9 ms·

I kinda feel bad for Unity. The company is in a bad place finacially. They're burning almost $1 billion a year and they have no good solutions to this. Either t

by kypro 3y ago

I kinda feel bad for Unity. The company is in a bad place finacially. They're burning almost $1 billion a year and they have no good solutions to this. Either they try to increase pricing and piss off their customers, or they cut costs (which they've been doing with mass layoffs) and risk losing ground to other game engineers like Unreal. For years the only thing really holding the company a float was their valuation. So long as investors were willing to give them money for growth and future profits they could continue to fund their loses. But now their growth is slowing and investors are less willing to pay up for growth generally what does Unity do? I've felt for a while that they'd be a likely victim of this most recent tech rut and that seems to be playing out. They have no moat, slowing growth and are burning huge amounts of cash. Unless the macro changes in their favour it's hard to how they get out of this and stay on top.

raincole 3y ago
> They're burning almost $1 billion a year and they have no good solutions to this. Unity acquired Weta at 1.6B. The solution is not to do this.
- pilchard123 3y ago
  Not even all of Weta - only the digital VFX bit.
- nick__m 3y ago
  Not Weta FX but Digital’s Tools, Pipeline, and Engineering. "Weta Digital’s Academy Award-Winning VFX teams will continue as a standalone entity known as WetaFX under majority ownership by Sir Peter Jackson and helmed by CEO Prem Akkaraju."¹ 1- https://investors.unity.com/news/news-details/2021/Unity-Completes-Acquisition-of-Weta-Digitals-Tools-Pipeline-and-Engineering-Talent/default.aspx https://investors.unity.com/news/news-details/2021/Unity-Com...
0xDEF 3y ago
I don't understand their refusal to make games that will make them money and showcase Unity's capabilities. The only reason Unreal engine has so favorable license conditions is because Epic Games earn billions from Fortnite and Epic Games Store.
- raincole 3y ago
  Because to make the next Fortnite takes not just a lot of money, but luck. What if they made a game and it flopped (a techinically impressive game can definitely flop)? People will be like "oh see Unity engine is so bad, even the game from the first party doesn't sell".
  - Already__Taken 3y ago
    but why aren't they investing in successes as they find them. There was loads of room to invest in ksp1 to try and get a chunk for themselves.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  I'm still sad there hasn't been a new Unreal Tournament since 2007. It's all only Fortnite now.
  - 0xDEF 3y ago
    They seem to have something in the works: https://www.epicgames.com/unrealtournament/en-US/ https://www.epicgames.com/unrealtournament/en-US/
    - mschuster91 3y ago
      I fear that this is the 2014 pre-alpha that got cancelled in 2017 due to f..ing Fortnite. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_Tournament_(cancelled_video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_Tournament_(cancelled_v...
  - jakebasile 3y ago
    At least we'll always have the first, best UT.
    - ngc248 3y ago
      UT 99 and Quake 3 Arena came out at the same time. But UT with its modes and different game types was just amazing.
aniforprez 3y ago
Honestly, if they just added revenue share like Unreal does and tweaked their subscriptions a little, the backlash wouldn't have been nearly as bad. The uproar is a combination of a really badly announced system and details that don't seem to be ironed out properly leaving devs ripe for abuse. Plus you have one of the most tight knit communities of artists who all reacted almost as one to this announcement and have experience with abuse from gamers in terms of piracy, review bombs, refund waves and so on. I guarantee most developers would have grumbled but given in to a revenue share I'm also completely baffled how poorly thought out this whole thing has been. Unity has been used by the likes of Nintendo, Microsoft and other massive game development studios. Do they seriously think a fee applied on retroactive sales and revenue numbers would be accepted without issue from them?
- cfiggers 3y ago
  > Do they seriously think a fee applied on retroactive sales and revenue numbers would be accepted without issue from them? Unity have not proposed a fee on retroactive sales. They have proposed a from-this-point-forward fee that applies to new sales/installs of any game made with Unity, including new sales/installs of back catalog games.
  - ooterness 3y ago
    Sales and installs don't happen at the same time. If I buy a game once on Steam, I might install it on any number of unique devices. Per the Unity FAQ, every one of those installation events results in an additional bill for the game's developer. In other words: This is absolutely a retroactive rug-pull on new installs of old sales. Update: Because of the way they're rolling this out, the only way to avoid the retroactive license change is to immediately stop using Unity's development tools. If I were running a game studio, that's what I would do.
  - jasonlotito 3y ago
    This is incorrect. They are basing the numbers in January based on previous install numbers, not "from this point on." Note, it's not sales, it's installs. And it's not new installs. That you keep saying sales really means you aren't fully informed about the changes and should spend some time researching this.
enlyth 3y ago
I wouldn't feel bad for their executives. They are the ones who chose the 'growth at all costs' path, and this is what you get. They could've probably been sustainable and profitable if they mainly serviced their core audience of indie developers with a smaller amount of employees and a simpler product, but it seems they really wanted to brute force themselves into the AAA market.
- kypro 3y ago
