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AppLovin offers to buy Unity Software in $17.5 bln deal
- Blackthorn 4y agoDoes this include ironsource or did that not happen yet?
- gmays 4y agoThey agreed on a merger, but it hasn't happened yet. The AppLovin acquisition could preempt the Iornsource merger.
- rhexs 4y agoHow did unity go from mobile game development darling to being acquired by an adware company?
- solarkraft 4y agoNot being all that profitable. Maybe their business model was too nice.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- hesdeadjim 4y agoThey grew too big, too fast and the majority of their income was reliant on mobile ads — which were demolished by Apple’s “Do Not Track Me” popup. So, they’re desperate.
- ramesh31 4y ago>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-pocalypse) has led Unity to a long slow decline in developer share ever since.
- brundolf 4y agoThey released Unreal 4 as freemium more than two years before Fortnite became a battle royale and took off. The latter has definitely fueled continued investment in the engine, but it was Unity that forced them to adopt the pricing model.
- moneywoes 4y agoIs the Epic engine that much better?
- cecilpl2 4y agoYes, generally. It's what many AAA games use.
- haunter 4y agoimho 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-scripting-in-unreal-engine/ 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's an engine geared toward professional game designers and artists, basically whole studios, rather than programmers. Unity is really fun to play with if you are a single indie dev. Also it's much better for mobile development. You can do all with Unreal engine too but it's "meant to be" for FPS/TPS games and anything other than that is not harder just you need to "fight" the engine sometimes. And the Unreal engine is open source. Well it's like open access because there are some very strict rules and limitations around it. But at least it's good for personal use https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/ue-on-github https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/ue-on-github
- hesdeadjim 4y agoBlueprints 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.
- helsinkiandrew 4y agoAppLovin Market cap is roughly ~$14B and Unity is ~$15B. This sounds more like a merger - AppLoving is offering shares which would be worth 49% of the combined company. Unity provides the Game Engine, AppLoving provides the ad/payment side - it could work.
- nacs 4y agoThis is basically the same as their previously announced deal with IronSource, a malware/adware company. Both are terrible for consumers/developers.
- sparky_ 4y agoWell, except that AppLovin is a (non-malware) ad tech company. So I mean, at least there's that. But the play is more consolidation that anything. A large swath of mobile games use Unity, and a large swath of free games monetise using AppLovin. The Venn Diagram of these two is nearly a single circle.
- helsinkiandrew 4y ago> Both are terrible for consumers/developers. Unfortunately they don't get to vote on it.
- mrDmrTmrJ 4y agoBut 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?
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- jacknews 4y ago"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.
- devindotcom 4y agoThat's interesting, I hadn't seen this version of "perilous" before but I like it.
- jacknews 4y agoI'm using it for 'dire', 'desperate' more than 'perilous', though when your ad agency makes more from your products than you do, you could also say the economic structure is in peril.
- robotnikman 4y agoReminds me of McLovin
- nacs 4y agoUnity announced a month or so ago that they were going to merge with "IronSource" -- a company famous for shoveling malware that was blocked even by Microsoft's Defender software. This AppLovin offer is almost a step up from that.
- pie420 4y agoIt just highlights the parlous state of the current economic structure even more then
- hardtke 4y agoCheck out the AppLovin financials[1]. Even if you've never heard of them, they have strong revenue growth, line of sight to high profitability, and a diversified revenue stream. Their revenue in 2022 projects to be triple that of Unity. [1] https://s27.q4cdn.com/966411597/files/doc_financials/2022/q1/05/1Q22_AppLovin_-Shareholder_Letter_FINAL-2022-05-11.pdf https://s27.q4cdn.com/966411597/files/doc_financials/2022/q1...
- hesdeadjim 4y agoThe only dream I have from these horrendous merger and acquisition offers happening with Unity is that the new corporate overlords open up the core engine like Unreal.
- mattgreenrocks 4y agoI hope Unity gets a good deal here, but..."AppLovin"? Seriously?
- russellbeattie 4y agoIt is definitely the most cringe-inducing company name that I've seen in a while. But you have to admit, like "GoDaddy", it's memorable, even if it's for the wrong reasons. From a marketing perspective, it might be a plus. Better than "AppTec" or the equivalent which would be forgotten instantly.
- spywaregorilla 4y agoI can only imagine this will hurt the engine more and more.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- 60secs 4y agoOnly if you mind ads in your game editor.
