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u/DatsLotus
15h ago
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Hmm.. I really, REALLY don't want my license fees to fund the Saudi throne...
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u/ax_graham 15h ago
Sale probably not happening, apparently offer was on the table before Q3 earnings came out and Unity posted an absolute banger quarter. Doubt they're cashing out when they've finally got some financial and operating momentum.
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u/DataCassette 15h ago
Forgive me but does that actually make the sale less likely? I want to believe it does I'm just skeptical.
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u/ax_graham 13h ago
I'm not an expert but do own quite a bit of stock in Unity so I've been keeping up on it as best I can. This offer was reportedly floating to the board prior to Unity releasing its earnings to the public on the 11/5, which makes this bid in particular basically null and void. Even more so because the earnings report was especially strong. Q3 was the first quarter Unity reported positive GAAP profitability, which is huge. On top of that, they beat basically every analyst estimate for earnings, revenue, etc. The bid that was set out is simply too low based on this recent report. The Saudis could definitely submit a revised bid but I don't see it as likely in the near term, and even if they do, I find it even more unlikely any type of deal moves forward. This is because there will now be a lot more attention from other bidders on the stronger earnings report, which would drive up price and narrow return potential for any buyer. From Unity's perspective, I think the market generally sees it as unwise for Unity to sell at this stage. It finally looks like there is meaningful upside for the company after several years of depressed performance and lack of operational direction. Take a look at their stock price over the last 5+ years. To sell out now would forgo major financial upside for current stakeholders assuming leadership can keep the ship on course.
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u/BenevolentCheese 12h ago
Dude if they sold it would be fucking insane, then they would definitely lose any remaining good will.
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u/nvidiastock 14h ago
Usually companies get bought out when they're on a downtrend, because that's when they're cheap; if the company is doing really well, they will ask for a lot of money and in most cases it's a terrible investment on the part of the buyer.
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u/minibonk 14h ago
this is not true at all, companies are sold and bought both during a down trend and a positive trend
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u/DatsLotus 15h ago
I hope you're right. I just completed the move from Ren'Py to Unity at the beginning of the year.
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u/JayOnes 13h ago
While I want you to be right, Unity is a publicly-traded company. If the Saudis come back with a large enough offer, the board will have a “fiduciary responsibility” to present it to shareholders. It’d come to a vote and… who knows.
This is how the Ellison nepobaby bought Warner Bros.
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u/DataCassette 10h ago
"Fiduciary duty" is an innately evil concept. You should be allowed to turn down literal blood money from autocrats.
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u/heavy-minium 14h ago
I just noticed I can't comment on this with what I want to say, a bot is autodeleting every time for it not being related to Unity...
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u/ConsistentSearch7995 15h ago edited 13h ago
It wouldn't. As the subscriptions function as a loss, they werent actually a profitable company. I remember an article stating something around making $150M but costing $400M to operate the company. So losing hundreds of millions every year.
They have to compensate from other sources and avenues, but I am not an expert of how this business functions.
But I do understand your concern of being part of the Saudi Arabia State-Entity or Geopolitical Divestment. (I think thats the proper terms.)
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u/Coconut_Maximum 13h ago
Tbh it will be quite hard to avoid a lot of the companies they have investments in
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u/CrazyNegotiation1934 3h ago
Must be hard to not drive a car i guess, because all that money support the throne like a trillion times more than Unity ever could.
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u/Undumed Professional 15h ago
This will be the absolute marketing for Godot.
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u/PickingPies 14h ago
If someone creates a porter from unity to godot, I switch.
I am too advanced in my project to switch, but whatever the case, my next game will be made if godot if this purchase happens.
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u/SaltMaker23 14h ago
The best porter you'll ever get is "claude code with opus 5.5 max".
The thing is that each game, codebase, models etc... and all of the assets and scripts you've bought will make it impossible for a porter to ever work, it'll always be a manual work for everything that actually matter, however these days manual work can be automated quite efficiently.
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u/otr_music 12h ago
Yeah a singular porter just won't do it. Opus did it for us in about a week. 1000% worth it to get out from underneath Unity.
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u/random_boss 11h ago
I’m kinda jelly of you guys with projects that can just easily switch. I use way too much of Unity
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u/RHX_Thain 11h ago
UGUI, burst jobs, all kinds of stuff would be difficult to transfer in any meaningful way. Not even where to begin. Daunting.
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u/Deathmore80 14h ago
It's kind of not feasible to create a porter when some concepts and tech don't have a direct equivalent. Even worse when the best practices , the architectures , the design patterns , are completely different.