  I suppose. There's quite a few companies in Unity's position right now for a reason though. For better or worse the "growth at all costs" strategy was the strategy companies like Unity had to employ for the last decade to attract investor capital so I tend to blame the low interest rate "easy money" environment more than companies like Unity being reckless. Although that said, it does seem Unity made some stupid moves in recent years. I don't follow the company that closely, but I'm aware they made some large acquisitions funded in-part with debt during the pandemic. It's one thing taking on debt if you have a strong balance sheet, but it seems a little short-sighted for a company losing billions to use debt to fund an acquisition – especially at the elevated prices they paid during the pandemic.
  - enumjorge 3y ago
    > I tend to blame the low interest rate "easy money" environment more than companies like Unity being reckless. As if the founders had no other options in life than to start companies relying on business models where you capture the market with investor money and then once you’re customers are locked in, you squeeze them as much as possible. Unreal is in the same market. They also took in investor money. They’re not in the same situation. The people behind Unity chose to play the game. The c-suite is handsomely rewarded, and we praise their business acumen when things go right, but if things go wrong suddenly they’re victims of circumstance. They can take ownership of their decisions.
  - varelse 3y ago
    [dead]
- artursapek 3y ago
superchroma 3y ago
Why feel bad? They're a victim of deliberate bad choices. The buck stops at the top. Nobody told Riccitiello to hit the gas pedal, nor to enrich himself by selling shares prior to a disastrous announcement, he did that all on his own. I feel much worse for the thousands of developers he's holding a metaphorical gun to with this awful policy, who now have to stress about swapping engines.
- okamiueru 3y ago
  He did? Is insider trading laws in the US non-existant? Wow
  - ZekeSulastin 3y ago
    Yeah, 2,000 sold (~50,000 over the last year) out of ~3,200,000 still held, under a trading plan filed in May.
  - danjoredd 3y ago
    Insider trading laws exist, execs just like to ignore them. Hopefully, the SEC takes a look into his dealings considering how public this is.
intelVISA 3y ago
The Unreal thing is that Unity has/had ~8,000 employees last year. Sounds like an awful lot for a mobile game engine.
- Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
  Where did you read that Unity is just a mobile game engine? Unity supports basically all gaming platforms. Windows, Linux, Mac, PS5, Switch, XBox, etc. There are AAA desktop games that use Unity.
- Ekaros 3y ago
  That seems quite a lot. Compared to game development teams with their own engines which they have kept modern while releasing games...
  - RugnirViking 3y ago
    How many such game development companies actually are there? I see a lot of aging engines out there, and companies that jumped to unreal, but I have by no means broad knowledge
    - hokumguru 3y ago
      Certainly not an expert but top studios like Bethesda and CDPR maintain their own engines with an order of magnitude less employees. They make games too.
      - derstander 3y ago
        CDPR seems to be switching to Unreal. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/03/the-witcher-will-return-as-a-triple-a-rpg-shifting-to-unreal-engine-5/amp/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/03/the-witcher-will-retu...
      - grumple 3y ago
        They also produce games that are very similar to their other games, with similar mechanics, while Unity has to support a far more diverse set of games (basically anything 2d or 3d), and presumably has to continually offer a wider set of cutting-edge features.
mrtksn 3y ago
> They're burning almost $1 billion a year and they have no good solutions to this Maybe they should have something to show for this $1B/year and take a cut of this $250B+ industry to cover the costs? They appear to have about %30 market share, so they need to capture less than %2 of the value created with their tool to break even and if they can't do that or they are providing tech for the less than average profitable part of the industry they should shift focus or reduce costs. AFAIK it's only natural for businesses to go out of business if they can't capture more value than they consume.
- baobabKoodaa 3y ago
  (deleted)
  - mrtksn 3y ago
    It appears that the video gaming industry size is 242B as of this year: https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/video-game-market https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/video-ga... None of this is attributable to engines, it's the size of the products built using the engines and it appears that the ad revenues are not included and that appears to be another $80B. The game engine market is the market of supplying the game developers with the tech to build their games. That's where the game engine makers that spend 1B per year and hold %30 of the engine market need to charge about %2 of the products made using their engines to break even.
JKCalhoun 3y ago
> and they have no good solutions to this Bought by Apple or Microsoft maybe?
- spacebanana7 3y ago
  Unity seem like a very valuable acquisition target. Any of the American or Chinese big tech companies could put Unity to good strategic use plus a few medium sized tech companies like Adobe and Sony.
- kypro 3y ago
  Both Apple and Meta would love buy Unity, but my understanding is that regulators likely wouldn't allow it. If you haven't seen it already: https://sriramk.com/memos/zuck-unity.pdf https://sriramk.com/memos/zuck-unity.pdf
- LordDragonfang 3y ago
  My money is on Meta. Unity powers the vast majority of VR games and is (was) the favored API for Meta's dev tools, and even Apple chose it as their only officially supported 3rd party toolkit for the Vision Pro. Meta seems to enjoy throwing money into the VR space to subsidize it at the low-cost end, I could easily see them doing a hostile takeover of Unity "for the good of the VR space"
  - sircastor 3y ago
    Apple “chose” it might be a bit misleading. While I’m sure they could’ve gone with Unreal, the outstanding lawsuits alongside the very loud negative press from Epic made it a non starter. Outside of Unreal and Unity, there aren’t a lot of options.
JCharante 3y ago
Losing a billion means they spent more than that, but on what? I haven’t used unity since 2016 and never in a professional capacity but I can’t imagine anything significant was improved or added in the last year.
