5 ms·

What a joke I was there when the acquisition happened and it was both “yay” and “what?” There was so little communication with the overall staff - even at the

What a joke I was there when the acquisition happened and it was both “yay” and “what?” There was so little communication with the overall staff - even at the M9 level - and the management seemed to be doing their own thing. My prediction: Unity is going to be BedBath&Beyonded

DarkNova6 3y ago
I don't know about "BedBath&Beyond". Would you mind to elaborate for those of us who don't know? :-)
- pmontra 3y ago
  Maybe this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bed_Bath_%26_Beyond https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bed_Bath_%26_Beyond
  - javajosh 3y ago
    what a sad story. It's an interesting tale oddly in favor of letting nepotism happen. The story definitely reads like some activist investors righteously decapitated the company for nepotism, but then were left with a dead body.
    - MakeThemMoney 3y ago
      Is it really in favour of nepotism? I see nepotism in this case as incidental. They could have restructured the company for the lulz, and still get the same result.
  - ethbr1 3y ago
    The things you miss... I wasn't even aware they'd disappeared. That history is some reading! When your CFO tragically jumps off a balcony, the company might not be doing well. Why do so many big box stores seem to follow the huge growth -> saturation -> quick implosion and bankruptcy script? Surely their margins don't materially change? Low per store sales from bad stores? But the first step seems to be closing stores, and that doesn't resolve the issue. It seems weird they'd be able to attract capital for expansion, but then implode so quickly.
    - jerf 3y ago
      "Why do so many big box stores seem to follow the huge growth -> saturation -> quick implosion and bankruptcy script?" Debt financing. Zigging a bit, my family has been watching The Foods that Built America: https://www.history.com/shows/the-food-that-built-america https://www.history.com/shows/the-food-that-built-america It seems that about half the episodes tell the same story: Somebody built a new food concept, or polished an existing one in some very useful economic way. They're super ambitious and pretty much as soon as they proved out their base restaurant or sold to a few stores, they immediately opened a couple dozen new restaurants or built a huge new factory. Which they do by loading up on huge, huge amounts of debt. Most of the rest of the human interest portion of the episode talks about the stresses of pulling in enough money to pay the debt. Many of them get acquired or end up getting so much external investment that it amounts to an acquisition. Of course it's a survivor bias situation; we're not getting told stories about the companies that did the same thing but failed utterly. While the past 20 years of ~zero interest rates have made this even easier, it isn't necessary. It has quite often been possible to go to some banks with what looks like a good idea and end up in debt up to your eyeballs while expanding your business size possibly by entire factors of magnitude virtually overnight. It ends up very similar to the venture capital pattern we're familiar with in our industry even if isn't exactly the same forces. The result is basically a bimodal distribution; either you manage to pay down the debt to some reasonable level and you end up with a large money-printing business, or you don't, and you have to liquidate everything. Basically you're seeing the failing side of the bimodal distribution of this pattern. Since a business always works to project strength, you never see them visibly ailing; it's just, there's this big edifice that looks invincible and then virtually overnight it's gone. A further elaboration relevant to BB&B is that when you're in debt trouble, you become extremely vulnerable financially. You need to pay off that debt, and that opens you up to corporate raiders who supply you with enough to keep you afloat, but