Unity to merge with app monetisation firm ironSource
Unity to merge with app monetisation firm ironSource
It's sad to see Unity laying off 200 staff and now this news. Personally I used to love the Unity engine, I even did my Masters with it.
$4.4 Billion is a good deal considering that Unity has a very large strong hold of games produced with the engine, especially in mobile and tablet sector. Also taking into consideration Unity own VFX facility Weta Digital, rigging tools specialist Ziva Dynamics and SpeedTree developer IDV and more.
I could never understand why they did not make Unity free for education years ago while UDK was free from day one. Now a days there’s all these different payment options but it’s too late for many institutions as many now have staff members trained in Unreal and the visiting lecturers who are normally professional alumni are also trained in Unreal.
Software companies like Pixologic have got to understand students are not rolling in cash even if it’s just a 50% discount or a monthly bill of $9.99 it's still too much. While there is nothing quite like ZBrush, Blender is getting there and I wish Autodesk would let Mudbox go opensource, it was such an amazing piece of software back in the day, all it needed was some better brushes and a proper PBR work flow and it would have dominated, still could but Autodesk don’t seem to want to do anything with it, I think this year there was very little updates at all? All it needed was to hire someone like Wayne Robson or at least buy his Mudbox Brushes.
Universities are training future licence users in their software for free so please be more like companies like SideFX: Houdini who not only make the software free but will give it to the student and the company that hire them for free for 6 months after they graduate. Universities will always move towards the best offer on the table unless there is a huge difference in the what the software can do like ZBrush for example and or the industry demand.
Okay rant over.
Good luck Unity, I hope your fortunes change but at -18% on the stockmarket I guess something needed to change.
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I agree, really sad to see staff laid off at Unity. I hope everyone who has been effected bounces back asap.
I wonder if Unity in the future will be more like a traditional SaaS (software as a service) company like current Adobe or Autodesk.
I imagine most of these acquisitions will be services/subscription of some sort?
Granted, consolidations in game-dev tools/software makes me a bit sad (reduces competition). Every conglomerate seems to be busy with acquisitions in order to fortify/protect their "moats"/ecosystems/SaaS-model.
Thing is back when I was in game dev school, we had access to the programs we needed through out school which provided the licenses on machines at the labs.
So most students used to work on their portfolios at the school and had access even after graduation.
For their personal time, every student I knew pirated the programs and used those programs to make their portfolios.
Once they got work at studios they used licensed software provided that studio wasn't pirating it too.
There's a whole lot of piracy out there on the high seas so regardless of how much they monetise these products, students will always pirate what they need and get away with it if their smart about it.
Unity lays off a bunch of staff, meanwhile the CEO (John Riccitiello) gets a pay bump of 160% to $22 million.
I also heard the laid off staff were working on a internally developed game to better battle test/demo the engine.
They've done plenty of demos over the years that seemed to showcase mostly graphics but you'd think there's no need to develop full games considering this engine is one of the most common ones being used out there to make games.
You'd think that, but every project I've worked on has hit some bizarre decision by unity that just proves that they never actually used the feature or workflow outside of a test environment or small sample. Unity is now and has almost always been propped up by its community for sourcing solutions to problems and creating core extensions & features far more then their own capacity to do so internally.
The project that got canned was actually using some asset store purchases to achieve the look because the engine didn't have what they needed, which says a lot. No way they're going to find out those kinds of gaps an R&D bubble.