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Unity Software with a 'company reset' walks away from film VFX and the Wētā Deal

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Re: Unity Software with a 'company reset' walks away from film VFX and the Wētā Deal

#31

Post by drtgh »

Jare wrote: post #6
kakali wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also acquired 250 people who they are now laying off and Weta is rehiring. Seems like a disaster of a deal by Unity. Weta just got free money for a snapshot of their code.

Unity apparently had no clue what to do with the toolset when they had the team that built it, you can imagine what they will do with it now without the team. Weta sure isn't re-buying it because they already have it. It's been literally a 1.6B gift to Peter Jackson?

I'm not familiarized with those game engines, but the first search showed me that "Unity is more commonly used to develop mobile or 2D games while Unreal is used to create video games on consoles or next-generation PCs."

I have no idea, my own speculation as curiosity, but maybe Unity was looking for coding for realistic rendering, know-how, for rise a competence with the Unreal market space?

But if it were the case, why let to fly away the team? Maybe was this part of the deal with Weta? to sell an snapshot as the parent comment says, with the pack of programmers for to train Unity's team temporally?

I don't know. The numbers are very high, if I were in charge I wouldn't invest that quantity of money without sending firstly a pair of emissaries for to read code and verify the toolset will be useful for the pipeline.

PS: The shareholders owe me a few beers for sowing the seeds of doubt.

Re: Unity Software with a 'company reset' walks away from film VFX and the Wētā Deal

#32

Post by avisser »

sfjailbird wrote: post #18

If you look at a company's shares as their real product, then a lot of these kinds of maneuvers start to make sense. I learned this from HBO's Silicon Valley, btw...

It should include getting rid of the executives who thought this was a good idea in the first place then. Otherwise it seems like "I might have thought you were incompetent, but now you've proven it" moment.

Re: Unity Software with a 'company reset' walks away from film VFX and the Wētā Deal

#33

Post by thereddaikon »

qwytw wrote: post #30
delfinom wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cheap money and incompetent executives that were able to survive using that cheap money. A lot of "business type" individuals were truly kept afloat by just being to finance their dumb ideas on cheap money instead of actually being able to bring profit to the table.

The thing is that the business would have been perfectly fine without that nonsense. They have a core product which despite all its issues still have real demand it's not bloatware but something you can build a sustainable business on. Had they not massively overhired, stayed at ~1500-2000 employees, focused on the engine itself and not wasted massive amounts of money on acquisitions like this the company would likel…

That's not how publicly traded businesses are run. You are not serving the needs of the business. You are serving the needs of the shareholders. Line must go up therefore you need to constantly expand. This incentivizes stupid acquisitions bought on with stock and debt. It does not incentivize focusing on your core businesses and investing in to it.

Re: Unity Software with a 'company reset' walks away from film VFX and the Wētā Deal

#34

Post by coughupalung »

Jare wrote: post #6
kakali wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also acquired 250 people who they are now laying off and Weta is rehiring. Seems like a disaster of a deal by Unity. Weta just got free money for a snapshot of their code.

Unity apparently had no clue what to do with the toolset when they had the team that built it, you can imagine what they will do with it now without the team. Weta sure isn't re-buying it because they already have it. It's been literally a 1.6B gift to Peter Jackson?

I worked for Weta a few years before the acquisition, let me just say that I'm not surprised that Unity didn't know what to do with it. It was never a single DCC set of code, but lots of separate tools (many very old) that only sort-of worked together. I imagine they would have to throw everything out and start over to build something on the level of Maya or Houdini.

Re: Unity Software with a 'company reset' walks away from film VFX and the Wētā Deal

#35

Post by maeln »

drtgh wrote: post #31
Jare wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unity apparently had no clue what to do with the toolset when they had the team that built it, you can imagine what they will do with it now without the team. Weta sure isn't re-buying it because they already have it. It's been literally a 1.6B gift to Peter Jackson?

I'm not familiarized with those game engines, but the first search showed me that "Unity is more commonly used to develop mobile or 2D games while Unreal is used to create video games on consoles or next-generation PCs." I have no idea, my own speculation as curiosity, but maybe Unity was looking for coding for realistic rendering, know-how, for rise a competence with the Unreal market space? But if it were the case,…

> but maybe Unity was looking for coding for realistic rendering, know-how, for rise a competence with the Unreal market space?

