PGwwI
- scoopertrooper 5y agoWhat the hell did I just watch? Feature length that may be, but that's more of a fever dream than a movie.
- Rd6n6 5y agoFever dream is a fun way to put it. It’s definitely unique
- elias94 5y agoHaving the capability of generate large independent AI entities with Massive inside a videogame, will leverage the usability of Unity by non coder.
- nickthemagicman 5y agoColor me surprised that Unity had 1.6 billion.
- Borlands 5y agoUnity is betting big on VFX Virtual Production, what a huge step this is. Unreal is of course ahead in this space, with major productions like Mandalorian to back it up. This is very interesting and exciting to see what will happen. Weta is so beloved in the industry, and has so much expertise, hope nothing is lost in this transition.
- bj-rn 5y agoWas wondering why virtual production doesn't pop up more often in this thread. The Mandalorian and its behind the scenes triggered a slew of similar studios, for example [1]. Alot of them use Unreal in their workflow. (Another tool often used is Notch[2]). And COVID (travel restrictions, no in-person events etc.) gave them a huge boost. [1]https://bowl.studio https://bowl.studio [2]https://www.notch.one https://www.notch.one
- Mizza 5y agoI'm interested in starting a film studio using ILM's 'The Volume' technique: https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/20/how-the-mandalorian-and-ilm-invisibly-reinvented-film-and-tv-production/?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAECMz9gPgkHiorRtgEjJKc50hTI3D5i9Pqmn3RpkLfl7Nspy1xCywgpqSmxX2mkI_BG28ENLCnycWLcQfV8Tdwhj8aCXP4y-4llRQSItZCIuEok5vJ0MonMYsBMNAUu0_kD1OiHlmeBVRP1v9VnKbw8E8BhbrPJlDevfvUxjMaiE https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/20/how-the-mandalorian-and-il... but ILM has it all locked up. If Unity/Weta could recreate this as a product package.. well, that'd be a game changer for indie cinema.
- pixel_fcker 5y agoThere are several companies offering this out there. ILM definitely doesn’t have it “locked up”.
- Mizza 5y agoDo you have any links? I've looked and not found any, but happy to hear there are alternatives.
- juanuys 5y agoThey should call it WetaHuman. https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/metahuman-creator https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/metahuman-creator