- spywaregorilla 4y agoFun story, I left my unity game running a test in editor over night, accidentally. When I came back in the morning, my harddrive was full. The reason? Unity logging the same telemetry error over and over because it was not allowed to phone home. I have happily switched to unreal.
- conductr 4y agoIs that really what people are afraid of? Why would they do that? They want developers to put ads in their games certainly, but I don't think they want to alienate the devs with ads in the tool. That seems silly
- spywaregorilla 4y agoMy initial reaction was nah, but on second thought, I'm not so sure. Most indie devs will produce nothing and generate no revenue / buy no seats. But they may purchase stuff on the unity asset store. I could see ads finding their way into the editor that way. Not that this has anything to do with applovin though
- conductr 4y agoGood point, I hadn’t thought about it from that angle. I could actually see that rationale, don’t agree with it but could see how greed could take them there.
- whoisjuan 4y agoFor people wondering what happens with the ironSource deal, this bid is meant to derail it. This is AppLovin playing offense to avoid the emergence of a stronger competitor and instead become that stronger competitor. Unity is not as strong in monetization technologies but it’s a desired asset since it has already a foot in with game developers. Unfortunately building a game engine is not as profitable as building adware. I guess Zuckerberg’s idea to buy Unity at certain point doesn’t sound that bad now. Clearly he wanted it for the game engine technology and not to build another ad revenue source. Kind of ironic how things play out in the long term.
- seanalltogether 4y agoThis makes more sense. I had not heard of AppLovin until this post, but it seems clear from their solutions that a majority of their revenue comes from providing ads in games, or providing ad campaigns to those wanting to promote a game they built. And with Unity merging with ironSource that could sink a lot of their revenue.
- tjoff 4y ago> I guess Zuckerberg’s idea to buy Unity at certain point doesn’t sound that bad now. Clearly he wanted it for the game engine technology and not to build another ad revenue source. Kind of ironic how things play out in the long term. Not sure I follow that logic.
- whoisjuan 4y agoThere are some Zuckerberg emails exposed as part of some subpoena process where he describes why Unity was a valuable asset to build Meta's AR/VR business. He goes on a lengthy argument about why owning Unity will create a value flywheel that could accelerate Meta's business by doubling down on Unity's engine as a core technology for building games and other AR/VR experiences: https://sriramk.com/memos/zuck-unity.pdf https://sriramk.com/memos/zuck-unity.pdf We don't know what would have been the outcome since this never happened, but he saw Unity as a valuable core technology, so is reasonable to assume (whether you like Zuck or not) that Meta would have probably invested some serious money in making Unity (the engine) better. Now that we are past that, we are looking at a company that can't grow its game engine business anymore, so they have started to invest in app/game monetization. But likely at the expense of being less focused on improving the game engine. So the logic here is that Unity under Zuck (who is ironically the king of ad revenue models) would likely have thrived as a game engine. Instead, Unity as an independent company is now seen as nothing else than adware leverage.
- atwood22 4y agoUnity 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.
- throwaway1777 4y agoThat’s bull market thinking. The stock could just as easily continue sliding down.
- hesdeadjim 4y agoYea, they've spent a lot of money over the last few years on questionable acquisitions (Weta for multiple billions, seriously?). They are making a big push into their game services division, which is more than ads now: matchmaking, lobbies, dedicated servers (Multiplay acquisition), etc. They also aren't trying to only target Unity for some of these. Multiplay in particular runs a lot of Unreal games, or at least they did (such as Apex Legends). Unfortunately I don't see a world where these services move the needle at all for a giant behemoth of a company like Unity.
- 2600 4y agoApex Legends on PC and consoles is using a modified version of Source engine, although the mobile version is using Unreal.
- xSxY3fj5gVCmvWE 4y agoThe game's engine is irrelevant to the multiplayer backend in this case. https://unity.com/case-study/apex https://unity.com/case-study/apex
- atwood22 4y agoThey’re like 27% down from their IPO price two years ago. I don’t think their business has deteriorated so drastically that 17.5B would be attractive. I could be wrong though.
- curiousDog 4y agoApplovin..The company you build after watching Superbad while high too many times I guess
- jshaqaw 4y agoUnity is in a decent position to be a world dominant company as ar/vr arrives if it can avoid being just yet another vector of ad spam.
- eurasiantiger 4y agoThis seems like two countries fighting over who gets to control what ideology gets distributed through the Unity advertisement ecosystem.
- tehabe 4y agoThat is why we can't have nice things.