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Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

It's a weird decision.

Unreal Engine is redefining game engines into something capable of creating both movies and games, and pushing the state of the art to somewhere amazing.

Whilst..... Unity is laying off people and leaning into low quality advertising.

It's weird also that the big players like Microsoft didn't swing in to buy Unity and do the same thing that Unreal is doing.

It's like the future of high end media is being created in this space and Unity is tossing away their second place position entirely.

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Meta would love to buy Unity, it has been on Zuckerberg's radar for almost a decade:

https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/13/facebook-mulled-multi-bill...

But in practice they can't do any acquisitions anymore because of antitrust. Two recent examples:

- Meta purchased a VR fitness app maker called Within, and the FTC is now blocking the sale.

- Meta purchased Giphy years ago, and the UK antitrust authority now wants the sale unwound even though Giphy did no business in the UK.

Multi-billion dollar acquisitions of public companies like Unity are out of the question for Meta because they're subject to a much higher standard than anyone else. Microsoft can probably get away with buying Activision Blizzard while Meta can't buy one insignificant VR game.

This is a real shame. Meta is a company that is trying to do something (beyond Facebook) and I think a Unity acquisition would benefit both of these companies (in their current positions).

Is it? Facebook is trying to "take over" areas not at all related to social media in order to gain more data and could act as a loss-leader in the game developer space just in order to bolster market share in other areas. Preventing that seems to be better for consumers in general.

Isn't that what Microsoft is doing as well?

If Microsoft is allowed to buy Activision Blizzard they would have bought the vast majority of the most popular video game series in the world.

Minecraft, Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Diablo, and Elder Scrolls are all top selling game franchises.

The only company that would have more top selling game franchise would be Nintendo and they created all of them for themselves.

Why is Microsoft allowed to buy all of these game studios but Facebook can't buy a single VR studio?

> Isn't that what Microsoft is doing as well?

Yes. And Amazon. And Google. And others.

What the the US government is doing, I have no idea about, but they don't seem to care a lot about preventing huge companies from taking over entire markets, even those not related to their core business. Which already is hurting consumers, but the worst has yet to come.

Has that acquisition been approved? You’re implying that it has, but last I heard of it, it was being investigated by both the FTC and the CMA in the UK.

On the other hand, I'm not looking forward to eventually get a Facebook out of necessity when I need to login into my Unity editor.

Just like Occulus? All Unity accounts will be authorized by a Meta account. Lose the Meta account lose the Unity access.

This is good! Multi-billion-dollar tech companies have been given too much power by governments, partly because they want to capitalize on the spying capabilities provided by their endless cycle of private data slurping, collecting and de-anonymizing, and partly by regulatory capture from an army of lobbyists employed by the tech companies.

Meta is a company that's trying to land grab a new continent (metaphorically). Their motivation to push the Metaverse is their control over it. I don't see why any of us should want to help them do that.

The case of Giphy is really absurd.

Unity is still the engine for the vast majority of 2D and 3D games, especially VR. It feels like each has filled their niche well, and they are now bifurcating to target different audiences.

It doesn't seem to me like Unreal will ever capture the majority of the market, unless their tactics change.

I would wager it's owed mostly to the mobile market dwarfing console/PC nowadays for which Unity is the de facto choice. The same way the web market gives us legions of Js devs: Unity is just the game engine ver of Node - easy to hire for and runs everywhere.

I am so glad I didn’t go for Unity but Godot. I know it’s playing catch-up but it’s been a joy to work with. Not sure what to think of Unity.

For anyone interested in creating games. I can only second this. Been using Unity for work and hobby purposes since Unity 5 and feel its always been undecided on how to do things. Even more so now than back then.

With Godot I've never had the feeling that I'm working against the engine to achieve something. Godot has one, maybe two different ways of doing something. If more than one, there are usually obvious tradeoffs between the two ways.

There were alleged rumors that Microsoft did try to acquire Unity at one point. It takes two to tango and the allegation was always that Unity wasn't interested in selling to Microsoft. The impression that I have is that Unity didn't get to this "weird ad company with a game engine byproduct" by accident, they seem to have had board members where this was their exit in mind all along and the (weird, gross) direction they intended to move the company.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7655460/ made in unity https://blog.unity.com/entertainment/neill-blomkamp-on-what-... https://blog.unity.com/entertainment/bugsbot-g-the-first-kor...

Unreal/Epic have taken free to play money already. It was Unity's turn i guess.

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