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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

#41

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#42

Post by steezeburger »

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.

Luxury of web dev?! I'm not sure I agree it's luxurious.

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

#44

Post by debacle »

I have been revisiting Godot this past week after feeling that I didn't give it a fair shake a few months ago.

I don't know that Unity has a future. Unity is still better than Godot, and in some ways by a wide margin, but Godot is gaining ground fast, the learning/tooling ecosystem has exploded in the last several months, and for most "indie" projects, which Unity's pricing change was targeting, Godot is the better choice. It might be the best open source tool I've ever worked with.

Unity is going to either need to position itself at the top of the productivity curve between Unreal's raw power and Godot's "Blenderyness," or it's going to have to become a more mature ecosystem that caters to bigger games (which might be harder after the brand damage). Godot is going to become better, faster in the next 18-24 months.

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

#45

Post by shadowgovt »

debacle wrote: post #44

I have been revisiting Godot this past week after feeling that I didn't give it a fair shake a few months ago. I don't know that Unity has a future. Unity is still better than Godot, and in some ways by a wide margin, but Godot is gaining ground fast, the learning/tooling ecosystem has exploded in the last several months, and for most "indie" projects, which Unity's pricing change was targeting, Godot is the better c…

How is Godot on cross-platform targeting these days? To me, the most attractive aspect of Unity's offering was the opportunity to port the same game core and assets to multiple targets with relatively little retooling.

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

#46

Post by KaiserPro »

coughupalung wrote: post #34
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 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.

I worked in the industry and fairly closely with a number of notable Weta Engineers.

I still don't know why you'd spend 1.6billion on a VFX pipeline. I mean sure it gives you cachet, but a lot of the pipeline is mostly asset management rather than the few bits of special sauce that provide artist tooling.

but 1.6 billion is a ridiculous amount of money for a company's turnover of ~110million[1], with pretty thin profit margins, compared to a software company.

Maybe I'm wrong about weta, they did make mari after all, which is pretty special, however the foundry didn't pay anywhere near that much for mari, for what appears to be a similar licensing deal.

[1]https://rocketreach.co/weta-digital-profile_b5c60ffef42e0c50

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

#47

Post by shadowgovt »

coughupalung wrote: post #34
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 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.

It's always fascinating to me to watch companies do an acquisition of a technical stack that has no pedigree aligned with their own technical stack.

Software has shape, and if you're acquiring a stack that's wildly different from your own, there's no guarantee that integration will be particularly feasible. You may not even be acquiring the talent that would know where to start with such an integration because you never know what key pieces of the system were built ages ago by somebody who left long before acquisition was even discussed.

I've watched this happen with systems as closely aligned as two Python / JavaScript tech stacks that differed in frameworks, libraries, and wire protocol. It took something like 2 and 1/2 years past executive projections to integrate the offerings.

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

#48

Post by DarkNova6 »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #40

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

I don't know about "BedBath&Beyond". Would you mind to elaborate for those of us who don't know? :-)

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

#49

Post by KaiserPro »

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 to others. (nuke, is from Digital Domain, Mari from Weta, Katana & Flix from sony) However they never spaffed 1.6billion for a complete pipeline.

Partly because they could never raise that much cash, the market isn't anywhere big enough to support that, but also VFX pipelines are incredibly bespoke and mostly ephemeral. I'm willing to bet that most of the stuff Unity bought was glue code for getting assets in and out of off the shelf software. The rest is managing billions of versions of individual files. (Weta people, please jump in and correct me)

Sure there are special bits of rnd that allow procedural generation, or better marker->3d model tracking, but not 1.6 billion and 250 people. The "tooling" team of weta original was never more than 60 people from what I understand.

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

#50

Post by shadowgovt »

maeln wrote: post #35
drtgh wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 enginee…

A major difference that is no longer a difference is that VFX used to be about creating visual imagery in the context of a forced perspective with live action shots mixed in.

The dynamic background technology being used now for shows like The Mandalorian and Star Trek changed the story. Now VFX teams are being asked to craft the back half of a set as a 3D model that can be blended with live action shot in front of a screen displaying that model to proper perspective based on camera position. So now they have to care about the 3D dynamics of the scene in a way they previously weren't required to... A way that video game engines have been wrestling to ground for decades.

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