Unity already has a 3d engine that can match Unreal (more or less, and we won't talk about the fact that there is 3 rendering pipeline, and the deprecated one is the only one who is reliable. Really, we won't talk about it). If anything, Unity use to have some of the best realtime-cg engineer under their payroll. The mobile/2D game is mostly historical, a lot of AAA quality game have been made in Unity.

VFX is a different beast. For the longest time, realtime CG and VFX/movie CG use to be really two separate field (with a lot of connection ofc, CG is CG). Unreal made wave when they started to be used in cinema (The Mandalorian I think was the first big name openly saying they were using Unreal in their pipeline). Realtime CG got so good that it can (for some specific effect) be used instead of traditional VFX pipeline, which are usually slower to iterate in. I think the exec at Unity saw Unreal "success" and wanted to get a piece of the cake before it was too late. It was not a bad idea, but Unity as been so mismanaged these past few years, it again completely failed at producing anything real, stable and usable.

Re: Unity Software with a 'company reset' walks away from film VFX and the Wētā Deal

#36

Post by subtra3t »

bmikaili wrote: post #20

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.

> Unity will die or be replaced by the end of the century

To be fair you can be say that about just about every game engine out there (yes, even the open-source ones) and be right 99% of the time.

Re: Unity Software with a 'company reset' walks away from film VFX and the Wētā Deal

#37

Post by qwytw »

thereddaikon wrote: post #33
qwytw wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is that the business would have been perfectly fine without that nonsense. They have a core product which despite all its issues still have real demand it's not bloatware but something you can build a sustainable business on. Had they not massively overhired, stayed at ~1500-2000 employees, focused on the engine itself and not wasted massive amounts of money on acquisitions like this the company would likel…

That's not how publicly traded businesses are run. You are not serving the needs of the business. You are serving the needs of the shareholders. Line must go up therefore you need to constantly expand. This incentivizes stupid acquisitions bought on with stock and debt. It does not incentivize focusing on your core businesses and investing in to it.

> That's not how publicly traded businesses are run

That's not necessarily true. There are plenty of examples of public companies which have grown in more sustainable way while prioritizing their core businesses.

> You are serving the needs of the shareholders. Line must go up therefore you need to constantly expand.

Yet the market did not reward them and the shareholders are not particularly happy. While these pressuresfor public do exist at the end the incompetences of Unity's board and upper management are to blame.

Re: Unity Software with a 'company reset' walks away from film VFX and the Wētā Deal

#38

Post by pavlov »

qwytw wrote: post #29
sfjailbird wrote: post #18

If you look at a company's shares as their real product, then a lot of these kinds of maneuvers start to make sense. I learned this from HBO's Silicon Valley, btw...

Then they even failed at that. Unity stock price peaked in late 2021 due to the general tech bubble and the whole "Metaverse" thing specifically. The Wētā deal was announced a month or two earlier and probably had no real effect. It was downhill ever since...

Insider stock lockups expire typically 6-12 months after the IPO, which in Unity's case was in September 2020.

So in fact the peak of Unity's stock was perfectly timed to allow insiders to sell their shares at those inflated prices.

I know personally someone who made closer to $10 million on Unity stock. If the IPO had been two years later, the stock would have been worth only a few million. (Or perhaps more likely not liquid at all, since Unity is the kind of company that would have no chance of an IPO in the current environment.) That's a life-changing difference.

Re: Unity Software with a 'company reset' walks away from film VFX and the Wētā Deal

#39

Post by lsaferite »

drtgh wrote: post #31
Jare wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unity apparently had no clue what to do with the toolset when they had the team that built it, you can imagine what they will do with it now without the team. Weta sure isn't re-buying it because they already have it. It's been literally a 1.6B gift to Peter Jackson?

I'm not familiarized with those game engines, but the first search showed me that "Unity is more commonly used to develop mobile or 2D games while Unreal is used to create video games on consoles or next-generation PCs." I have no idea, my own speculation as curiosity, but maybe Unity was looking for coding for realistic rendering, know-how, for rise a competence with the Unreal market space? But if it were the case,…

This has nothing to do with the conversation topic, but I'm curious where you picked up the word "lucubration"? I know there are a vast number of words I've never encountered, but this one was... interesting.

Re: Unity Software with a 'company reset' walks away from film VFX and the Wētā Deal

#40

Post by AndrewKemendo »

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

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