then have a lot of options to do things useful in the short term but that kill the company in the long term. With clever structuring, they can keep the profits but dump the debt with the company itself as it goes under. BB&B had some of this going on. However, I consider this a further consequence of the original debt financing, basically one of the concrete ways it can fail. (Expect to see some more over the next few years. There's a lot of "zombie companies" out there (a term you can google), which is a term for the companies making just enough revenue to pay the interest load on their debts but not pay down principle. In a zero-interest rate world they could sort of chug along indefinitely, but as they have to pay real interest you're going to see these companies really start to struggle.)
- wredue 3y ago
  Cheap massively overpriced shit products, with horrendous stock control managers and stock buyers with some… weird taste. There you go. Bed Bath and Beyond.
  - coffeebeqn 3y ago
    And their management squeezed the company for personal profit until it went bankrupt
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  Channeling dang for a moment: Previously discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37652479 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37652479
DonHopkins 3y ago
Bedded, Bathed, & Beyonded
georgeecollins 3y ago
If the management continues to under perform, they will be acquired. The FTC investigation showed Zuckerberg was thinking about it. He probably couldn't for Sherman act reasons. But think about it: they have a good business that has better strategic value for a platform holder. Amazon spent a fortune trying to emulate their business to advantage AWS. That was an incredibly poorly managed endeavor. If they had bought Unity they wouldn't have needed Lumberyard. I can think of a lot of companies that would want Unity for the right price, or if the US govt would let them buy it. Can't say that about Bed Bath and Beyond!
- swiftcoder 3y ago
  I think everyone has tried to buy Unity at one time or another - I pushed for it at both Amazon and Facebook. Unity was steadfast in their refusal to sell, however. I'm curious to see how much of their business they have to set on fire before they are forced to abandon that position.
- TillE 3y ago
  I think Microsoft would love to own Unity. Many of their game studios use it, it's C# (with a promised migration from Unity's ancient hacked Mono to modern .NET), they don't have their own public game engine. It would probably be the best outcome for everyone.
  - bsjaux628 3y ago
    Pretty much non of them use it outside the random A game here and there, they use UE5 or in house. The only ones I remember that used Unity were Ori and Cuphead and those were not first party studios
  - gavanm 3y ago
    I could see that potentially being an Anti-Trust issue for them. Given the controversy over the Activision acquisition, acquiring one of the major engine platforms, having a major game studio, and already owning the XBox platform might make for great end to end strategic alignment / platform control - but I think it would also be a big regulatory/political fight to get done.
dboreham 3y ago
> “yay” and “what?” In my youth we called these "airport lounge deals", imagining that the deal had resulted from the two CEOs happening to sit next to each other at the bar in the first class lounge at JFK during a snow storm. They get drunk and decide to form a strategic partnership or merger. Everyone else is like "Huh?".
Keyframe 3y ago
Series of events and PR releases sounds like ultimately they have paid for non-exclusive tools/IP source locense for 1.6b. WetaFX still has rights to continue tools and IP and judging by grapevine and PR they'll also hire a good bunch of devs back. Ridiculous Biggest hardware tech in film business ARRI isn't worth third of that. That's how small all of that behind the scenes industry is.
PoignardAzur 3y ago
> Unity is going to be BedBath&Beyonded You heard it here, folks, Unity is the next meme stock.

