Do they really create content for the store? I thought that the Asset Store was mostly content from third parties.
Yes, 8k people is grotesque for a game engine business. But it seems they don’t want to think they’re in that business, and keep expanding into markets they probably shouldn’t be in.
1700 of the employees seem to be at Weta (the movie special effects studio), which Unity bought a couple of years ago.
Their product isn’t just the engine and the asset store, they’ve accrued dozens of other products on the side, chasing the current fad. For example it looks like during the pandemic they went all in on buying up all kinds of online collaboration tools.
They have a professional services / consulting sweatshop division.
They run an ad network or two. They’ve probably got O(1k) people in sales and account manager roles for that business.
Ahh, I had no idea. So they went on an acquisition spree and now are trying to leverage their core business to keep the wolves from the door. A++ job, Johnnie.
Nah, they are still chipping away at making the third do everything the second did. I don’t think they’ve touched the first one in years. FWIW, they’ve built a progressively better foundation each time, just not sure why it’s taken three tries to get it this right. Especially when they settled on just copying HTML and CSS for that third attempt.
Well, sure. Their monetization model runs contrary to the engine’s.
F2P games have thousands of times more players, more installs, and rely on a combo of whales and season passes with cosmetic and convenience dlc for revenue. Best case scenario, of course many are blatantly pay2win too.
Now unity charges per install— the vast majority of which generate zero revenue. You’re losing money as each (most) player joins! This is intolerable.
I’d expect legal action too. Genshin is huge, they’ve got money for attorneys.
Well, at say, $3B in game revenue per year you are talking about 150M new installs and about $2M in install fees, less than 0.1% revenue and likely much less than what they are already paying yearly (they probably have special licenses).
Can they develop a new engine at $2M per year? Very unlikely.
The truth is that they have had those kind of positions and job openings for a while now (before the announcement of the per install fees). As much a piece of news as the CEO share sale.
As to what those positions mean: It could be both they are developing an own engine in a long term strategic play (they are very big, so this is very possible), and/or that they are hiring engine developers to expand their branch of Unity (you can buy source code access to Unity).
In preparation to some lectures I had given, I’ve seen the OG presentation of Unity UI (the self-written UI framework from 2016) and they had plans like virtual windows and tabs. With the 1.0* release of it, the guy writing it was laid off and since then that UI part is in maintenance mode.
Generally not a positive when a very successful, hypothetical target client is vocally donating to a competing service and advertising it as a form of public good.
As far as I can tell, Unity’s competition is Unreal, and $100,000 isn’t going to be a game changer for them. Is Godot anywhere near being a viable alternative, in 2023, for the vast majority of potential paying Unity users?