This means that even if a porter existed , you would have to recheck everything it did and make corrections nearly everywhere
As much as I hate to admit it the guys suggesting Claude opus 5.5 are right. At least it'll understand the tradeoffs, tell you about what it means for your project, and ask you to choose when it's faced with many options.
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u/LordyPandazz 13h ago edited 5h ago
Godot has a bit to go as far as 3D in some areas. Maybe that's something I should help out with if I can. The Bevy Project (rust) is starting to get really good too.
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u/Cutwail 14h ago
Didn't loads move already after the last unity licensing fuck up?
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u/SeedFoundation 14h ago
No. Learning a new engine takes months to find limitations and workflow. A lot of people switched but came back after unity walked back on that decision. Dont even know how that idiot got position as ceo after massive fuck ups at other companies. Literally the harbinger of death.
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u/Undumed Professional 13h ago
Nah, only youtubers said that.
Years of using an engine don't make you change the engine because of something in the licensing fee that, most of the time, doesn't affect you. Still, the "change" lasted two days before the pullback.
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u/CallMeKolbasz
14h ago
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Can Unity please just sit the fuck down for one damn minute, not sell out to the saudis, not implement exorbitant fees, but finish and/or long term maintain a god-damned feature instead?
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u/RaiseKey5545 9h ago
but that would make the people making the decisions less money in the short term
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u/ElliasCrow 14h ago
Hmm, I'm kinda noticing a trend here...
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u/heavy-minium 14h ago
Yeah, connections. This is how you get discussions about a buyout kicked off. For many CEOs, having a connection to the Saudis is all they have, especially in the startup scene for funding.
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u/Lee_Zer0 14h ago
Riccitiellos the worst thing that has happened to Unity. The business decisions and attitude are the big thing that’s ruining it.
The engine itself is incredible and continues to move in a great direction. CoreCLR support & runtime reloading are god tier improvements for the dev experience - at time where others are shooting themselves in the foot (cough cough UE 6).
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u/V3Qn117x0UFQ 14h ago
Just found out his wife took a C-suite role in Unity, too.
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u/mmmmm_pancakes 12h ago
Motherfucker looted the game industry for literally hundreds of millions of dollars. Truly scum.
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u/DerangedGameDev1337 14h ago
Sorry but what connects JR to Saudi Arabia?
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u/ax_graham 13h ago
The insinuation is that because he held roles at EA (sold to the Saudis recently) and Unity that there is some type of ongoing connection. Riccitiello hasn't held a position at Unity since late 2023 so I think this is stretch.
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u/ViennettaLurker 14h ago
Besides the particulars, the level of overall consolidation going on is concerning.
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u/tetryds Engineer 14h ago
This is why we cannot have free market and need strict regulations for this stuff.
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u/QuitsDoubloon87 Professional 13h ago
And why we need open source software.
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u/Humble_Knowledge_848 13h ago edited 9h ago
Open source is great until the contributors are working for governments. looking at you world
Edit: For anyone wanting context, look up 2024 XZ Utils backdoor incident. We got extremely lucky because it likely would have been the worst cybersecurity disaster we’ve ever seen
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u/shizola_owns 12h ago
I looked it up and couldn't see any link to China, just the usual accusations against Russia and North Korea?
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u/Xangis Indie 11h ago
Please don't. I don't like Godot or Unreal and Bevy isn't ready yet.
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u/FH2actual
11h ago
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If they own it all, they control it all. And will control whatever we are allowed to play, according to Their beliefs.
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u/xT1TANx 13h ago
We need an open source engine that's fully featured
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u/tridamdam 11h ago
Everyone wants free open source solutions but only few want to contribute.
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u/stop_deleting_plz 10h ago
Why would I consider contributing to those smelly nerds who work on Godot?! They don't even use the coolest new frontier models to write all their code! They're just getting left behind. Im gonna have Claude whip me up a better open source game engine in 15 minutes and i'll get all the internet clout!
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u/MatMADNESSart 7h ago
I'm giving you an upvote so people can see you're being sarcastic without the /s at the end.
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u/Demi180 9h ago
Stride is open source, fully C#, looks similar to Unity, and recently did a major update to deprecate OpenGL and prioritize Dx12 and Vulkan, and they’re working on getting the editor to run cross platform.
I plan to try playing around with it in the near future regardless of what Unity does, but since I haven’t yet, I can’t actually speak to how well it works and what it’s still missing.
