
Unity Software Inc S-1 - swyx
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1810806/000119312520227862/d908875ds1.htm
======
formalsystem
Out of any software tools I use frequently, Unity is the one that brings me
the most joy.

Any reasonably complex interface is essentially a game whether it's a music
composition app, simulator, MMO or even a basic form.

The basic abstractions of entities and components sometimes feel like they
could apply to any software project. It's seamless to animate something, add
physics, style in ways that would seem mind boggling in other environments
I've worked in like Python or Javascript.

You can learn so much going over basic Unity tutorials on Youtube and
disassembling Unity games on Steam.

The asset store has many people aggressively experimenting with better user
experiences for doing certain tasks whether its character skinning or node
based programming, many of the best assets end up added to Unity by default.

Unity is not mostly used for mobile games, some insanely complex games are
made in Unity. You can check out this list on Steam
[https://store.steampowered.com/curator/31285130-Unity-
Engine...](https://store.steampowered.com/curator/31285130-Unity-Engine-
Games/)

Unity ML agents is the single most exciting ML project out today which helps
you create the most complex Reinforcement Learning environments you can dream
of.

Unity ate the indie game market but I think they will also eat Robotic
simulations, Animation, interior design, VR, Web apps and Desktop apps.

Can't wait to buy shares.

~~~
akersten
> Any reasonably complex interface is essentially a game whether it's a music
> composition app, simulator, MMO or even a basic form.

I've been out of the game development arena for a while, but I can't help but
pause here. Are people really writing DAWs and big desktop app interfaces in
_Unity_?

The last time I played with a game engine, I would have said UI was its
weakest aspect. Clunky, slow controls, visually unappealing, and certainly
lacking in accessibility. Without researching more, I would feel pretty
confident placing a bet that if I pointed JAWS at a Unity Window, it would say
"Game Window" and that's about it. Windows accessibility hooks and tab
navigation certainly didn't work out of the box, and I would say that is bare
minimum for a UI toolkit.

So while it's valid that Unity is a beast and game engines will eat the world
for games, I have a really hard time taking them seriously for UI-driven
application development.

~~~
trynewideas
> Are people really writing DAWs and big desktop app interfaces in Unity?

Arguably the biggest non-game applications are in virtual cinematography,
architectural visualization, non-game simulations, and immersive art
installations. Most of those uses don't result in discrete "apps", though,
they're just workflows within Unity designed to produce a specific type of
output.

One prominent example of a discrete pro app made from Unity, though, is
Digital Monarch Media's filmmaking toolsuite, which is built on Unity.[1] But
it fills some unusual hardware and interface needs that Unity is built, or has
plugins, to provide (touchscreen interfaces, motion tracking, color grading).

That said, I see non-game apps in the vein of content creation or productivity
pop up more frequently now in Godot development than Unity. There are some
proof-of-concepts, like the Godello[2] Trello clone that was posted here a
while back, but more useful examples are Pixelorama[3], an open-source pixel-
art editor built with Godot, and Heavypaint[4], a painting/sketching app.

[1] [https://www.vfxvoice.com/instant-feedback-expozure-
expands-i...](https://www.vfxvoice.com/instant-feedback-expozure-expands-its-
virtual-toolset/)

[2]
[https://github.com/alfredbaudisch/Godello](https://github.com/alfredbaudisch/Godello)

[3] [https://orama-interactive.itch.io/pixelorama](https://orama-
interactive.itch.io/pixelorama)

[4] [http://www.heavypoly.com/heavypaint](http://www.heavypoly.com/heavypaint)

~~~
jarrell_mark
Godot is written in Godot. Anything you see in its UI can be used by Godot
developers.

~~~
PinkMilkshake
Which can be abused in fun ways!
[https://twitter.com/yafd/status/1294719274657787904](https://twitter.com/yafd/status/1294719274657787904)

------
MrLeap
I use Unity every day at work. This is a mixed bag for me. Unity gives google
a run for their money when it comes to abandoning old features / letting them
rot.

The editor is kind of crashy, launch times get unwieldy fast. Sometimes
there's subtle differences between build version and running in the editor,
and solving the disparity is a death march.

All that said, it's still one of my favorite environments to work in. I wonder
if I have Stockholm syndrome.

