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AppLovin offers to buy Unity Software in $17.5 bln deal

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Re: AppLovin offers to buy Unity Software in $17.5 bln deal

#11

Post by ramesh31 »

rhexs wrote: post #3

How did unity go from mobile game development darling to being acquired by an adware company?

>How did unity go from mobile game development darling to being acquired by an adware company?

Fortnite.

The unimaginable runaway success of Fortnite took Epic from "market entrant" status to "dominant industry leader". It allowed them to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into Unreal development, and enabled them to finally release the engine under a freemium model to indie devs. That, (combined with the iOS ad-pocalypse) has led Unity to a long slow decline in developer share ever since.

Re: AppLovin offers to buy Unity Software in $17.5 bln deal

#12

Post by seanalltogether »

whoisjuan wrote: post #10

For people wondering what happens with the ironSource deal, this bid is meant to derail it. This is AppLovin playing offense to avoid the emergence of a stronger competitor and instead become that stronger competitor. Unity is not as strong in monetization technologies but it’s a desired asset since it has already a foot in with game developers. Unfortunately building a game engine is not as profitable as building ad…

This makes more sense. I had not heard of AppLovin until this post, but it seems clear from their solutions that a majority of their revenue comes from providing ads in games, or providing ad campaigns to those wanting to promote a game they built. And with Unity merging with ironSource that could sink a lot of their revenue.

Re: AppLovin offers to buy Unity Software in $17.5 bln deal

#13

Post by moneywoes »

ramesh31 wrote: post #11
rhexs wrote: post #3

How did unity go from mobile game development darling to being acquired by an adware company?

>How did unity go from mobile game development darling to being acquired by an adware company? Fortnite. The unimaginable runaway success of Fortnite took Epic from "market entrant" status to "dominant industry leader". It allowed them to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into Unreal development, and enabled them to finally release the engine under a freemium model to indie devs. That, (combined with the iOS ad-po…

Is the Epic engine that much better?

Re: AppLovin offers to buy Unity Software in $17.5 bln deal

#15

Post by brundolf »

ramesh31 wrote: post #11
rhexs wrote: post #3

How did unity go from mobile game development darling to being acquired by an adware company?

>How did unity go from mobile game development darling to being acquired by an adware company? Fortnite. The unimaginable runaway success of Fortnite took Epic from "market entrant" status to "dominant industry leader". It allowed them to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into Unreal development, and enabled them to finally release the engine under a freemium model to indie devs. That, (combined with the iOS ad-po…

They released Unreal 4 as freemium more than two years before Fortnite became a battle royale and took off. The latter has definitely fueled continued investment in the engine, but it was Unity that forced them to adopt the pricing model.

Re: AppLovin offers to buy Unity Software in $17.5 bln deal

#17

Post by throwaway1777 »

atwood22 wrote: post #14

Unity is currently valued around 15B. 17.5B is an embarrassingly small premium, especially considering how down the tech broader tech market is. You have to think Unity will shortly be worth more than 17.5B.

That’s bull market thinking. The stock could just as easily continue sliding down.

Re: AppLovin offers to buy Unity Software in $17.5 bln deal

#18

Post by cecilpl2 »

moneywoes wrote: post #13
ramesh31 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How did unity go from mobile game development darling to being acquired by an adware company? Fortnite. The unimaginable runaway success of Fortnite took Epic from "market entrant" status to "dominant industry leader". It allowed them to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into Unreal development, and enabled them to finally release the engine under a freemium model to indie devs. That, (combined with the iOS ad-po…

Is the Epic engine that much better?

Yes, generally. It's what many AAA games use.

Re: AppLovin offers to buy Unity Software in $17.5 bln deal

#19

Post by hesdeadjim »

throwaway1777 wrote: post #17
atwood22 wrote: post #14

Unity is currently valued around 15B. 17.5B is an embarrassingly small premium, especially considering how down the tech broader tech market is. You have to think Unity will shortly be worth more than 17.5B.

That’s bull market thinking. The stock could just as easily continue sliding down.

Yea, they've spent a lot of money over the last few years on questionable acquisitions (Weta for multiple billions, seriously?).

They are making a big push into their game services division, which is more than ads now: matchmaking, lobbies, dedicated servers (Multiplay acquisition), etc. They also aren't trying to only target Unity for some of these. Multiplay in particular runs a lot of Unreal games, or at least they did (such as Apex Legends).

Unfortunately I don't see a world where these services move the needle at all for a giant behemoth of a company like Unity.

Re: AppLovin offers to buy Unity Software in $17.5 bln deal

#20

Post by haunter »

moneywoes wrote: post #13
ramesh31 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How did unity go from mobile game development darling to being acquired by an adware company? Fortnite. The unimaginable runaway success of Fortnite took Epic from "market entrant" status to "dominant industry leader". It allowed them to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into Unreal development, and enabled them to finally release the engine under a freemium model to indie devs. That, (combined with the iOS ad-po…

Is the Epic engine that much better?

imho yes. I work in the industry and it has more depth and more solid. Blueprints are awesome, it's a node based scripting editor which allows visual programming. Unity is nowhere near that https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/blueprints-visual-sc... It's completely possible to build a whole game using nothing but Blueprints.

The whole Unreal engine with the editor and such is powerful toolset and you can tell it's an engine geared toward professional game designers and artists, basically whole studios, rather than programmers. Unity is really fun to play with if you are a single indie dev. Also it's much better for mobile development. You can do all with Unreal engine too but it's "meant to be" for FPS/TPS games and anything other than that is not harder just you need to "fight" the engine sometimes.

And the Unreal engine is open source. Well it's like open access because there are some very strict rules and limitations around it. But at least it's good for personal use https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/ue-on-github

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