Most notably, this is laying off their entire acquisition of Weta Digital which was an audacious $1.6B purchase.
After which Unity did nothing to take the proposed products into the marketplace.
After which Unity did nothing to take the proposed products into the marketplace.
The way to commercialize WETA stuff would be to make new product teams and basically redo much of the work with professional software devs and figure out where the original VFX R&D had gaps - and it always has massive gaps.
Unity just went nuts with wacky acquisitions the last couple years and this was one of them.
HT: That’s also an important point explained when we talk about internal VS commercial (or build VS buy) in the animation/VFX industry.
Internal softwares does less than 5% (or less) of commercial products, but they are doing it in a straight, fab compatibility way. No effort is made in making the tool working with your fab, the tool is shaped for the fab from scratch. That’s the value of internal tools. Converting those is viable product is very risky.
"Unity welcomes Weta Digital’s world-class engineering talent of 275 engineers that are known for architecting, building, and maintaining Weta Digital tools and core pipeline."
So it just seems they have just thrown away $1.6 billion. If they were unable to commercialize any of their tools while they still had the people who built them it will be entirely hopeless now.