Hopefully all this public money will get them to make a saner serialization
format for their scene files. Unity's relationship with version control is...
tense.

~~~
brundolf
I'm curious what issues it still has with version-control? I know that for a
while the default asset format was binary instead of text, but I believe they
made text the default a little while ago (I've used Unity in a hobby capacity
over the years but never professionally)

~~~
MrLeap
Scene files are the biggest thing. They're merge conflict magnets. You breath
aggressively and they'll "change". Our workflow tends to be based around
prefabs, and a main scene we _rarely_ change. Despite never touching it,
everyone on the team has to revert Main.scene before committing, pretty much
every time.

VFX Graphs are also pretty nuts. Cut one line and it changes 3000 lines of
code. This isn't the biggest deal in the world, but it makes for weird diffs.

There was a memory leak bug with the videoplayer component, and the only fix I
found was to update to a newer-than-LTS version. That version likes to strip
public rendertexture fields from the inspector every time you pull a scene
down from git. Hopefully they fix that before they call it an LTS :)

~~~
moron4hire
I've found additive scenes a little nicer for avoiding scene merge conflicts.
Additive scenes come with a lot of baggage of their own, but it's worth it to
learn to get that initial start up time down way more.

------
DizzyDoo
Like some others who are commenting, I use Unity for my job every day, and
it's not been a great experience these last few years, each 'part' (graphics
pipelines, documentation, Editor and tooling, and so on) has been steadily
deteriorating over the versions. This article from Garry (from Garry's Mod,
Rust and so on) from earlier in the year is still all accurate:
[https://garry.tv/unity-2020](https://garry.tv/unity-2020)

Sadly, I wonder how much the last few years of very obviously aiming at Going
Public has led the company and Unity as a software to this state. When the
forums are full of "what is going on with Unity" threads and the company blog
is full of "we've bought this cloud company" and "we're investing in AR for
automative engineering", something isn't matching up.

~~~
brundolf
What I've heard is that many of the problems are growing-pains; Unity has some
really deep technical debt and they're (perhaps too hastily) ripping it out
and updating things, which is causing angst for devs when a) their existing
projects break, and b) in some cases the old system actually gets deprecated
_before_ the new one reaches parity. But it also sounds like all of the
completely new stuff that doesn't involve scorched-earth deprecation is
generally well-received (and in some cases, a long time coming).

Does that line up with your experience?

~~~
DizzyDoo
I really, really wish it did.

Here's just one concrete example: real-time point-light shadows in the
Universal Render Pipeline. URP is the new 'default' way of rendering, the old
renderer is being phased out, this is the new way of doing things - as you
say; technical debt as they re-engineer. But how horrid has this process of
eliminating technical debt been? You've got Unity proudly announcing that URP
was 'production ready' in February 2019, but you still can't have a point-
light cast real-time shadows. Currently that (let's face it, really basic)
feature is planned for Unity 2020.2, which is still in alpha, but even if you
download the alpha you can't access that feature yet, _and_ they've announced
they're not going to backport it, so bad luck if you're using 2019 or even
2020.1 for your game.

It's actually making me a bit sad to go into detail on what watching the URP
fiasco, so I'll spare any other examples involving post-processing stacks, or
'camera stacking', or Ambient Occlusion, or...

~~~
brundolf
That's pretty bad, but I'd still file that under "too-hastily deprecating
things before the new version is at parity". Not that it isn't a huge issue,
but could it be a temporary issue? Is the newer one, in theory, on a good
track for the long-term?

~~~
squeaky-clean
The newer one (URP) is already in its second rewrite after ditching the
initial version (LWRP). They also completely split the post-processing stack
into two incompatible stacks depending on whether you're using URP or HDRP,
then backtracked and are attempting to merge them into a single stack again.

So while maybe they'll get it all fixed soon, based on their track record I'm
pretty cynical and bet it's more likely in 2021 or 2022 they'll announce yet
another overhaul of the rendering stack(s), probably unifying them back into
one stack or something.

~~~
DizzyDoo
Absolutely. One more additional thing: the latest back-track has been the URP-
is-not-a-standalone-package anymore, URP package versions going forward are
going to be tied to a specific Editor version. I imagine this is going to make
the ability to backport features and bug fixes incredibly difficult because
the dependencies are going to be so tightly enmeshed.

------
johnfn
I'm quite bearish on Unity in the long run.

