Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Unity Software Inc S-1

sec.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 294 posts

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#31

Post by binky »

VonGuard wrote: post #6

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…

Excellent point with regard to dev tools not being a successful LT investment, with Oracle being an exception. I find Atalassia being sellers of dev "app", a standalone final product rather than a component in an overall solution that is effectively tax on every copy.

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#32

Post by nv-vn »

speps wrote: post #29
MrLeap wrote: post #19

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 i…

> 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. They had money before, it's not like they were running at a loss. The source control situation affects other engines (e.g UE4) just as much.

> it's not like they were running at a loss

Well looking at their income statement, they were actually running at a loss haha

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#33

Post by 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...

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

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#34

Post by ingenieros »

flexie wrote: post #5

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 :-)

Are they even still Danish though? They moved their HQ to San Francisco years ago and the filing clearly shows they are incorporated in Delaware.

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#35

Post by akersten »

1f60c wrote: post #30
akersten wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 unapp…

I think GP meant that a lot of patterns that are common in game dev could also be applied to other kinds of software.

It doesn't read that way to me, since it ends with "can't wait to buy shares" and is sandwiched between other examples of how Unity brings them joy - implying Unity is the platform on which all of these things will be built. I guess OP can clarify if they desire, and my comment still stands regarding Unity's UI toolkit.

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#36

Post by formalsystem »

akersten wrote: post #26
formalsystem wrote: post #22

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 bogg…

> 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 unapp…

This is an example of someone who has built a robotic simulator in Unity https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvZgbB71yb8&feature=youtu.be

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#38

Post by volkk »

johnfn wrote: post #33

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 ex…

Alternatively, I found Unity super intuitive and straightforward when learning game dev. I was doing some random 2D platformer tutorials on udemy, along with a bunch of others and I always thought it was almost..easy to build that kind of game. I'm sure 3D is a different beast.

Full time I'm an SWE, and I realized the way you structure your code depends on you. Disclaimer: I didn't get VERY far and didn't make huge games so maybe things become extremely painful later on. But for learning, it's a really great tool

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#39

Post by nv-vn »

vmception wrote: post #23

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

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.

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#40

Post by OneGuy123 »

johnfn wrote: post #33

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 ex…

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.

Post reply on HN