111–120 of 122 posts
What a joke I was there when the acquisition happened and it was both “yay” and “what?” There was so little communication with the overall staff - even at the M9 level - and the management seemed to be doing their own thing. My prediction: Unity is going to be BedBath&Beyonded
You heard it here, folks, Unity is the next meme stock.
So one interesting thing to note here, is that it appears that it was a licensing deal. Weta proper still appears to have access to thier tooling, and is isolated from unity pulling out. The Foundry, who are a VFX based version of Adobe/Autodesk have a similar style of working, but not at such a massivly inflated scale. They negotiate license agreements to take over tools from VFX companies and extend them for sale t…
The point of production pipelines being bespoke (at least past a certain company size) is a relevant one. The main workhorses of large scale production (Maya, Houdini, Nuke, etc.) are extremely customizable and extensible. Over years (decades in the case of Weta) companies develop highly complex workflows and associated tools based on these applications.
That is why the Unity deal never really made sense to me. The idea that Weta's tools could somehow be packaged up and delivered as essentially shrink-wrapped consumer-level add-ons to Unity was a naive one at best. I'm not entirely surprised to see it fall apart.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the management continues to under perform, they will be acquired. The FTC investigation showed Zuckerberg was thinking about it. He probably couldn't for Sherman act reasons. But think about it: they have a good business that has better strategic value for a platform holder. Amazon spent a fortune trying to emulate their business to advantage AWS. That was an incredibly poorly managed endeavor. If they had bought…
I think Microsoft would love to own Unity. Many of their game studios use it, it's C# (with a promised migration from Unity's ancient hacked Mono to modern .NET), they don't have their own public game engine. It would probably be the best outcome for everyone.
How John Riccitiello kept the top job for so long is a mystery. This acquisition never made sense.
It makes a lot of sense to me, they just didn't execute. There is a huge blending of VFX technology and video games and always has been. Old person story: I remember interviewing an artist at Pandemic Studios (an old video game company in Los Angeles) and the artist's reel just had a shot from "Titanic" which was new then. "That's just a shot of a man walking across the deck of a ship, what did you do." "I animated t…
2 years later and that never happened. I would guess that's because it's quite difficult to jam a software platform into another software platform.
Unity has a long history:
> 1) acquire some software/tech
> 2) attempt to integrate (force) it into Unity
> 3) fail
> 4) scrap the integration
Based on what I've heard about how Unity operated under John R, this was likely a scenario where the head honchos recognized a business synergy and didn't consult the engineers on how feasible integration would be.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bed_Bath_%26_Beyond
The things you miss... I wasn't even aware they'd disappeared. That history is some reading! When your CFO tragically jumps off a balcony, the company might not be doing well. Why do so many big box stores seem to follow the huge growth -> saturation -> quick implosion and bankruptcy script? Surely their margins don't materially change? Low per store sales from bad stores? But the first step seems to be closing store…
Recently--mostly private equity.
Any company with >$50 million in real cashflow is a target for private equity to come in, load it up with debt and extract the cash.
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That’s where open source gets tricky. Most platforms like iPhone or PlayStation are closed ecosystems and require you to make legal contracts with them to develop and release on them
Godot can export to iOS/Android just fine, the consoles are an issue because their SDKs are behind an NDA. I wonder why they still do that, seems like it only hamstrings developers.
Two reasons:
1. It exposes you to patent trolls, which is fine if you have no money so they won't come after you or have too much money to bleed them dry in courts.
2. If you license third party IP (which had been the case for every console after, perhaps, Atari 2600) you are also bound by the agreement with the third party, which has its own reasons, generally related to the reason #1.
What a joke I was there when the acquisition happened and it was both “yay” and “what?” There was so little communication with the overall staff - even at the M9 level - and the management seemed to be doing their own thing. My prediction: Unity is going to be BedBath&Beyonded
If the management continues to under perform, they will be acquired. The FTC investigation showed Zuckerberg was thinking about it. He probably couldn't for Sherman act reasons. But think about it: they have a good business that has better strategic value for a platform holder. Amazon spent a fortune trying to emulate their business to advantage AWS. That was an incredibly poorly managed endeavor. If they had bought…
Amazon Lumberyard always seemed like a strange idea. Yes, AWS, Twitch, and other integrations might be cool, but those should all have public APIs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the management continues to under perform, they will be acquired. The FTC investigation showed Zuckerberg was thinking about it. He probably couldn't for Sherman act reasons. But think about it: they have a good business that has better strategic value for a platform holder. Amazon spent a fortune trying to emulate their business to advantage AWS. That was an incredibly poorly managed endeavor. If they had bought…
I think Microsoft would love to own Unity. Many of their game studios use it, it's C# (with a promised migration from Unity's ancient hacked Mono to modern .NET), they don't have their own public game engine. It would probably be the best outcome for everyone.
Given the controversy over the Activision acquisition, acquiring one of the major engine platforms, having a major game studio, and already owning the XBox platform might make for great end to end strategic alignment / platform control - but I think it would also be a big regulatory/political fight to get done.
Unity will die or be replaced by the end of the century. Once people swarm on AR/VR apps and realize how annoying it is to develop things using Unity Editor, at least compared to the luxury of web dev, some alternative will have to pick up from there.