- chefandy 3y ago
  I'm not going to say that they spend their money wisely, but game engine development, in general, moves at breakneck speed, and unity is no exception.
  - cfiggers 3y ago
    I'd love to read more about "game engine development, in general, moves at breakneck speed," if you happen to know of a blog post or something or might be willing to share more.
PeterisP 3y ago
Is Unity-2023 version a billion dollars better than Unity-2022, or even close to that?
- IdiranVibe 3y ago
  Not at all... lots of people still run unity 2021
- sumtechguy 3y ago
  Some of the stuff looks pretty cool that they are adding but would probably take a retooling of many workflows to use correctly. They had some very compelling items they were adding in that would make people pick it over others. But with those license terms. That will be a hard pass by many. My guess is they are hurting financially but took cues from their weta tool stack for installs. Where in that industry per install cost is decently normal and just rolled into a production budget. But on the games side that is not going to fly. As it is a one time cost vs recurring. I feel bad for the shops where they are 2 years in with this thing and just had the rug pulled on them.
grotorea 3y ago
> They have no moat How easy is for a studio to change engine? Isn't that a decent moat?
- yard2010 3y ago
  So they get to hold their current customers hostages and get no new customers.
- maccard 3y ago
  I think we're about to find out.
- whatyesaid 3y ago
  Maybe Godot is similar enough where you'd be able to consider this. Otherwise this move is more harmful in the long term of Unity and it's about future games and not current ones. Long term matters more, always. It may also make AAA invest away from Unreal as it looks like a monopoly now.
- nylonstrung 3y ago
  It's extremely difficult- it's going to break your pipeline and all of your programmers and tech artists essentially need to learn a new language If you were switching Unity -> Unreal you'd honestly be better off firing your team and hiring Unreal devs
maccard 3y ago
Do feel bad for them but this is a problem of their own making. Many parts of their current situation were avoidable. That doesn't justify what they've tried to do here though. This isn't just a price increase, it's a significant price increase, and a poorly thought out "revshare" model that applies retroactively people who signed deals with them and built a business model off of the deal they signed.
cyanfrog 3y ago
That reminds me. How is blender able to stay free. How is their approach different?
- tapoxi 3y ago
  Blender is nonprofit and funded by donations and grants. The closest analog to this in the game engine space is Godot.
  - jwells89 3y ago
    Blender is also managed exceptionally well for a FOSS project, systematically polishing up rough edges and paying close attention to the needs and desires of its userbase which no doubt inspires larger donations from more donors than FOSS projects usually have.
    - prox 3y ago
      Their biggest marketplace (blendermarket) also directly contributes to the the Foundation as well.
    - breakingcups 3y ago
      It is incredible. Truly incredible. I know of no other FOSS project that comes close.
- Someone1234 3y ago
  Aside from being OSS backed nonprofit, they also have a relatively small full time staff: https://www.blender.org/about/people/ https://www.blender.org/about/people/
- mnau 3y ago
  Blender is GPL2+. It's impossible to have that license and not be free. It's also basically impossible to change license.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
rozab 3y ago
Maybe they should stop acquiring a continuous stream of startups that have nothing to do with their primary mission? I would bet only a very small proportion of Unity employees work on or even adjacent to the Unity engine.
Rovoska 3y ago
Only on hacker news will you find someone feeling bad for a company, of all things.
alexvitkov 3y ago
They spent like 6 billion on acquisitions that don't help make their core product better. Literally just don't do that and you'd be in the green right now.
- nylonstrung 3y ago
  This isn't quite true as those acquisitions are paid for by stock and debt to a large extent It's not like they bought these with a pile of $6B cash they had lying around
  - hyperhopper 3y ago
    > stock and debt Yes, and now they are burning tons of money due to that debt and having to make ridiculous decisions to appease the stockholders. You just stated the exact reason this whole thing is a problem.
babypuncher 3y ago
They brought this on themselves. They never needed 7700 employees just to maintain an indie-scale game engine. Epic maintains their far more advanced engine with 2200 people, and they also run a AAA live service game.
- maccard 3y ago
  Epic is way more than 2200 people. It was 2000 people when I worked there almost 3 years ago.
  - shrimp_emoji 3y ago
    Why'd ya leave?
    - maccard 3y ago
      Same reason anyone leaves any other job!
delfinom 3y ago
Not gonna lie, I was looking at their Q10 filing recently and I'm dumbfounded they have spent $450 million for "sales and marketing" so far this year. ON WHAT AND WHY???
somenameforme 3y ago
Unreal is technically orders of magnitude ahead of Unity, and they have around 4000 employees spread across multiple continents. And I'm referring to the entirety of Epic, so that's also the Fortnite teams and everybody else. Unity, by contrast, has about 8000 employees. Many companies seem to be hiring far more employees than they realistically need - often to the point of their own detriment, and I don't entirely understand why. Even for successful companies like Google, it seems unlikely that they need anywhere remotely near 180k employees.
educaysean 3y ago
Everything you wrote paints a familiar picture: a company whose leadership made poor financial decisions over and over. I won't judge anyone for mourning the loss of their favorite corporate entity, but I personally find it hard to feel pity knowing that they dug their own grave.
nickstinemates 3y ago
> I kinda feel bad for Unity. I don't. They could have sold to Meta and didn't. If they didn't have a plan that didn't involve fucking their users, that's on them.