Unity to me seems like a team with a fantastic marketing department to
contrast with a much weaker engineering department. I've tried to use Unity
off and on for years and every time I spend time learning it, I regret it. I'm
a full-time React developer, and the difference in engineering culture and
best engineering practices between Unity and React is massive. The Unity
experience is riddled with bugs, poorly-thought-out workflows, and half-
finished or obsolete features. Simple tasks, more often than not, become an
exercise in frustration. I've written a blog post about this[1], though it's
incomplete (mostly because somewhere after writing the 2000th word I wondered
why I was even using Unity at all) so I've never published it anywhere.

I've honestly wondered a lot why Unity is successful at all, and the only
answer I can really come to is that their direct competition - Unreal Engine,
and a few other studio-made engines like CryEngine - are even worse. (Which
leads to another question: why is it so hard to make a good game engine? But
that would be another thousand words, so let's not stray too far from the
point...) Godot is a glimmer on the horizon, but it looks like it still needs
a few years to catch up.

I also have a sneaking suspicion that Unity is successful because it is used
by a lot of people as their introduction into programming, and they simply
don't know that anything better is possible.

Still, I suspect that most developers who use Unity will eventually reach the
same conclusion and move on, and this seems to be confirmed by the google
trends graph, which has been sloping steadily downwards over the last 5 years
or so[2].

[1]:
[https://www.notion.so/UnityIsFundamentallyBroken-e3b1474e7af...](https://www.notion.so/UnityIsFundamentallyBroken-e3b1474e7afb42bdb05cadcd3c2dbd77)

[2]:
[https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F0dmyvh)

~~~
OneGuy123
Comparing a web library to game engine is a bit of a stretch.

Unity is very nice to develop actually. It's a lot more simple than UE4 for
example, but UE4 is much better suited for more complicated games, but then
again, Subnautica is made in Unity, so Unity is very flexible.

Neither is "bad" or "worse". Unity is obviously not perfect, but video game
engines move and change all the time, that is the nature of the video game
industry.

Unity is mostly used for mobile video games, to which UE4 is not that much
suited because it's more complicated and requires a better phone + the apk
size will be larger in the end.

~~~
johnfn
It's really not as much of a stretch as you might think.

Let's put aside everything that the two libraries actually _do_ for a second,
and just think about them in the abstract. React very clearly tries to _guide
the developer towards correct patterns and abstractions._ It's clear that
React developers have thought very deeply about how to lead engineers towards
the happy path of code with fewer bugs in it. It throws loud errors and
warnings if you do something that could even potentially lead to an error down
the line. They deprecate and eventually remove broken features. And it almost
goes without saying, but they finish the features they're working on, rather
than leaving them in the codebase in a half-finished state.

Unity does none of these things. Unity doesn't mark old features as
deprecated: you could be using a deprecated or obsolete API for months without
ever recognizing it because the only communication Unity gives you is a post
on the Unity blog post from years ago. (This has happened to be multiple
times.) Unity doesn't tell you when you're doing something wrong - you can
still StartCoroutine with a string, even though you should be using a function
reference. Unity absolutely does not try to lead your code towards the happy
path of fewer bugs - GetComponent<>, possibly the most used Unity function,
can easily trigger bugs because Unity does not statically verify that the
component you're looking up exists, so if you forget and remove it later, your
code will crash. React is very intentionally designed _not_ to have problems
like this.

I wrote like 4000 words on this topic, if you want more detail. Feel free to
dig in if you'd like:
[https://www.notion.so/UnityIsFundamentallyBroken-e3b1474e7af...](https://www.notion.so/UnityIsFundamentallyBroken-e3b1474e7afb42bdb05cadcd3c2dbd77)

~~~
xex70
AAA here. Actually, it is a stretch, because you’re expecting an entirely
different discipline of software development to reflect the trends, knowledge,
and assumptions of your discipline. We are a CryEngine shop but I’ve used
Unity extensively for MVP pitches, spec work, and side projects. I also left
the Web vertical to do this so I still have context from your side as well.

I took the time to read what you’ve written. Just about every single point you
made in that essay can be distilled to “Web developer with strong convictions
about Web software engineering and expecting game development to look like
familiar territory,” with only a couple exceptions. I read that essay and I
walk away with “that person is going to have a hard time if they pursue
professional game development,” not the intended conclusion you had about
Unity’s lackings. That’s reflected in nearly every concern about Unity
expressed in this thread because this is a Web forum.

Unity has deficiencies we are all aware of in the industry, but none of them
are in your essay. Several of your points are misunderstandings, several are
just wrong, and all of them paint a picture which also gives a lot of AAA
shops pause about hiring Web folks (and that I’ve had to deal with): there’s a
pretty strong strain among the Web industry of “if you don’t do software like
FAANG does, you’re doing it wrong and your stuff is terrible.” Meanwhile, the
stuff you call bad/terrible/worse is generating billions in revenue and
employing thousands. Seriously, Unreal is worse than Unity? Nearly stopped
reading there.

I’m reminded of a friend who does control development for factories and had
someone come in straight from a Google internship who started trying to
reimplement SCADA from first principles using Kubernetes. The Web is one way
to do software engineering. There are others, and one of those others is
reflected in the design of Unity.

