Unity is buying Peter Jackson’s Weta Digital for $1.6B
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
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.
We'll see. There's the risk of massive job losses in Wellington, which wouldn't spark joy, but they're an absolutely terrible employer in terms of workplace health and safety and sexual harrassment, so it's just as possible there is an improvement in employment conditions.
Isn’t selling a success? That’s the whole idea!
They won’t need all of the “normal” jobs that employ non-engineers (accounting, payroll, finance, legal). Marketing and sales will likely be cut in some form, a bunch of local contractors they use will likely be let go since the acquiring company will already have different relationships for those services.
It’s disruptive for the stakeholders when for example Google buys a Bay Area company.. it’s much more disruptive when an overseas company buys a (or the) big employer in a region.
It's also an interesting development given that they only recently started promoting a cloud-based service for integrating their technology with Maya & Houdini.
I've worked with some of weta's toolset on the avatar sequels and I've also worked with unreal on various projects... it's interesting hearing this and I wonder if that's part of the toolset that will be released
For US HNers - it's different than in the US where health insurance is tied to employment. I typically have the exact same health coverage whether I'm employed, self-employed, or un-employed.
That’s a very different experience to the rite of passage a lot of devs (myself included) have taken because there’s high constant demand and high day rates.
Thus, they're not "contract employees" but "independent contractors"--which, without the law change, wouldn't have been legal in the same way "gig workers" failed to meet the criteria of "independent" in many places/cases (e.g. working for more than one client at a time, having control over work location etc).
(There was some recent coverage of this history in this article (although it appears the relevant full text is not available online): https://web.archive.org/web/20210921132447/https://northands...)
Have no insider scoop on Weta in particular, but just hitting back that having contractors instead of employees is somehow unethical.
It's unethical when the people concerned aren't independent contractors but are treated as such because it's cheaper for the company (e.g. in regard to sick pay, holiday pay etc) than treating them as employees.
If you like a 6 month engagement length, that's cool, there's nothing stopping you from agreeing to a 6 month employment contract.
Although even that is unethical on a company's part if they're taking advantage of power imbalances in the employment market to transfer risk/cost onto employees only "agreeing" to short term contracts under duress.
I mean how far do we take this - you've got 3 months worth of building to be done at your house, so you have to form an LLC and employ carpenters directly?
Cool, and one of those responsibilities is ensuring that the contract arrangement is that of independent contractor and not employee.
(Well, actually, it's more that your right as an employee is that your employer has the responsibility to ensure the arrangement isn't being misrepresented. So, really, you're free to make whatever arrangement you like but if your "client" is actually your employer they open themselves up to legal risk.)
And, if your arrangement meets the legal criteria, then great, you can be a contractor.
And, if it doesn't, then you can "lobby" the government to change the law so that you get what you want and other people get to be more easily exploited by their employers.
Or, you know, you can ensure that you have multiple clients, work at times & locations & on equipment controlled by you, on specific pre-agreed tasks and/or whatever other legal requirements need to be met to be considered a contractor.
With regard to the carpenters, company structure is unrelated to whether or not you're considered an employer by law. If the arrangement you have with the carpenters meets the criteria of being an employer/employee relationship, then, that's what it is.
But most likely they're independent contractors free to accept & refuse work as they wish, have & use their own tools etc etc or they're employees of a building firm you've actually contracted with.
Film projects have weird schedules. You simply couldn't run a business if you had to have a consistent set of people over time.
In that case, maybe the senior management should stop referring to the other people as "employees" then.
And, if being an employee is such a bad deal, why would senior management choose to be employees rather than "independent contractors".
> But there are lots of long-serving staff who are basically employees.
There's no such thing as "basically employees" (or indeed "staff" who aren't employees) they're either "actually independent contractors" or "employees intentionally & exploitatively miscategorized as independent contractors").
> You earn more as a contractor.
That's certainly what the management want people to think, for sure. But if being an employee isn't even a possibility it's conveniently pretty hard to know if that's actually the case.
> You simply couldn't run a business if you had to have a consistent set of people over time.
Perhaps that means it's actually a "hobby" or a "charity" rather than a business then?
And, regardless, that just means you hire people as employees on fixed term contracts, not that you get to miscategorize them & get the law changed to make it "legal".
None of this is about a better deal for the people doing the work--it's entirely possible for a fully loaded employee cost to be 2x salary so if the company can get the workers to accept 1.5x salary & shift risk to them, well, that's just a great deal for the company, isn't it.
Especially in an industry with an unending supply of creative people willing to be ground up in the process of doing what they love.
Perhaps we should take a lesson from what happened to the dinosaurs that worked as "independent contractors" for oil industry...
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.
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.
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.
[0] https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/events/build-for-architec...
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-paki...
[2] https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/RenderingFeatures/Na...
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.
It's not a smart idea due to other factors as well, like storage usage.
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.
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. Weta (for the Urukai this would be the wetsuit-esque muscles outfit, armour and helmet/mask - before the combined them)
2. Wardrobe (The rags laid over the armour)
3. Makeup (not really needed for the Urukhai except I seem to remember they used to darken around our eyes)
The order would be slightly changed for the elf costume with makeup playing a larger part (this also involved the wigs).
It's hard to imagine what part the teams involved with this would be doing for Unity!
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.
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.
https://venturebeat.com/2020/11/12/unitys-first-post-ipo-rep...
Unity's current market cap is $48B. Doing a levered buyout of another company that is ~1/30th of your size is stupidly trivial to do with cheap credit and an asset value that size.
For the uniformed - this is essentially how firms like Goldman Sachs make billions of dollars. Massively simplifying this, but they loan a portion of the $1.6B (let's say 50%) just like you would do on a house. The collateral is the stock of Unity in case they default on the payments.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When Epic spent 1.6 Billion they got FallGuys, a large studio, and a publisher.
Unity has taken on debt to buy the chance to payout yet more salaries. When Epic spends, they do so from profits, to buy more profits and IP.
The incredible irony being Wata's asset library will all be high poly, and thus the only video engine able to run them: UE5
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
My take is they're not going to see the light of day within the consumer market.
>Unity made a video about the acquisition titled "Bringing Weta Digital’s tools to all creators"
Source: also in NZ.
We're remote first and are hiring for all sorts of roles if you're interested: https://www.tetrate.io/careers/ (scroll down to the bottom)
If you're interested I'm in Brisbane and I run a DevOps discord: https://chat.learndevops.com.au/
You're welcome to join if you want to chat to other engineers, a few of which are in your local area or close :)
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.
> 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.
Remember when Facebook said Oculus would be independent for years to come?
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.)
They don't use much Apple or OSX.
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.