by kypro 3y ago

raincole 3y ago

> They're burning almost $1 billion a year and they have no good solutions to this. Unity acquired Weta at 1.6B. The solution is not to do this.

pilchard123 3y ago
Not even all of Weta - only the digital VFX bit.
nick__m 3y ago
Not Weta FX but Digital’s Tools, Pipeline, and Engineering. "Weta Digital’s Academy Award-Winning VFX teams will continue as a standalone entity known as WetaFX under majority ownership by Sir Peter Jackson and helmed by CEO Prem Akkaraju."¹ 1- https://investors.unity.com/news/news-details/2021/Unity-Completes-Acquisition-of-Weta-Digitals-Tools-Pipeline-and-Engineering-Talent/default.aspx https://investors.unity.com/news/news-details/2021/Unity-Com...

0xDEF 3y ago

I don't understand their refusal to make games that will make them money and showcase Unity's capabilities. The only reason Unreal engine has so favorable license conditions is because Epic Games earn billions from Fortnite and Epic Games Store.

raincole 3y ago
Because to make the next Fortnite takes not just a lot of money, but luck. What if they made a game and it flopped (a techinically impressive game can definitely flop)? People will be like "oh see Unity engine is so bad, even the game from the first party doesn't sell".
- Already__Taken 3y ago
  but why aren't they investing in successes as they find them. There was loads of room to invest in ksp1 to try and get a chunk for themselves.
mschuster91 3y ago
I'm still sad there hasn't been a new Unreal Tournament since 2007. It's all only Fortnite now.
- 0xDEF 3y ago
  They seem to have something in the works: https://www.epicgames.com/unrealtournament/en-US/ https://www.epicgames.com/unrealtournament/en-US/
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    I fear that this is the 2014 pre-alpha that got cancelled in 2017 due to f..ing Fortnite. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_Tournament_(cancelled_video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_Tournament_(cancelled_v...
- jakebasile 3y ago
  At least we'll always have the first, best UT.
  - ngc248 3y ago
    UT 99 and Quake 3 Arena came out at the same time. But UT with its modes and different game types was just amazing.

