"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.
That's interesting, I hadn't seen this version of "perilous" before but I like it.
AppLovin offers to buy Unity Software in $17.5 bln deal
41–50 of 86 posts
Re: AppLovin offers to buy Unity Software in $17.5 bln deal
#42Earlier 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.
Most of game dev is prototyping though. This isn't too big of a problem. Converting well written bp to c++ is pretty easy.
Re: AppLovin offers to buy Unity Software in $17.5 bln deal
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would 1000% live in a world where Facebook bought Unity. Ignoring how shitty they are otherwise, they could let Unity be Unity and remove the distraction of monetization from a game engine company. Alas, Unity leadership (CEO) had delusions of world domination and here is where they find themselves. I’m sure Facebook even made a prelim offer behind the scenes and Unity scoffed because they thought they would be a $…
> they could let Unity be Unity Some Oculus users would disagree with you.
As much as gamers critique Meta's handling of Oculus, Oculus would be dead/gone by now if not for the acquisition. Meta has been dumping fuel/cash on Oculus to keep VR alive and the VR experience has mostly improved over the years.
Re: AppLovin offers to buy Unity Software in $17.5 bln deal
#44Unity 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.
Huh, how would the market being down enable Unity to command a higher premium?
Re: AppLovin offers to buy Unity Software in $17.5 bln deal
#45How did unity go from mobile game development darling to being acquired by an adware company?
Not being all that profitable. Maybe their business model was too nice.
Re: AppLovin offers to buy Unity Software in $17.5 bln deal
#46Earlier 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?
There's pros and cons. But the direction of unreal seems extremely positive and the direction of unity seems very negative. Unreal's providing significant updates with a pretty clear roadmap and lots of content being made available to indie devs for free.
Unity is arguably getting worse and seems to lack a cohesive strategy. Last I checked, which was a few years ago, the engine doesn't have functioning networking feature (online multiplayer). They used to, but they deprecated it before failing to launch their new one. There's other stories in a similar vein.
You can of course make it work with third party plugins but it's not a good sign of engineering quality.
Re: AppLovin offers to buy Unity Software in $17.5 bln deal
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unity shareholders would get 49% of the combined company, if they don't screw up the merger a game tech + ad tech combination might be worth than either alone
> if they don't screw up the merger This is a really crap deal for shareholders. They'll go from owning a $15bn company, to owning half of a ~$30bn company, but with all the risk of the merger failing or failing to live up to promises, which, surprise surprise, is the norm.
Or going up in value plus they can cashout at any point.
Re: AppLovin offers to buy Unity Software in $17.5 bln deal
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is basically the same as their previously announced deal with IronSource, a malware/adware company. Both are terrible for consumers/developers.
> Both are terrible for consumers/developers. Unfortunately they don't get to vote on it.
But they do:
1. Consumers vote with every dollar they spend (or add they click).
2. Developers vote with both with every dollar they spend on software, and every monetization strategy they select to earn dollars from customers.
There's a ton of industry structures I don't like. (I won't list various companies I don't like, b/c that would distract from my core point that they do have healthy economics from customers who do like their products.) Existing market structures are usually the result of some form of consistent action on the part of market participants.
So what would a better industry structure be, for customers, that would consistently make money for developers?
Re: AppLovin offers to buy Unity Software in $17.5 bln deal
#49"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.
They are one of the most prevalent players in the space. Dismissing them kinda shows a lack of knowledge in the app/ad nexus, which is pretty relevant. Involved in promoting, publishing and monetizing games.
I am not sure how the continuation of micro monetization in mobile apps shows a large economic peril for the industry. Gamers have been voting with their wallets for stuff like this since 2011.
Re: AppLovin offers to buy Unity Software in $17.5 bln deal
#50I can only imagine this will hurt the engine more and more.
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