
Unity, now valued at $6B, raising up to $525M - doppp
https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/25/unity-now-valued-at-6b-raising-up-to-525m/
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appstorelottery
I've been developing in Unity since V1.0. Back then you could ring David
Helgason and complain about the water shader not working when you run it for
12 hours straight - and get it fixed.

It blows my mind how much they've grown - but not just that - the tool itself
is capable of AAA these days. The only real competition at that level is
probably Unreal - and that's so very different to get into if you're an old-
school unity developer. When you compare the Asset store (where you can
practically buy any solution to your common problem) and compare it with
Unreal's store - it doesn't really compete.

These two points make me think Unity has such a moat built around developers
mindspaces that it's probably super-hard to dethrone at this point.

I'm interested if anyone else has an alternative point of view on unities
sustainable competitive advantage.

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Keyframe
I'm gonna offer you another angle. Custom engine. You CAN almost always beat
these general solutions if you specialize with your engine. Question is,
should you? Would that specialization offer an advantage vs developing
something with a general solution like that?

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georgemcbay
The biggest problem with custom engines is really the tools -- it isn't that
hard (relatively) to build a modern feature-rich 3D gaming engine.

OTOH, it is very difficult to build a full tool pipeline that supports that
engine.

Most of the value of Unreal or Unity is that the tools are already there and
they more or less Just Work and a lot of people know how to use them.

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Keyframe
Is the format of those tools open? One could, in theory, use their tools, but
with custom engine.

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gridspy
Just go and use Godot if you want an open / custom engine and good tools.
[https://godotengine.org/](https://godotengine.org/)

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fartcannon
Godot is a fantastic engine. And it's fully open source so if you want to have
a hack at it, you definitely can.

And the guys who dev it are cool as.

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lyttlerock
The key word here seems to be "up to". It'll be interesting to see how many
employees (common shareholders) are actually willing to sell their shares to
the investors.

If they're holding on and the full $525M isn't raised, then almost
paradoxically, I'd wager that Unity is doing really really well. If they're
selling, I don't think it necessarily can be construed as good or bad without
proper context.

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dmix
> If they're selling, I don't think it necessarily can be construed as good or
> bad without proper context.

This is assuming the employees and stock holders are rational and can maintain
long-term risky assets. Plenty of people will be looking to cash out as
they've held stock for a long period and want to buy a nice house or car or
something.

I'm sure the wealthier percentage will take a longer term look at it. But I
wouldn't generalize the average equity owning employee as you would a typical
public market.

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mtremsal
Selling shares during a tender offer is a perfectly rational move for
employees that are cash-poor and faced with the tax implications of exercising
their options. Also obviously for anyone looking to simply de-risk.

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dmix
Fair enough, it’s all about how much time and money you have. Rational was a
poor choice of words.

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trykondev
I've been using Unity for more than half a decade at this point. Some of their
choices along the way have been really frustrating to deal with, but on the
whole, they've empowered me and plenty of colleagues to create things we might
not have been able to otherwise. (Or at least, certainly not as easily).

I know it's popular to hate on Unity for some of the bad games produced using
the engine, but I don't really think that's fair -- to me, that's a failure of
the storefronts that host subpar games. Creating a tool that makes it easier
for people to make games is awesome.

Unity has given me a lot, and I root for the company's success.

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baud147258
That reminds me of a discussion around a good (in my opinion) game called
Mechanicus that had some poor performance. Unity got the blame for this, but
as Subnautica (and plenty other games) has shown, good-looking and performant
games can be developed using Unity, it's more an issue of available ressources
(Mechanicus had like 1 full-time dev vs +- 6 for Subnautica) and skill. And
without Unity, I don't think the Mechanicus team could have developed their
game or it wouldn't have been as good.

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Stevvo
I wouldn't call Subnautica good looking; it has the worst LOD implementation
I've seen in a game for 20 years, and performance was quite unremarkable.

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dawhizkid
Amazing when what otherwise sound like dysfunctional/toxic orgs do well. No
mention of the sex scandal at the top. Checking Glassdoor as well and seems
like a lot of unhappiness in general.