~~~
tikhonj
Game programming _isn 't_—or at least _shouldn 't be_—so different from other
fields that fundamental software engineering principles do not apply. It seems
like discarding criticism just because it comes from outside the immediate
industry is going to lead to an insular culture and get in the way of any real
change or progress.

Doubly so for an industry that still has high-profile, highly funded projects
(Battlefield V, Anthem... etc) flounder because of technical debt and poor
tooling. (And yes, these issues are all downstream of awful management for
those particular projects, but that doesn't change the technical side of
things!)

~~~
tikhonj
This goes in the other direction too: other fields can and should borrow ideas
from game programming. At the end of the day the goals of different software
projects are pretty comparable: we all want to produce quality code, minimize
bugs and do it as quickly and productively as we can. The details and trade-
offs aren't identical, to be sure, but at the end of the day different
programming fields are far more alike than not.

------
ordinaryradical
Having followed this space for some time, Unity made huge strides at the
beginning but has become notorious for punishing shiny features while leaving
things broken or half-supported, which makes the developer’s life hard if you
happen to run into one of those bugs. Closed source means you’re stuck writing
ugly workarounds.

My impression was that you can bootstrap some incredible stuff in Unity, but
demanding kinds of games will push you into its uglier corners and leave you
at the mercy of its updating schedule.

This is very different from Unreal, or even Godot, which have their own trade
offs. But it seems to me like there is enough of a “mid market” for all of
them to coexist.

~~~
oblio
Hearthstone is built with Unity. I don't know if it's on Blizzard or on Unity
(though, comparing things to other Blizzard games, I'd suspect Unity), but
Hearthstone uses an awful lot of resources and is quite laggy on mobile,
despite it presenting a pretty bare-bones 3D scene with barely any special
effects.

~~~
jayd16
Card games use a lot of high res art. They take a surprising amount of
textures.

~~~
oblio
Have you played Hearthstone? It was released in 2013 and I wouldn't call their
graphics "high end" by any stretch of the imagination. If racing games or FIFA
run fluently on a Galaxy Tab S4, so should Hearthstone...

Even their PC version is laggy, check out streamers restarting the game (!)
before important and action packed battlegrounds turns.

~~~
jayd16
Racing games and FIFA can reuse a lot of texture data. Same rock. Same
uniform. Repeating crowd. That said, HS just runs on mobile. It's not
optimized for it. It's obvious when you can only look at a chunk of your
collection at a time instead of smoothly scrolling that the cards take up a
lot of ram.

Users also have a lot more control over what is shown on screen. For a FIFA
game everything is loaded beforehand. In a card game that has to hide
information, it has to load as the game progresses.

~~~
esrauch
I don't think that's actually a fair explanation for why the game is so janky.
Very simple animations that aren't loading new resources like Ysera Unleashed
visibly badly lag even on the top end machines used for tournaments.

