
Unity Technologies Targeting 2020 IPO - leafo
https://cheddar.com/media/unity-technologies-targeting-2020-ipo-sources
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cableshaft
Is this a good or bad thing for the long-term usage of their platform, do you
think? My gut instinct says bad, since once they go public they will be under
continued pressure by stockholders to keep making more and more money, and so
they feel increased pressure to increase their prices and/or reduce featureset
for the free version (or start charging for it again). They might be more
focused on consumer facing features than bug fixing than they have been in the
past, also.

I don't know, just seen this go bad with lots of other companies, that leaves
me skeptical about how this will go and nervous about making games using their
platform in the future.

~~~
m12k
The investors (Sequoia being the big one) will want to cash out at some point,
and then it's either an IPO or an exit. The most likely buyers in an exit-
scenario would be platform owners like Apple, Google or Microsoft, which would
be terrible for Unity's viability as a cross-platform tool (or at least look
that way - just see the reactions that came after Microsoft bought GitHub). Or
they get bought by Epic/Tencent, and the market becomes a monopoly, which is
pretty damn bad as well. So under the circumstances I think an IPO is by far
the lesser evil, even though I do share your concerns about the
shortsightedness of public investors (though I'd argue that's a general
problem and not a problem with Unity specifically)

~~~
jayd16
Seems like Microsoft would be the obvious choice. They just bought Xamarin,
they're finally in a good spot with regards to C#'s growing cross platform
viability and they're actually a game publisher.

I don't really know why MS would bother unless not doing so would risk a Unity
collapse and a loss of a lot of C# development.

~~~
Impossible
Many of Microsoft Window Mixed Reality\Hololens apps are made in Unity also,
so it makes sense there.

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vtange
This might be a poor PR move for Unity in relation to game developers. Many
will read it as a cash grab with more monetization shenanigans lurking on the
horizon and decide to switch to engines like Godot Engine. Unity might've
actually hurt itself if it loses too many client developers.

It doesn't help that there have already been some recent stories of developers
being given the cold corporate treatment,[0] and the recent issue with
Improbable.[1]

[0] [https://sipreadrepeat.com/2018/12/16/unity-email-
controversy...](https://sipreadrepeat.com/2018/12/16/unity-email-controversy-
what-does-it-mean/) [1] [https://gamedaily.biz/article/507/improbable-
disputes-unitys...](https://gamedaily.biz/article/507/improbable-disputes-
unitys-terms-of-service-violation-claims-in-latest-chapter-of-public-feud)

~~~
ValleyOfTheMtns
As a hobbyist game developer I can attest to the quality and ease of use of
Godot compared to Unity and Unreal (note: I've only dabbled with making 2D
games). It "clicked" much quicker for me and I can quickly prototype ideas
(most of which are terrible, but that's not the engine's fault).

~~~
jayshua
I've built a fairly large MMO unity project. The worst part of the process was
the editor. Godot is a _much_ more plesant experience.

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reificator
I was just starting to be hopeful after their decision to hire Mike Acton and
put him in charge of a more data-driven alternative to their existing
architecture.

Now I'm worried that this will start driving them toward short-term gains more
than anything.

I'm predicting that if they go public, they'll ape Epic's storefront model
within 3-5 years.

~~~
Mirioron
The data-driven architecture seems amazing. They've shown us some great
results. I echo your worries that this IPO will probably lock them into short
term goals.

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stuart78
I understand the reservation about an IPO changing their motivations, but it
seems like a pretty predictable path for a company that has raised >$600m.

It does not seem to me obviously better (for developers or their customers)
for Unity to stay private or be acquired. Acquisition could threaten the
cross-platform appeal and perpetual private state would not deliver a return
to investors.

And I don't think there is an inherent threat to either the freemium model or
a perversion of the roadmap. There seems to be real competition between game
engines and the value the free offering provides is one of the easiest entry
points to game development. This delivers a huge number of potential
developers, which is the foundation that sustains the paying developers above
it.

Somebody there told me once that their mission was to 'have half the world's
creative content created in Unity', meaning not only video games, but films
and presumably traditional CAD markets such as architecture and product
design. If this is true, I think the real threat to developers irrespective of
IPO is one of focus. Can Unity evolve the product for their core market, or
will they become too horizontally committed and lose focus?

This is a place where the market could 'correct' a land grab strategy by
driving the company to focus on the core business.

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gmueckl
Hm, I do not really like that Unity has become such a widely used engine as a
completely closed platform. Computer games are part of our cultural heritage
by now and tying them to a closed source, utterly opaque and unmaintainable
runtime environent will probably not help with keeping them alive as artifacts
that can be experienced in the future.

I wish they were in a position to actually open up the core runtime source
code so that it can be ported and maintained independently in the future. The
tools - the commercially important part of the engine - can stay closed for
all I care. I wonder if we would see such a move with shareholders crying for
quarterly results.

~~~
BoorishBears
I honestly don’t buy that for a minute.

Unity3D is an implementation detail for games that would be closed source
anyways.

The games that are the biggest part of mainstream culture today like Fortnite,
GTA, CoD, AAA games in general are not open source.

If a creator is interested in open source they won’t use Unity, but since open
source is very far from the “default” for games there’s no difference between
a game written in Unity and a game written in some in-house engine.

Not one culture defining game interested in being open source has come out on
Unity3d because you don’t start an open source project by building on a closed
source engine...

And as an aside, Unity3D is not that opaque either, increasingly large parts
of it are being opened up and the Unity executable setup is not designed to be
particularly opaque to someone trying to access a specific game's assets.

~~~
zaksoup
I mean, Unreal Engine and CRYEngine are source-available if not open-source.
I'm not sure that it's so far-fetched to call for the open-sourcing of game
technology like engines.

~~~
j_4
Large parts of Unity (everything C#) are source-available as well.

~~~
lasagnaphil
But unlike Unreal, the source code license is reference-only (yeah it sounds
ridiculous, but you are not allowed to modify and recompile the source code.)
Someone sent a pull request to the code (a bugfix which solved a lot of GC
performance issues), only to get rejected because of the license (although it
later got patched internally in Unity)

[https://github.com/Unity-
Technologies/UnityCsReference/pull/...](https://github.com/Unity-
Technologies/UnityCsReference/pull/1)

~~~
BoorishBears
But how does that affect the above comment trying to spin this as an archival
thing? If you want to port to a new platform one day when Unity is bottom up
the fact they’re not accepting patches isn’t going to matter

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learc83
An IPO is almost always a bit worrying, but I'm feeling very optimistic about
the direction Unity is going in general.

I've just started work on a new game using their new ECS system. It's not
ready for anyone who's not either a very seasoned programmer or very patient,
but so far I like it much better than the standard MonoBehaviour workflow.

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fizixer
Funny I confused it with Unity Biotechnology, which also raised $300M recently
and is on the upswing.

Would be interesting if both go IPO around the same time and confuse the heck
out of everyone:

\- "Did you hear Unity went IPO?"

\- "Unity? the Technologies or the Biotechnology?"