aniforprez 3y ago

Honestly, if they just added revenue share like Unreal does and tweaked their subscriptions a little, the backlash wouldn't have been nearly as bad. The uproar is a combination of a really badly announced system and details that don't seem to be ironed out properly leaving devs ripe for abuse. Plus you have one of the most tight knit communities of artists who all reacted almost as one to this announcement and have experience with abuse from gamers in terms of piracy, review bombs, refund waves and so on. I guarantee most developers would have grumbled but given in to a revenue share I'm also completely baffled how poorly thought out this whole thing has been. Unity has been used by the likes of Nintendo, Microsoft and other massive game development studios. Do they seriously think a fee applied on retroactive sales and revenue numbers would be accepted without issue from them?

cfiggers 3y ago
> Do they seriously think a fee applied on retroactive sales and revenue numbers would be accepted without issue from them? Unity have not proposed a fee on retroactive sales. They have proposed a from-this-point-forward fee that applies to new sales/installs of any game made with Unity, including new sales/installs of back catalog games.
- ooterness 3y ago
  Sales and installs don't happen at the same time. If I buy a game once on Steam, I might install it on any number of unique devices. Per the Unity FAQ, every one of those installation events results in an additional bill for the game's developer. In other words: This is absolutely a retroactive rug-pull on new installs of old sales. Update: Because of the way they're rolling this out, the only way to avoid the retroactive license change is to immediately stop using Unity's development tools. If I were running a game studio, that's what I would do.
- jasonlotito 3y ago
  This is incorrect. They are basing the numbers in January based on previous install numbers, not "from this point on." Note, it's not sales, it's installs. And it's not new installs. That you keep saying sales really means you aren't fully informed about the changes and should spend some time researching this.

enlyth 3y ago

I wouldn't feel bad for their executives. They are the ones who chose the 'growth at all costs' path, and this is what you get. They could've probably been sustainable and profitable if they mainly serviced their core audience of indie developers with a smaller amount of employees and a simpler product, but it seems they really wanted to brute force themselves into the AAA market.

kypro 3y ago
I suppose. There's quite a few companies in Unity's position right now for a reason though. For better or worse the "growth at all costs" strategy was the strategy companies like Unity had to employ for the last decade to attract investor capital so I tend to blame the low interest rate "easy money" environment more than companies like Unity being reckless. Although that said, it does seem Unity made some stupid moves in recent years. I don't follow the company that closely, but I'm aware they made some large acquisitions funded in-part with debt during the pandemic. It's one thing taking on debt if you have a strong balance sheet, but it seems a little short-sighted for a company losing billions to use debt to fund an acquisition – especially at the elevated prices they paid during the pandemic.
- enumjorge 3y ago
  > I tend to blame the low interest rate "easy money" environment more than companies like Unity being reckless. As if the founders had no other options in life than to start companies relying on business models where you capture the market with investor money and then once you’re customers are locked in, you squeeze them as much as possible. Unreal is in the same market. They also took in investor money. They’re not in the same situation. The people behind Unity chose to play the game. The c-suite is handsomely rewarded, and we praise their business acumen when things go right, but if things go wrong suddenly they’re victims of circumstance. They can take ownership of their decisions.
- varelse 3y ago
  [dead]
artursapek 3y ago

superchroma 3y ago

Why feel bad? They're a victim of deliberate bad choices. The buck stops at the top. Nobody told Riccitiello to hit the gas pedal, nor to enrich himself by selling shares prior to a disastrous announcement, he did that all on his own. I feel much worse for the thousands of developers he's holding a metaphorical gun to with this awful policy, who now have to stress about swapping engines.

okamiueru 3y ago
He did? Is insider trading laws in the US non-existant? Wow
- ZekeSulastin 3y ago
  Yeah, 2,000 sold (~50,000 over the last year) out of ~3,200,000 still held, under a trading plan filed in May.
- danjoredd 3y ago
  Insider trading laws exist, execs just like to ignore them. Hopefully, the SEC takes a look into his dealings considering how public this is.

intelVISA 3y ago

The Unreal thing is that Unity has/had ~8,000 employees last year. Sounds like an awful lot for a mobile game engine.

Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
Where did you read that Unity is just a mobile game engine? Unity supports basically all gaming platforms. Windows, Linux, Mac, PS5, Switch, XBox, etc. There are AAA desktop games that use Unity.
Ekaros 3y ago
That seems quite a lot. Compared to game development teams with their own engines which they have kept modern while releasing games...
- RugnirViking 3y ago
  How many such game development companies actually are there? I see a lot of aging engines out there, and companies that jumped to unreal, but I have by no means broad knowledge
  - hokumguru 3y ago
    Certainly not an expert but top studios like Bethesda and CDPR maintain their own engines with an order of magnitude less employees. They make games too.
    - derstander 3y ago
      CDPR seems to be switching to Unreal. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/03/the-witcher-will-return-as-a-triple-a-rpg-shifting-to-unreal-engine-5/amp/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/03/the-witcher-will-retu...
    - grumple 3y ago
      They also produce games that are very similar to their other games, with similar mechanics, while Unity has to support a far more diverse set of games (basically anything 2d or 3d), and presumably has to continually offer a wider set of cutting-edge features.

mrtksn 3y ago

> They're burning almost $1 billion a year and they have no good solutions to this Maybe they should have something to show for this $1B/year and take a cut of this $250B+ industry to cover the costs? They appear to have about %30 market share, so they need to capture less than %2 of the value created with their tool to break even and if they can't do that or they are providing tech for the less than average profitable part of the industry they should shift focus or reduce costs. AFAIK it's only natural for businesses to go out of business if they can't capture more value than they consume.

baobabKoodaa 3y ago
(deleted)
- mrtksn 3y ago
  It appears that the video gaming industry size is 242B as of this year: https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/video-game-market https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/video-ga... None of this is attributable to engines, it's the size of the products built using the engines and it appears that the ad revenues are not included and that appears to be another $80B. The game engine market is the market of supplying the game developers with the tech to build their games. That's where the game engine makers that spend 1B per year and hold %30 of the engine market need to charge about %2 of the products made using their engines to break even.

JKCalhoun 3y ago

> and they have no good solutions to this Bought by Apple or Microsoft maybe?

spacebanana7 3y ago
Unity seem like a very valuable acquisition target. Any of the American or Chinese big tech companies could put Unity to good strategic use plus a few medium sized tech companies like Adobe and Sony.
kypro 3y ago
Both Apple and Meta would love buy Unity, but my understanding is that regulators likely wouldn't allow it. If you haven't seen it already: https://sriramk.com/memos/zuck-unity.pdf https://sriramk.com/memos/zuck-unity.pdf
LordDragonfang 3y ago
My money is on Meta. Unity powers the vast majority of VR games and is (was) the favored API for Meta's dev tools, and even Apple chose it as their only officially supported 3rd party toolkit for the Vision Pro. Meta seems to enjoy throwing money into the VR space to subsidize it at the low-cost end, I could easily see them doing a hostile takeover of Unity "for the good of the VR space"
- sircastor 3y ago
  Apple “chose” it might be a bit misleading. While I’m sure they could’ve gone with Unreal, the outstanding lawsuits alongside the very loud negative press from Epic made it a non starter. Outside of Unreal and Unity, there aren’t a lot of options.

JCharante 3y ago

Losing a billion means they spent more than that, but on what? I haven’t used unity since 2016 and never in a professional capacity but I can’t imagine anything significant was improved or added in the last year.

chefandy 3y ago
I'm not going to say that they spend their money wisely, but game engine development, in general, moves at breakneck speed, and unity is no exception.
- cfiggers 3y ago
  I'd love to read more about "game engine development, in general, moves at breakneck speed," if you happen to know of a blog post or something or might be willing to share more.

PeterisP 3y ago

Is Unity-2023 version a billion dollars better than Unity-2022, or even close to that?