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rolltiide
Its more amazing that people desperately try to link behavior to finances.

Its from a teaching style done in Christian sects within the United States
(and maybe just protestants in general?) where prosperity is linked to
behavioral compliance. So you see this unquantifiable anomaly throughout
society as the meme brushes off on more people.

Someone doesn't “deserve” x,y,z because of a,b,c. When the reality is that
their network has other considerations, and one key aspect of global issuances
is that local reputation is less of a factor.

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throwaway2048
Its not much of a stretch to suggest that a company that screws over people in
scummy ways has a higher chance of screwing over investors in scummy ways, or
just engaging in self destructive business harming behavior in general.

Not sure why you think its some kind of deep rooted christian morality thing.

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_delirium
That doesn't seem to me to follow directly. History is full of successful
people who treat the wealthy/powerful well, but treat people who aren't
wealthy/powerful less well, and come out ahead by doing so. It really is only
in Christian morality, imo (or other similar religions' morality), that this
kind of thing somehow inherently doesn't work.

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throwaway2048
Its also full of people and organizations who spiral out of control with bad
behavior that then sink the entire ship.

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dptd
Okay, so most of us are aware of Unity vs Unreal battle. Are there any other
engines which are being used or worth checking them out?

I heard a lot of good things about Godot Engine:
[https://godotengine.org/](https://godotengine.org/)

Someone also mentioned here Grid Engine (which I never heard of):
[https://www.planimeter.org/grid-sdk/](https://www.planimeter.org/grid-sdk/)

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rubinelli
Unity could potentially get squeezed between Godot in the low-end and Unreal
in the high-end. I've played around with Godot, and for small, performance-
insensitive games, like a Candy Crush clone or indie puzzle platformer, it is
a nice, license-unencumbered option.

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echelon
Beginner question!

I want to use a game engine in my video editing pipeline. I want real time
video acquisition, real time shading, real time camera manipulation, depth /
fov tools, object and scene management, etc. I want to extend it to do all
sorts of things, but basically the gist is to mix video editing and game
engine, and put actors into complex virtual scenes in real time.

Which engine should I use? Which one supports more video things out of the
box?

Ideally it works on Linux, but that isn't a hard requirement.

Also, if you can answer my questions on Skype/Hangouts (or in person in
Atlanta), I'd be happy to pay $$$/hr. I want to get a broad overview of the
space.

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WrtCdEvrydy
It depends.

If you're fully on a professional pipeline (all professional tooling for 3d
work), Cryengine can deliver breathtaking stuff. If you're a little more open
source geared, Epic is a little better than Unity. Unity behaves like a
framework where you buy the rest of the features from the Unity Store.

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juskrey
So now it becomes another overfed sacrificial VC lamb. Bye bye Unity I guess.

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pjmlp
Unity was founded in Denmark.

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juskrey
Yep, let's leave that warmness in our hearts once we see all the new fancy
subscription models after investor money will be in.

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pjmlp
I happen to support commercial software, and belive in paying other developers
for the tools that help me to get my own money, so.

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juskrey
Now you'll be paying new VC customer harassment department instead of
developers.

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ausbah
Why does a private company trying to go public need to raise money from
investors?

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bin0
A large part of this is allowing their employees to cash out. When a company
goes public, there is often a clause that prevents sales for a certain number
of months, and who knows what the share price will do by then. This is
actually a really good thing for Unity to do, trying to make the "stock
compensation" perk into a meaningful cash-out. It also means employees don't
have to deal with holding shares in a public company if they don't want to, as
that's hassle.

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soup10
Unity is great at efficiently producing shovelware.

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jameslevy
Swift, Flutter, React, pretty much any development framework is also great at
efficiently producing shovelware. That is to say, a platform for efficiently
making things is going to be used to produce a lot of crap, as a rule.

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arvinsim
Curious as to why you mention mobile targeted frameworks as examples here.

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slivanes
Take a look at App Store and Play store - lots of shovelware in both.
Frameworks in a meaningful way enable this because they expand the developer
base.