Maybe more clearly, whenever you enter a game there's a loading spinner that
freezes for several seconds even on the very highest end desktops; you'd think
for a game whose main graphics concern is exactly "image asset streaming from
disk", they have wouldn't need to hard-freeze the menu UI to do the loading.

~~~
jayd16
Its not an explanation for why the game is janky. Its a rebuttal to the
comment that HS(card games in general, really) is bare bones or should be
trivial to run well. Almost certainly they could fix the issue with background
thread loading and some UI tweaks if they wanted to. That said, the issue is
most likely that they're simply loading texture data from disk on the main
thread. This is the default Unity behavior with asset loads and it's not
really possible to hit their RAM quotas if they load every card. A subset of
cards reveals information.

------
_mkef
Ehh.

I really hope Unity raises tons of money , and inspires some decent
competition here.

Unity is the worst game engine, aside from all others. UE4 is a convoluted
mess. I've tired several times , but even getting it setup with the C++ build
chain is a pain.

Godot ( which epic funded recently ) isn't done yet.

I'm going to stick with Unity until someone else can build an easy to use game
engine. Ultimately Unity does tons of very difficult things, like I wouldn't
want to write build systems for a half dozen platforms solo.

The asset store is easily Unity's greatest advantage. With about 1000$ and a
month you can make a full playable games. I also owe Unity my career. I work
far from game design , but Unity taught me how to program.

In my dream Valve releases Source 2 , it's just as easy to use as Unity and
then game developers have a real choice.

Or I get a spare 600k to build something in UE4. I'm a fairly experienced
programer and I still can't make heads or tails of it

~~~
furyofantares
I'm a highly experienced programmer and I can't get started with Unity. Maybe
I'm just an old curmudgeon now. But I just want to see some code and drive
from code. The workflow of starting from objects and scenes in a GUI and
attaching scripts is totally foreign to me. And then most of the tutorials
seem to be videos, which I have no patience for, with text I can skip around
and tailor my learning to my personal needs. And then I have no idea how to
predict if any given video or documentation or sample project is out of date.
It's extremely frustrating and makes me feel dumb and old.

~~~
squeaky-clean
I originally had this mindset. Still kind of do. But the way of managing
things through gameobjects, serializable components, and the scene hierarchy
UI is very beneficial when you have non-programmers working on your game with
you.

It's annoying when you're a solo dev who wants to handle everything in code,
but they're definitely trying to optimize the workflow for a small diverse
team rather than for a programmer or group of only programmers.

> And then I have no idea how to predict if any given video or documentation
> or sample project is out of date.

100% agree with this. I wish I could just buy a comprehensive book on an older
version of Unity and stay on that as long as I can. But I can't really find
much for more advanced Unity that doesn't exist as a video or GDC talk.
(though an exception would be the catlikecoding tutorials)

~~~
zemo
> the way of managing things through gameobjects, serializable components, and
> the scene hierarchy UI is very beneficial when you have non-programmers
> working on your game with you.

honestly it's extremely useful even if you're an experienced programmer
working alone. Being able to pause the simulation, move some objects around in
space, and then resume the simulation is extremely powerful. Typing out the
coordinates into code would: be ridiculously tedious -and- force you to commit
to disk (by writing the files) the changes to something you really only need
in memory. Being able to play with the state of the simulation by hand is
extremely powerful.

------
VonGuard
This should be a monster. We have no direct game development tools exposure on
the stock market, unless you count Autodesk, but their tools are usable by
other industries. That means it's gonna be shouldering a burden for an entire
industry, and one that the stock market doesn't understand or appreciate.
Potential for going either way, really.

Development tools have traditionally been a poor investment long term, but
that's not been the case since about 2010, especially since Atlassian went
public.

Unity is also gonna be a proxy for Unreal. Since these two competitors are not
directly competing on the stock market, Unity should be a bit of a mirror for
what the market thinks Unreal would be worth on its own.

~~~
chrisseaton
> That means it's gonna be shouldering a burden for an entire industry

> Unity is also gonna be a proxy for Unreal

Why do you think it has to do all these things? Why can't it just be a stock
on its own?

~~~
wastedhours
There's always a sector influence on the valuation of stocks - if an analyst
writes a report saying the gaming sector as a whole is going to grow 1000x in
the next 10 years, you can bet people will be looking for stocks to ride that
wave.

If Unity is the only buyable stock in the sector, then they'll feel the
impact.

~~~
Trasmatta
There are lots of existing stocks in the gaming sector though, so it would
need to be more like "game engines are going to grow 1000x".

------
kaesar14
"We have experienced rapid growth. Our revenue grew from $380.8 million to
$541.8 million for the years ended December 31, 2018 and 2019, respectively,
representing year-over-year growth of 42%, and from $252.8 million to $351.3
million for the six months ended June 30, 2019 and 2020, respectively,
representing period-over-period growth of 39%. We generated net losses for the
years ended December 31, 2018 and 2019, and six months ended June 30, 2019 and
2020, of $131.6 million, $163.2 million, $67.1 million and $54.1 million,
respectively, which included $20.9 million, $44.5 million, $14.8 million and
$21.7 million, respectively, of stock-based compensation expense. We reduced
our net cash used in operating activities from $81.1 million to $67.9 million
for the years ended December 31, 2018 and 2019, respectively, and from $19.8
million to $15.4 million for the six months ended June 30, 2019 and 2020,
respectively."

Promising financials!

