Live data from Hacker News

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

fxguide.com

71–80 of 122 posts

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

#71

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

> “yay” and “what?”

In my youth we called these "airport lounge deals", imagining that the deal had resulted from the two CEOs happening to sit next to each other at the bar in the first class lounge at JFK during a snow storm. They get drunk and decide to form a strategic partnership or merger. Everyone else is like "Huh?".

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

#72
post #60
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bed_Bath_%26_Beyond

The things you miss... I wasn't even aware they'd disappeared. That history is some reading! When your CFO tragically jumps off a balcony, the company might not be doing well. Why do so many big box stores seem to follow the huge growth -> saturation -> quick implosion and bankruptcy script? Surely their margins don't materially change? Low per store sales from bad stores? But the first step seems to be closing store…

I think your model is missing an intermediate step after financial troubles but before closing stores: aggressive cost cutting that ruin the product/experience. By the time they have gotten around to closing the underperforming stores, every other store is now underperforming.

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

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ne…

„Software has shape“ - apt!

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

#74
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Godot can export to iOS/Android just fine, the consoles are an issue because their SDKs are behind an NDA. I wonder why they still do that, seems like it only hamstrings developers.

That's actually why. Tl;dr the console owners want the system to be a little bit legally and technically complicated because they only want to developers that have legal and technical competency making product for their consoles. The implosion of the home console ecosystem in the United States between Atari and Nintendo is widely understood to have been caused by Atari giving up or losing the capacity to regulate who…

They can remove the NDA on the SDK but still require games to go through a strict quality control and approval process before allowing them to be sold. Those things aren't mutually exclusive.

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

#75
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 press…

>That's not necessarily true.

Sure, not necessarily but it is a common result and not a surprising one.

>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.

Ultimately these moves end poorly for the business doing them. That's not in question. But shareholders are mad not because the move was made but because it didn't work as intended. Buying smaller companies to inflate your stock value short term while crippling the company with debt and bloat long term is an old tactic to maximize short term shareholder wealth so they can cash out and leave latecomers holding the bag. This lead to some famous company collapses when it backfired or when it drove less unethical executives to commit accounting fraud like Worldcom. But it doesn't always end up with such a spectacular implosion. Usually it just cripples the company and they get gobbled up by a competitor a few years later.

Its a common problem because the way the stock market works today doesn't necessarily align with its intended goals. The point was to let outside investors join in an enterprise they think was profitable and grow with it. But that's not the only way the game can be played. stock itself is a commodity and treated as such. I don't know how you fix that but doing so would go a long way to realigning incentives and preventing this kind of thing.

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

#76
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This. Virtual production is an incredible savings on the cost of film production. It still has problems and expenses, but there was a huge push toward it during COVID. Film production is a big market world wide.

I would also guess that if you have really good technology for virtual production you have tech that is useful for other things, like tele-presence, simulation, image scanning and so forth.

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

#77
post #70
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The things you miss... I wasn't even aware they'd disappeared. That history is some reading! When your CFO tragically jumps off a balcony, the company might not be doing well. Why do so many big box stores seem to follow the huge growth -> saturation -> quick implosion and bankruptcy script? Surely their margins don't materially change? Low per store sales from bad stores? But the first step seems to be closing store…

"Why do so many big box stores seem to follow the huge growth -> saturation -> quick implosion and bankruptcy script?" Debt financing. Zigging a bit, my family has been watching The Foods that Built America: https://www.history.com/shows/the-food-that-built-america It seems that about half the episodes tell the same story: Somebody built a new food concept, or polished an existing one in some very useful economic way…

> With clever structuring, they can keep the profits but dump the debt

I've always wondered the degree to which these buyouts are legitimate last-ditch turnaround efforts vs front-running bankruptcy proceedings.

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

#78
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Godot can export to iOS/Android just fine, the consoles are an issue because their SDKs are behind an NDA. I wonder why they still do that, seems like it only hamstrings developers.

That's actually why. Tl;dr the console owners want the system to be a little bit legally and technically complicated because they only want to developers that have legal and technical competency making product for their consoles. The implosion of the home console ecosystem in the United States between Atari and Nintendo is widely understood to have been caused by Atari giving up or losing the capacity to regulate who…

Bad quality control is just one of the factors in the 1983 video game crash.

PC games also became popular later and being able to freely install any game from any publisher you like hasn't killed the platform. The amount of crap on app stores and digital console stores still is quite high, even on the Switch store from 'quality minded' Nintendo which doesn't put a dent in sales.

My guess is the other factors, most probably the early market saturation, panicking investors and competition from home computers have contributed a lot more to the crash.

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

#79

How John Riccitiello kept the top job for so long is a mystery. This acquisition never made sense.

It makes a lot of sense to me, they just didn't execute. There is a huge blending of VFX technology and video games and always has been. Old person story: I remember interviewing an artist at Pandemic Studios (an old video game company in Los Angeles) and the artist's reel just had a shot from "Titanic" which was new then.

"That's just a shot of a man walking across the deck of a ship, what did you do."

"I animated the man."

I was dumbfounded. At that point our 3d graphics looked worse than Minecraft and I had no idea what CG they were sticking into practical shots.

(edited for spelling and I didn't catch all the errors I am sure)

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

#80
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The dynamic background technology being used now for shows like The Mandalorian and Star Trek changed the story

This is still very niche compared to normal vfx shots. VFX shots are everywhere.

So now they have to care about the 3D dynamics of the scene in a way they previously weren't required to

What does "3D dyanmics of the scene" mean specifically? Any vfx shot with 3D needs to track the camera, find the ground plane and maybe map out some simple geometry of the scene.

A way that video game engines have been wrestling to ground for decades.

What does this mean?

Post reply on HN