IdiranVibe 3y ago
Not at all... lots of people still run unity 2021
sumtechguy 3y ago
Some of the stuff looks pretty cool that they are adding but would probably take a retooling of many workflows to use correctly. They had some very compelling items they were adding in that would make people pick it over others. But with those license terms. That will be a hard pass by many. My guess is they are hurting financially but took cues from their weta tool stack for installs. Where in that industry per install cost is decently normal and just rolled into a production budget. But on the games side that is not going to fly. As it is a one time cost vs recurring. I feel bad for the shops where they are 2 years in with this thing and just had the rug pulled on them.

grotorea 3y ago

> They have no moat How easy is for a studio to change engine? Isn't that a decent moat?

yard2010 3y ago
So they get to hold their current customers hostages and get no new customers.
maccard 3y ago
I think we're about to find out.
whatyesaid 3y ago
Maybe Godot is similar enough where you'd be able to consider this. Otherwise this move is more harmful in the long term of Unity and it's about future games and not current ones. Long term matters more, always. It may also make AAA invest away from Unreal as it looks like a monopoly now.
nylonstrung 3y ago
It's extremely difficult- it's going to break your pipeline and all of your programmers and tech artists essentially need to learn a new language If you were switching Unity -> Unreal you'd honestly be better off firing your team and hiring Unreal devs

maccard 3y ago

Do feel bad for them but this is a problem of their own making. Many parts of their current situation were avoidable. That doesn't justify what they've tried to do here though. This isn't just a price increase, it's a significant price increase, and a poorly thought out "revshare" model that applies retroactively people who signed deals with them and built a business model off of the deal they signed.

cyanfrog 3y ago

That reminds me. How is blender able to stay free. How is their approach different?

tapoxi 3y ago
Blender is nonprofit and funded by donations and grants. The closest analog to this in the game engine space is Godot.
- jwells89 3y ago
  Blender is also managed exceptionally well for a FOSS project, systematically polishing up rough edges and paying close attention to the needs and desires of its userbase which no doubt inspires larger donations from more donors than FOSS projects usually have.
  - prox 3y ago
    Their biggest marketplace (blendermarket) also directly contributes to the the Foundation as well.
  - breakingcups 3y ago
    It is incredible. Truly incredible. I know of no other FOSS project that comes close.
Someone1234 3y ago
Aside from being OSS backed nonprofit, they also have a relatively small full time staff: https://www.blender.org/about/people/ https://www.blender.org/about/people/
mnau 3y ago
Blender is GPL2+. It's impossible to have that license and not be free. It's also basically impossible to change license.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

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rozab 3y ago

Maybe they should stop acquiring a continuous stream of startups that have nothing to do with their primary mission? I would bet only a very small proportion of Unity employees work on or even adjacent to the Unity engine.

Rovoska 3y ago

Only on hacker news will you find someone feeling bad for a company, of all things.

alexvitkov 3y ago

They spent like 6 billion on acquisitions that don't help make their core product better. Literally just don't do that and you'd be in the green right now.

nylonstrung 3y ago
This isn't quite true as those acquisitions are paid for by stock and debt to a large extent It's not like they bought these with a pile of $6B cash they had lying around
- hyperhopper 3y ago
  > stock and debt Yes, and now they are burning tons of money due to that debt and having to make ridiculous decisions to appease the stockholders. You just stated the exact reason this whole thing is a problem.

babypuncher 3y ago

They brought this on themselves. They never needed 7700 employees just to maintain an indie-scale game engine. Epic maintains their far more advanced engine with 2200 people, and they also run a AAA live service game.

maccard 3y ago
Epic is way more than 2200 people. It was 2000 people when I worked there almost 3 years ago.
- shrimp_emoji 3y ago
  Why'd ya leave?
  - maccard 3y ago
    Same reason anyone leaves any other job!

delfinom 3y ago

Not gonna lie, I was looking at their Q10 filing recently and I'm dumbfounded they have spent $450 million for "sales and marketing" so far this year. ON WHAT AND WHY???

somenameforme 3y ago

Unreal is technically orders of magnitude ahead of Unity, and they have around 4000 employees spread across multiple continents. And I'm referring to the entirety of Epic, so that's also the Fortnite teams and everybody else. Unity, by contrast, has about 8000 employees. Many companies seem to be hiring far more employees than they realistically need - often to the point of their own detriment, and I don't entirely understand why. Even for successful companies like Google, it seems unlikely that they need anywhere remotely near 180k employees.

educaysean 3y ago

Everything you wrote paints a familiar picture: a company whose leadership made poor financial decisions over and over. I won't judge anyone for mourning the loss of their favorite corporate entity, but I personally find it hard to feel pity knowing that they dug their own grave.

nickstinemates 3y ago

> I kinda feel bad for Unity. I don't. They could have sold to Meta and didn't. If they didn't have a plan that didn't involve fucking their users, that's on them.