~~~
tempsy
But growth is already slowing from 2018-2019 vs 2019-2020 period.

40% YoY growth for SaaS is par for the course, and the revenue figure is a bit
light.

Not necessarily a home run in the public markets though if there's a time to
do a tech IPO it's now given the frothiness of the market.

~~~
hunterloftis
I've heard this term used a few times now - a "frothy market," or a "frothy
startup," but I'm not familiar with it. What does frothiness mean in terms of
markets?

------
supernova87a
It is clear from the financials that in the coming months/years, they will be
pressured (or simply need to) cut back massively on R&D, marketing, etc.

They have a gross profit margin of 78% in the last 2 years (revenue - direct
operating costs), but then if you subtract R&D, sales + marketing, admin, it
drops to -30% net profit.

Not even knowing that much about them, you can see what's about to happen.

~~~
swyx
this is the story of almost every tech company at ipo, whats the big deal?

------
synaesthesisx
I'm bullish on Unity (especially with how it's positioned to take advantage of
the AR/VR boom). I know Facebook tried to buy them at some point, and am glad
that didn't pan out after watching what they've done with Oculus.

As someone who has invested heavily in SaaS stocks, I know the current market
is likely going to want to send this thing to space. There has arguably never
been a better time to IPO.

------
BoysenberryPi
Unity filing for an IPO is very interesting. I use both Unity and Tableau and
they have always seemed very similar to me in terms of marketing. They have
massive communities and excel at getting people up to speed and making you
feel powerful. However, once you get passed the "beginner-intermediate" phase
you realize this isn't really all its cracked up to be but at that point you
invested time into learning them and they technically get the job done so you
stick with it.

------
mlacks
> Industries Beyond Gaming: In industries beyond gaming, we estimate the
> market opportunity for our Create Solutions and Operate Solutions to be
> approximately $17 billion today, based on the number of software developers,
> architects and designers our solutions could potentially serve.

There is a graphic I stumbled upon years ago - I haven't been able to find it
recently - that described Facebook's gameplan - 10-20 years out. It basically
described how the focus of the platform would evolve with how effectively
users would be able to share their lives with their network, in progression
with technology, or - more specifically - the price of bandwidth. Let me
explain:

FB early years was very text-centric. I recall not "getting it" because it was
effectively a tricked-out twitter. Kinda like Asana vs Clickup today - more
features doesn't directly translate to "better". I of course didn't factor in
the "network effect". I digress. Early years was text-centric.

When internet speeds picked up (without much of an increase in price to the
end user), photos became more of a focus. The Instagram acquisition happened
around this timeframe

At the time I found this graphic, The same price/data speed phenomenon was in
effect and FB was transitioning to video as its core sharing focus. Facebook
acquires Occulus, which leads into the last part of the graphic -

VR. I remember MZ's Mark Zuckerberg's virtual Puerto Rico jaunt. New tech is
often akward, but knowing Facebook a player in an industry typically "beyond
gaming" is in line to blur that line, is one good example of the viability of
Unity as a real revenue producing entity.

This is getting a little long winded, but I think this next part drives the
point home.

I'm a real estate agent, and I used to work at a brokerage called Exp (NASDAQ:
EXPI). Their pitch (to agents) is that they are a "cloud-based brokerage".
While not required - there is a Club Penguin-esque "world" you log into, make
an avatar, walk around and an attend meetings in auditoriums. Its very cheesy,
but as mentioned above, all new tech is cheesy. Check out Exp stock
performance this year. Unity is in a prime position to work with companies in
"non-gaming industries" looking to keep current and move with the pace of tech

------
serverholic
Unity has completely destroyed my faith in their ability to deliver on
anything other than marketing.

