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Unity to acquire Parsec for $320M

investors.unity.com

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Re: Unity to acquire Parsec for $320M

#31

Post by worldsayshi »

m12k wrote: post #22
binarynate wrote: post #19

In addition to using Parsec's tech for cloud-based gaming, I also foresee Unity using it to stream shared applications into multi-user mixed reality apps (for example, multiple users in AR or VR sharing a Windows desktop).

Isn't VR extremely latency sensitive? I remember reading Carmack's blog posts about needing to reduce input and screen lag even on local machines to make it bearable. It just seems to me like the least likely place for streaming to actually work.

Yes but since VR seems to move towards standalone headsets there might be more potential in doing the heavy lifting off the device and deliver it half baked? Then the device can do the latency sensitive work?

With the quest I can stream from PC over wi-fi today. But yeah, doing it over the internet seems far fetched.

Re: Unity to acquire Parsec for $320M

#32

Post by simcop2387 »

m12k wrote: post #22
binarynate wrote: post #19

In addition to using Parsec's tech for cloud-based gaming, I also foresee Unity using it to stream shared applications into multi-user mixed reality apps (for example, multiple users in AR or VR sharing a Windows desktop).

Isn't VR extremely latency sensitive? I remember reading Carmack's blog posts about needing to reduce input and screen lag even on local machines to make it bearable. It just seems to me like the least likely place for streaming to actually work.

Only mostly so. It's latency sensitive in that your eye and head movements need very fast responses to avoid nausea in lots of people and produce a good experience. It's not latency sensitive in that a video stream needs to react to you at 90-120hz kinds of speeds. As long as the position and rotation of the video reacts and moves with the rest of the environment, the application itself won't need to respond any quicker than it already does outside vr.

Now I think you're thinking of running the vr application that's doing all the rendering remotely and strraming thst to the headset, it would definitely run into issues because of the latency.

Re: Unity to acquire Parsec for $320M

#34

Post by bradrn »

charlietran wrote: post #4

(disclosure: I work on the backend at Parsec) For those who don't know either company: Unity is a popular 2D/3D commercial game engine, and Parsec is a low-latency remote desktop tool that initially focused on gaming, but pivoted to an enterprise product for remote creative teams during the pandemic.

Thank you! When I read the title I only knew about https://hackage.haskell.org/package/parsec, and for a moment I was very confused…

Re: Unity to acquire Parsec for $320M

#35

Post by bogwog »

m12k wrote: post #2

Is there any way you ever make $320m back by selling a better performance version of teamviewer/remote desktop? Or is there some other play here - e.g. a Stadia/GeForce Now competitor?

Seems like Parsec is being sold to game developers as a remote work/collaboration tool. That's on obvious fit for Unity, which already sells commercial collaboration products/services (https://unity.com/products/unity-teams).

Idk if they'll get into game streaming, but for their existing business it makes a lot of sense already.

Re: Unity to acquire Parsec for $320M

#36

Post by dogma1138 »

dhruvrrp wrote: post #3

Interesting, I was expecting parsec to close shop after they stopped offering their paid hosting for gaming and refunded people's balance. Looks like they just pivoted towards business users instead. Anyway, congrats to the team!

Yeah that was most likely a pandemic pivot.

They got quite a few business clients that needed high fidelity and low latency Remote Desktop client including ironically enough many game dev studios that needed a better solution than to ship heavy and expensive dev workstation to their employees homes, they also got quite a few proviz users onboard that also needed to be able to leverage their existing hardware remotely.

I’m guessing that Unity can offer now a remote development workstation solution for game development and visualization.

Re: Unity to acquire Parsec for $320M

#37

Post by ntauthority »

Slightly offtopic, but is there any open source/fair-code equivalent of Parsec that doesn't fail blatantly on non-standard aspect ratios such as 32:9 or have lots of other failure modes that they seemed entirely uninterested in fixing (marked as known issues for years, and no public source code available so I can't diagnose or fix them myself)?

I looked and there didn't seem to be much at all that didn't rely on just one vendor's as-buggy encoding stack - such as NVIDIA Experience software instead of just their drivers, and it's sad to see the closest tech to this this be part of some acquisition instead now by a company that seems uninterested in open sourcing anything even if it doesn't endanger any of their commercial market (e.g. Unity and their Burst LLVM compiler thing)... I don't even need all the matchmaking and team sharing stuff, I just want NVENC/etc.-based desktop streaming that doesn't bomb itself over the slightest system anomaly.

Re: Unity to acquire Parsec for $320M

#38

Post by DiabloD3 »

ntauthority wrote: post #37

Slightly offtopic, but is there any open source/fair-code equivalent of Parsec that doesn't fail blatantly on non-standard aspect ratios such as 32:9 or have lots of other failure modes that they seemed entirely uninterested in fixing (marked as known issues for years, and no public source code available so I can't diagnose or fix them myself)? I looked and there didn't seem to be much at all that didn't rely on just…

I use Nvidia's ShieldTV server in the Experience package with Moonlight as the client, but yes, the Nvidia closed source backend does fault on some things (such as only shows primary monitor in multimonitor setups), but the stream quality is much higher and latency lower than using Steam to stream my desktop.

However, there is an alternative to Nvidia's closed source backend, called Sunshine (argh, the pun): https://github.com/loki-47-6F-64/sunshine

I haven't tried it yet, as I do run Windows /w Nvidia GPU on my desktop, but it apparently uses nvenc correctly (I'm on a Turing, Turing and Ampere have that fancy low latency mode for their encoder; something Steam still doesn't engage for in home streaming, yet uses the nvenc API directly), but also can support multimonitor (has a shortcut key to cycle through monitors).

Re: Unity to acquire Parsec for $320M

#39

Post by wyldfire »

charlietran wrote: post #4

(disclosure: I work on the backend at Parsec) For those who don't know either company: Unity is a popular 2D/3D commercial game engine, and Parsec is a low-latency remote desktop tool that initially focused on gaming, but pivoted to an enterprise product for remote creative teams during the pandemic.

I can't quite tell from the webpage. "Parsec for Teams": is that an AR-meeting-room-with-avatars kinda thing? Or is there some kind of photogrammetry?

Oh -- I see, it's for creative teams to share their design work? sketches, models, etc?

Re: Unity to acquire Parsec for $320M

#40

Post by jay_kyburz »

ummonk wrote: post #6

What's the goal here? Cloud hosted version of Unity? Support for cloud-hosted gaming?

It much easier to manage Unity licenses when we can't actually install it on our machines :)

Unity has this high level plan to be in the business of hosting things, assets in source control, cloud builds, metrics. I'm sure they will have workstations you can rent, same as MS is doing.

I wouldn't be surprised to see a service where developers can provide streaming test builds to end users. (Much safer than sending end users builds in a world where DRM is mostly useless)

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