DarkNova6 3y ago

I don't know about "BedBath&Beyond". Would you mind to elaborate for those of us who don't know? :-)

pmontra 3y ago
Maybe this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bed_Bath_%26_Beyond https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bed_Bath_%26_Beyond
- javajosh 3y ago
  what a sad story. It's an interesting tale oddly in favor of letting nepotism happen. The story definitely reads like some activist investors righteously decapitated the company for nepotism, but then were left with a dead body.
  - MakeThemMoney 3y ago
    Is it really in favour of nepotism? I see nepotism in this case as incidental. They could have restructured the company for the lulz, and still get the same result.
- ethbr1 3y ago
  The things you miss... I wasn't even aware they'd disappeared. That history is some reading! When your CFO tragically jumps off a balcony, the company might not be doing well. Why do so many big box stores seem to follow the huge growth -> saturation -> quick implosion and bankruptcy script? Surely their margins don't materially change? Low per store sales from bad stores? But the first step seems to be closing stores, and that doesn't resolve the issue. It seems weird they'd be able to attract capital for expansion, but then implode so quickly.
  - jerf 3y ago
    "Why do so many big box stores seem to follow the huge growth -> saturation -> quick implosion and bankruptcy script?" Debt financing. Zigging a bit, my family has been watching The Foods that Built America: https://www.history.com/shows/the-food-that-built-america https://www.history.com/shows/the-food-that-built-america It seems that about half the episodes tell the same story: Somebody built a new food concept, or polished an existing one in some very useful economic way. They're super ambitious and pretty much as soon as they proved out their base restaurant or sold to a few stores, they immediately opened a couple dozen new restaurants or built a huge new factory. Which they do by loading up on huge, huge amounts of debt. Most of the rest of the human interest portion of the episode talks about the stresses of pulling in enough money to pay the debt. Many of them get acquired or end up getting so much external investment that it amounts to an acquisition. Of course it's a survivor bias situation; we're not getting told stories about the companies that did the same thing but failed utterly. While the past 20 years of ~zero interest rates have made this even easier, it isn't necessary. It has quite often been possible to go to some banks with what looks like a good idea and end up in debt up to your eyeballs while expanding your business size possibly by entire factors of magnitude virtually overnight. It ends up very similar to the venture capital pattern we're familiar with in our industry even if isn't exactly the same forces. The result is basically a bimodal distribution; either you manage to pay down the debt to some reasonable level and you end up with a large money-printing business, or you don't, and you have to liquidate everything. Basically you're seeing the failing side of the bimodal distribution of this pattern. Since a business always works to project strength, you never see them visibly ailing; it's just, there's this big edifice that looks invincible and then virtually overnight it's gone. A further elaboration relevant to BB&B is that when you're in debt trouble, you become extremely vulnerable financially. You need to pay off that debt, and that opens you up to corporate raiders who supply you with enough to keep you afloat, but then have a lot of options to do things useful in the short term but that kill the company in the long term. With clever structuring, they can keep the profits but dump the debt with the company itself as it goes under. BB&B had some of this going on. However, I consider this a further consequence of the original debt financing, basically one of the concrete ways it can fail. (Expect to see some more over the next few years. There's a lot of "zombie companies" out there (a term you can google), which is a term for the companies making just enough revenue to pay the interest load on their debts but not pay down principle. In a zero-interest rate world they could sort of chug along indefinitely, but as they have to pay real interest you're going to see these companies really start to struggle.)
wredue 3y ago
Cheap massively overpriced shit products, with horrendous stock control managers and stock buyers with some… weird taste. There you go. Bed Bath and Beyond.
- coffeebeqn 3y ago
  And their management squeezed the company for personal profit until it went bankrupt
AndrewKemendo 3y ago
Channeling dang for a moment: Previously discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37652479 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37652479

DonHopkins 3y ago

Bedded, Bathed, & Beyonded

georgeecollins 3y ago

If the management continues to under perform, they will be acquired. The FTC investigation showed Zuckerberg was thinking about it. He probably couldn't for Sherman act reasons. But think about it: they have a good business that has better strategic value for a platform holder. Amazon spent a fortune trying to emulate their business to advantage AWS. That was an incredibly poorly managed endeavor. If they had bought Unity they wouldn't have needed Lumberyard. I can think of a lot of companies that would want Unity for the right price, or if the US govt would let them buy it. Can't say that about Bed Bath and Beyond!

swiftcoder 3y ago
I think everyone has tried to buy Unity at one time or another - I pushed for it at both Amazon and Facebook. Unity was steadfast in their refusal to sell, however. I'm curious to see how much of their business they have to set on fire before they are forced to abandon that position.
TillE 3y ago
I think Microsoft would love to own Unity. Many of their game studios use it, it's C# (with a promised migration from Unity's ancient hacked Mono to modern .NET), they don't have their own public game engine. It would probably be the best outcome for everyone.
- bsjaux628 3y ago
  Pretty much non of them use it outside the random A game here and there, they use UE5 or in house. The only ones I remember that used Unity were Ori and Cuphead and those were not first party studios
- gavanm 3y ago
  I could see that potentially being an Anti-Trust issue for them. Given the controversy over the Activision acquisition, acquiring one of the major engine platforms, having a major game studio, and already owning the XBox platform might make for great end to end strategic alignment / platform control - but I think it would also be a big regulatory/political fight to get done.

dboreham 3y ago

> “yay” and “what?” In my youth we called these "airport lounge deals", imagining that the deal had resulted from the two CEOs happening to sit next to each other at the bar in the first class lounge at JFK during a snow storm. They get drunk and decide to form a strategic partnership or merger. Everyone else is like "Huh?".

Keyframe 3y ago

Series of events and PR releases sounds like ultimately they have paid for non-exclusive tools/IP source locense for 1.6b. WetaFX still has rights to continue tools and IP and judging by grapevine and PR they'll also hire a good bunch of devs back. Ridiculous Biggest hardware tech in film business ARRI isn't worth third of that. That's how small all of that behind the scenes industry is.

PoignardAzur 3y ago

> Unity is going to be BedBath&Beyonded You heard it here, folks, Unity is the next meme stock.