\- It took them YEARS to deliver their new input system. Think about that. A
company with Unity's resources took YEARS to develop a system that takes
inputs from keyboards, mice, and gamepads and routes them to C# callbacks.
YEARS.

\- They completely abandoned their networking system (UNET) without a
replacement system... This was YEARS ago and we STILL don't have a production-
ready replacement.

\- They wrote a new render pipeline called the Universal Render Pipeline (URP)
and marketed it as a production-ready replacement for the old built-in
renderer. However, the new pipeline isn't even close to feature-parity and the
remaining features are still in development. How in the world is that a
"production-ready replacement"???

~~~
jayd16
Its not that they can't build anything. URP is ok. It cuts out features that
made it slower so its not going to ever hit feature parity. The problem is
indeed that the marketing oversold it. They should have never suggested devs
"move" to URP. For new games its alright.

~~~
zlsa
URP doesn't support casting dynamic shadows from point lights[0], something
which many games use and should really be a feature in a production-ready game
engine.

[0]: [https://forum.unity.com/threads/urp-point-light-
shadows.8819...](https://forum.unity.com/threads/urp-point-light-
shadows.881902/)

------
flexie
Very, very few Danish tech startups are listed. There are literally years in
between, unless you count NASDAQ First North. I guess this is the way to do it
:-)

~~~
whoisjuan
Is Unity Danish anymore? I mean, it got started in Copenhagen and its founder
is Danish but that's the extent of it.

I don't think people say Basecamp is a Danish company just because DHH is
Danish.

Not trying to poke holes at your statement. Just genuinely curious on what
determines where a company is from. In my book, headquarters location is the
baseline.

~~~
ppaattrriicckk
According to the Danish Companies House they haven't been very Danish since
2015. They've moved ownership 100% to Singapore (and from there, who knows).

Still 300 FTEs in Denmark, though.

[https://datacvr.virk.dk/data/visenhed?enhedstype=virksomhed&...](https://datacvr.virk.dk/data/visenhed?enhedstype=virksomhed&id=30719913&soeg=unity%20technologies&type=undefined&language=uk)
(the original company with David Helgason etc)

[https://datacvr.virk.dk/data/visenhed?enhedstype=virksomhed&...](https://datacvr.virk.dk/data/visenhed?enhedstype=virksomhed&id=30719883&language=uk)
(IP company)

[https://datacvr.virk.dk/data/visenhed?enhedstype=person&id=4...](https://datacvr.virk.dk/data/visenhed?enhedstype=person&id=4006112978&soeg=unity%20technologies&type=undefined&language=uk)
(reference to the Singaporean company)

------
whywhywhywhy
In 5 years Unity will completely dominate the creative space, even outside of
games you're going to be finding this tech everywhere and there is no double
in my mind you'll be seeing the unity logo at the end of summer blockbuster
credit sequences.

~~~
delfinom
Unreal Engine is already very far ahead into the cinema space and already
being used in numerous works being produced. Epic has been investing money
into supporting toolchains and devices built to support Unreal Engine in
cinema to boot. I simply don't see Unity catching up.

------
vmception
reading most of these comments, its clear and odd that people view "going
public" or filing an S-1 as a coveted position, something that someone
"deserves" or "doesn't deserve"

and to me that is a very odd side effect of companies not going public often

~~~
nv-vn
I think it has to do with the fact that HN has many users who are employed at
startups. When you get paid in what is essentially monopoly money, you're
going to be envious of startups which are able to turn that into cash. It
seems to me like it's just the side effect of people having 90% of their net
worth tied into a private company's equity and wanting the golden ticket to
actually redeem it.

~~~
vmception
Tragic, but not really, either way I would like to see more nuanced
discussions just about its under or overpricing, or something more overt like
its "pumpability".

Or maybe a discussion about how to get price discovery at lower valuations
instead of just dumping on everyone's 401ks at high valuations.

------
echelon
It seems like Epic is going to trounce Unity when they go public. They've got
a more powerful engine, megahit game, and distribution platform.

~~~
swalsh
I'm bull Epic too, but honestly, I don't care about the quality differences.
The main thing Epic has going for them that Unity does not is it's diverse
marketing channels. They are becoming huge in the cinematic, and broadcast
markets, huge markets Unity doesn't even have a presence in.

