Seems like this would have been a stellar business without the hassle of going public. How did they fuck this up? All they had to do was keep customers happy and collect money.
> Software developer Niantic released Pokémon Go, which was built using Unity engine, in 2016.[26] Following the success of Pokémon Go, Unity Technologies held several rounds of funding that increased the company's valuation: In July 2016, a $181 million round of funding valued the company at approximately $1.5 billion;[26] in May 2017, the company raised $400 million that valued the company at $2.8 billion;[27] and in 2018 Unity's CEO confirmed a $145 million round that valued the company at approximately $3 billion
Seems like investors wanted an exit, so public they went. I could be wrong. Maybe someone can provide better insight if I'm wrong or this isn't the complete picture.
There were, however, plenty of worse investments in those years: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-27/spac-mani...
Unity sells shovels in a gold rush. In 2016 Unity was known for being easier than the competition while having fantastic multiplatform/mobile support. They were positioned to take a tax on games sold on every major platform. It's almost impressive how badly they ruined such a winning hand.
Among Us, Pokemon Go, Beat Saber, Genshin Impact, Hearthstone, Rust were all made in Unity.
For sure it's a great product, but the truth is that it was subsidized by vc capital and is not a sustainable business
The debate is around is it worth $5 billion or $50 billion. It's not as easy as one might think to figure which.
Only because they are issuing massive amounts of stock (IIRC ~15% per year) to pay their employees and not doing any buybacks. How sustainable is that?
> It's growing at a very healthy rate
The problem is that it’s not. YoY growth they reported yesterday was -2% and they are also guiding for negative growth next year.
It's not bad, you just have to be aware of it. It's in the k - right there in the income statement (the opex lines will all have some % which is equity) and cashflow statement (the operating cashflow calc explicitly has a line for it).
Imagine a bank suddenly told all customers 30% of their saving will be taken, then backtrack. Only an insane/ignorant person will stay with them.
Only thing that I can think of is public ousting and crucifixion of leadership, followed by some strong legal protection of current engine's fees for X years into the future. To build the trust back.
I think there's a confluence of factors driving this. Foremost, they need a way for developers to make games, especially in the AR/VR space. SpriteKit and SceneKit have floundered, and RealityKit is not a complete solution to make games, let alone cross-platform games. They can't show any favor to Unreal Engine, even though it's superior, because of their fight with Epic. I wish they would invest more in something like Godot, but Unity has more marketshare (for now).
C# is a great language, and Apple is pragmatic enough to realize the cross-platform potential is much greater than Swift's. From what I've seen, Swift has little traction as a cross-platform tool compared to Mono. Lattner's departure took some wind out of the Swift sails, too.