Despite bringing in over $1.8 billion in revenue in the 12 months ending in June 2023, Unity was nearly a billion dollars away from profitability during that same period, thanks in large part to a wave of expensive acquisitions.
🥴 brilliant decision makers at unity
It’s by design, you don’t need to pay taxes if you don’t generate profit, you can just shovel more value into the company with investments and acquisitions that then hopefully generate you even more money in the future.
And at the same time you can point at that loss and use it as an excellent scapegoat for doing shitty things.
Weta was an especially weird and expensive acquisition, since they’re not even in the same field.
Weta is researching and building (amongst other things) graphics processing technologies.
Being able to take cutting edge technologies from the film industry, optimising them and selling them as “click and go” solutions in Unity would be a huge win.
StageCraft is the only thing where there is even a small overlap between game tech and the film industry, and that one is using Unreal Engine. Other than that, the special effects used in movies render at minutes per frame, not frames per second as in games. There’s no technology suitable for Unity in that.
Wait, they acquired Weta? I thought it was just cooperation or something like that
The talk was that Unreal was starting to get used in the entertainment industry for real-time set effects and they had no way to compete in that space.
In the article quoted by Ars (https://mobilegamer.biz/fuck-you-were-not-paying-inside-unitys-runtime-fee-fiasco/)
“I truly don’t think it was done maliciously,” our Unity insider said. “Ultimately Unity has lost a lot of money over the last 18 years – billions of dollars – and they need to do something to make more money. Sadly, it wasn’t delivered well, but the need to make more money is still there.”
Using anti-competitive tatic to try to eliminate a competitor is literally malicious.
I left Unity behind they they merged with Ironsource. I said it then, that they would become an ad focused company and engine development would be put in the back burner. I’ve watched that statement become the truth.
I left because even before that, they kept over promising features and then depreciating things and leaving users with broken systems that you either had to wrap up in boilerplate code yourself, or pay for an expensive plugin to make work right. When they MERGED (the article says it was an acquisition, but in reality it was a merge. Subtle seeming difference, but an important distinction for me), I saw the writing on the wall that this trend was only going to get worse. And it has.
I don’t find Unity’s excuses surprising, interesting, or newsworthy.
I mean they had the former CEO of EA at the helm. It was only natural
I was just amazed that it took him so long to roll out a predatory monetization model…
I don’t play AAA games (except BG3 if that has 3 A’s), but my wife plays The Sims, and between some cheap DLCs and mods, it seems like it’s almost free for tons of content?