------
adamnemecek
I wish them the best, they have transformed the landscape of indie game
development really drastically and forced others (Unreal) to follow suit.

~~~
jkinudsjknds
I'm surprised by this perspective. I see Unreal as leading the charge for
indies and Unity struggling to follow suit.

* Vastly better free content to throw in your games

* Source available engine

* No fees on the first million dollars of gross revenue

* Clear communication on roadmap for engine development and what's going to stay vs. change

------
minimaxir
Interesting given the current issues with their primary competitor Unreal
Engine/Epic, although the timing of this IPO is 100% coincidental.

------
DonHopkins
Oh great, with all that money maybe they can get symlinks to work in Windows.

------
silicon2401
Can someone explain what this means to a finance noob? Does this mean it will
be possible to purchase stock in Unity soon?

~~~
KerrickStaley
Yes, it means that they are going through the paperwork required to do an IPO.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_S-1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_S-1)

~~~
formalsystem
How long does this process usually take?

~~~
ystad
~ 2+ months

------
nshm
Audio recording API in Unity is awful, you can only record a short clip on
button press and thats it. No continuous listening, no sample rate
configuration, no realtime. And processing thread changes from version to
version. We had big trouble implementing speech recognition with Vosk in
Unity.

------
ourcat
Having only just installed Unity over the weekend and starting to go through
tutorials and starting to understand how I can build AR/VR/XR 'things', I've
started to see the light and wished I'd started on this a while ago.

I also see they acquired 'Bolt' and made that part of the free toolset. I
think 'visual programming' tools like that could be a great help in adoption
by young developers. I also like that visual aides like that can help the
understanding of underlying code.

This S-1 is a surprise, yet not. If you know what I mean.

Out of the various IPOs I've seen crop up recently, this is the one I'd go
for, due to the changes in the way people are to going to have to learn and
work, since the pandemic.

Right technology. Right time.

------
caymanjim
There's no mention of Apple here, but I suspect the timing of this is directly
related to Apple threatening to cut off Epic's SDK access due to the fight
over app purchase fees. This was almost certainly in the works already, but
now they need to accelerate it.

~~~
reaperhulk
In my experience it is exceedingly difficult to meaningfully accelerate the
timelines on publishing an S-1. There are too many lawyers, financial audits,
investor roadshow schedules, et cetera. This is likely pure coincidence.

~~~
caymanjim
I was confused and mixed up a story about Apple blocking Unreal Engine,
thinking that Epic owned Unity. I figured they had been playing the long game,
preparing a Unity IPO to launch in case Apple tried to block it.

------
madrox
Unity's done great things in its space. I worry about its long term prospects
against the likes of Epic, who are going to be able to vertically integrate
Unreal Engine with the epic games store and thus compete in ways Unity can't.
I think a better business strategy would've been acquisition that could've
given them that synergy, but I can also understand that, for the owners, the
biggest cash out may not be what they're going for.

------
ffggvv
as a counterpoint to all the complaints, i still think unity is by far the
easiest game engine to pickup even for people who’ve never coded before. and
there’s so many resources out there to pick it up that there isn’t really a
strong competitor imo despite any potential misteps

------
taken_username
> Our common stock is currently not listed on any securities exchange. We have
> applied to have our common stock listed on the NYSE under the symbol “U”.

U like Unity, not Uber or Unreal.

------
iwi885123jdkak
There revenue strategy is bad. They really should've had a cut from sales
after a certain threshold, similar to UE4.

Now they make peanuts from people who make millions using unity.

------
jshaqaw
What’s their plan to someday turn a profit?

------
barbecue_sauce
Hopefully this will allow them to start a grant program in the same vein as
Epic MegaGrants.

------
ptrmthv1
Web developers are learning it’s all pointer math on arrays.

Which game engines happen to be heavily optimized for.

SRE tools could be VR based. Omg lookit me pretending to manage a real server.
Meanwhile its just sending something that conforms to an API spec.

There’s your singularity

------
scott31
How can I short this?

~~~
DudeInBasement
Usually, there is a 'no short' window after IPO. It is better to buy put
options as it limits your downside risk. Unless you are a big dog (can
actually effect the market). Then shorting is better because you can force the
price in your favor.

~~~
scott31
put options are fine too, do you know where I can buy them?

~~~
hmate9
You can only get them after they eventually IPO.

~~~
TomGullen
I believe there is a wait time before options are available on new listings
also

~~~
ffhhj
There probably is.

