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Comment by shadowgovt | Hacker News Reader

Unity is the most popular game engine on Steam and has majority share of the mobile game market.

The fact that they can't survive two years of a pandemic without losing hundreds of employees and accepting a merger is indicative of the relative illness of the entire game tool service industry. This is a decades-old company that didn't have enough war-chest to float a few bad years.

Given these market realities, one should not expect quality of life in the games industry to improve without unionization or government intervention.

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This is just a guess but I think the main issue with unity is that the majority of the games released with it float under their 100,000 revenue target in order for them to get a piece of the pie.

I believe this is why they are rapidly expanding their backend services and ads network in order to try to eke out profit in other ways.

[1] https://unity3d.com/unity/activation/personal

> I think the main issue with unity is that the majority of the games released with it float under their 100,000 revenue target

Those games don't cost them anything, though. You'd have to explain trouble in terms of games doing worse during the last few years than they were historically, which is the opposite of the truth.

I see your point and I think it's a good one, but could them being a public company and their stock price plummeting not also affect their bottom line?

I genuinely am curious here, as I'm not well versed in how a companies stock price can affect their internal financials and ability to run the company without laying people off .

> The fact that they can't survive two years of a pandemic without losing hundreds of employees and accepting a merger is indicative of the relative illness of the entire game tool service industry. This is a decades-old company that didn't have enough war-chest to float a few bad years.

Bad years? I thought the pandemic was unusually good for at-home entertainment.

Worked for a mobile game company in 2020 and 2021. Can confirm that 2020 was a very good year revenue wise, if not dying off a little bit towards the end of 2021

Meanwhile, Unity's stock is trading lower than its open 18 months ago. If revenue's up in the industry, they're not capturing it.

That makes no sense. 18 months ago was January 2021. For Unity to be down now compared to then is fully compatible with the idea that (1) 2020 and 2021 were high points for the industry, and (2) things have started to die off since the end of 2021. That's exactly what you'd expect.

But the fact that 2020 and 2021 were historic boom years means that the description of Unity as just lacking the war chest to weather a couple of bad years is nonsense. These were great years, not bad years.

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