AppLovin offers to buy Unity Software in $17.5 bln deal • Hacker News Board

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

#21

Post by hesdeadjim » Tue, Aug 09, 2022, 3:36 PM UTC

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?

I would label it "different". Unity can target a wider swath of devices from a perf point of view, and in general is much more lightweight. It's also easier to customize and strip of components you aren't interested in.

The downside of course is that it's not a master of anything, and Unreal has great showcases to demonstrate that.

Unity isn't going away, devs aren't going to magically switch to Unreal for the above reasons. Additionally the transition is massively disruptive for a business built around Unity. You don't just magically become Unreal experts as a team by reading a few tutorials and building a couple of prototypes. Actually shipping a game cross-platform requires a huge amount of technical experience to optimize and work around issues that each brings.

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

#22

Post by hesdeadjim » Tue, Aug 09, 2022, 3:37 PM UTC

haunter wrote: post #20

moneywoes wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

Blueprints may be awesome for prototyping, but I have interviewed numerous lead and principal level engineers who worked on big Unreal games and the first thing they mention about Blueprints is that they aim to convert them to native code the moment they can.

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

#23

Post by tjoff » Tue, Aug 09, 2022, 3:42 PM UTC

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…

> I guess Zuckerberg’s idea to buy Unity at certain point doesn’t sound that bad now. Clearly he wanted it for the game engine technology and not to build another ad revenue source. Kind of ironic how things play out in the long term.

Not sure I follow that logic.

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

#24

Post by haunter » Tue, Aug 09, 2022, 3:44 PM UTC

hesdeadjim wrote: post #22

haunter wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

Blueprints may be awesome for prototyping, but I have interviewed numerous lead and principal level engineers who worked on big Unreal games and the first thing they mention about Blueprints is that they aim to convert them to native code the moment they can.

Yeah I agree. Just personally I love visual programming and wish there were more advancement on the field. And Blueprints is one of the better solutions available now.

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

#25

Post by 2600 » Tue, Aug 09, 2022, 3:48 PM UTC

hesdeadjim wrote: post #19

throwaway1777 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

Apex Legends on PC and consoles is using a modified version of Source engine, although the mobile version is using Unreal.

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

#26

Post by stryan » Tue, Aug 09, 2022, 3:52 PM UTC

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…

> The unimaginable runaway success of Fortnite took Epic from "market entrant" status to "dominant industry leader"

The Unreal engine has been around for over twenty years now and has been considered one of the top mainstream engines for over a decade. I'd hardly call that a "market entrant".

As another commenter pointed out, Unreal went freemium two years before Fortnite anyway.

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

#27

Post by atwood22 » Tue, Aug 09, 2022, 3:53 PM UTC

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.

They’re like 27% down from their IPO price two years ago. I don’t think their business has deteriorated so drastically that 17.5B would be attractive. I could be wrong though.

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

#28

Post by opyate » Tue, Aug 09, 2022, 3:54 PM UTC

haunter wrote: post #20

moneywoes wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

UE's source code is "available", but I wouldn't call it open source.

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

#29

Post by nacs » Tue, Aug 09, 2022, 3:56 PM UTC

jacknews wrote: post #16

"AppLovin" Who? It just highlights the parlous state of the current economic structure when some adware outfit is a 'peer' of one of the premier game engines.

Unity announced a month or so ago that they were going to merge with "IronSource" -- a company famous for shoveling malware that was blocked even by Microsoft's Defender software.

This AppLovin offer is almost a step up from that.

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

#30

Post by helsinkiandrew » Tue, Aug 09, 2022, 3:57 PM UTC

AppLovin Market cap is roughly ~$14B and Unity is ~$15B.

This sounds more like a merger - AppLoving is offering shares which would be worth 49% of the combined company.

Unity provides the Game Engine, AppLoving provides the ad/payment side - it could work.