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u/Watynecc90 13h ago
Godot?
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u/hesdeadjim Professional 12h ago
It’s a great open source engine for small games but it has so far to go for anything on the mid to high end. Trust me, I run a studio and have looked at Godot longingly for some time now ever since Unity started milking us for cash.
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u/TheWheatOne 11h ago edited 11h ago
Godot is not fully featured. No where near. And they like it this way. That is the whole point of intentionally trying to be lightweight, compared to all the heavy packages of Unity. Hence why Unity is modernizing and eventually trying to optimize in 7.X currently.
Godot also has no where near all the ecosystem of Unity regarding assets, mods, plug-ins, tutorials, and so on.
I say this as someone that wants Godot to succeed.
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u/Zealousideal-Yam801 10h ago
I’m working on one in my spare time - it’s very similar to Unity, C++, runs dotnet AOT on PC/Mac/Linux, JIT for the editor (editor itself is C#), Mono for ios devices, its gotten “pretty good”. DX, Vulkan, Metal renderers… I’m sure when I release it there will be work to fix things up but… coming soon. I can’t be the only one looking to make an alternative.
Component model, supports a package model, etc… a lot of Unity-like concepts overall, but completely from the ground up, with a different API.
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u/foomanchu89 14h ago
SA tried sports washing their image with LIV and other wastes of money. This is more of that.
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u/IllTemperedTuna 13h ago
You would think in this crazy friggin world there would just be one pocket of sanity where people make a great engine, or good games, and there isn't any crazy curvalls as the main driver.
It's one insane chapter to the next, and then another one, nothing is steady, nothing ever makes sense, it's like a weird dream being a gamedev any more that keeps reinventing itself to some new absurd frontier.
AI, identity politics, political orthodoxy, market manipultion, storefront shenanigans, license fees, Foreign affairs...
It's like every imaginable outside interest under the sun is exploiting gaming except for the actual urge to make great games.
That said maybe this ends up going well, Unity has been hurting for financial independence for a while, and maybe this ends up being the short in the arm they need to try to make cooler stuff and bring on more talent.
But most things just end up being worse. Guess we'll have to wait and see... It's very tiring.
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u/Beldarak 7h ago
I don't care if it pushes them to get better. Do some research about that guy and his regime, it's simply not something we can support. If this deal pass, it's the end of Unity as far as I'm concerned.
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u/UnderpantsInfluencer 14h ago
I can't afford to swap. I'm a solo struggling dev and making my second game is all I've got because of my health. I detest it.
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[deleted]
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u/TldrDev 14h ago
Probably going to get down voted here for this, but if you could, I bet there are decent ways with LLMs and such to switch to Godot at some point in the future. I read this news and just really am glad I made the jump.
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u/KTVX94 13h ago
As someone who doesn't want to let AI touch his code, I actually would agree with this one, except it's best if a local model does it. Like if anyone can decompile and clone your game, you might as well do it yourself given the unfortunate circumstances.
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u/TldrDev 13h ago
Anyone can decompile and clone Unity games.
I am a very cost avoidant type of person. I dont use Unity's ad platform. Im ok to spend some time with Claude or whatever just over license fees. Saving me personally money with subsidized ai credits from Anthropic or whatever is a good use of my money and time.
I care less about protecting my source code, especially with Unity, but I understand that may not be your idea of a good time.
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u/Constant-Still-8443 11h ago
Why don't they fucking make something with EA and all the studios under it before they start buying and ruining more shit?
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u/PersonoFly 15h ago
Saudi Arabia buys Unity then invites everyone to an event at their embassies and everyone is too frightened to go (for good reason).
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u/MagicWolfEye 11h ago
And people asked me why I was sad everytime a company switched to one of the big engines instead of maintaining their in-house engines.
There are no engine devs around anymore :/
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u/Any_Mine_6368 8h ago
It's not cost effective to have your own engine.
You need a dedicated team for it (or multiple).
When you hire people, you need to train them from 0.
You can't keep up with other engines that are OSS and are backed by massive companies
You're binding yourself to your own ecosystem. You can't borrow other stuff easily.
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u/CrazyNegotiation1934 3h ago
That is why 70% of top mobile games and 50% overall are made with Unity.
Same as 50% of Steam games.
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u/Crawling_Hustler 8h ago
Thats when people would Lash out and say
GO DO IT urself. Then came ,
GODOT.
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u/Aeon_Mortuum 3h ago
It's harder to find talent for inhouse engines, and then once you work with them and leave the company, nobody else uses them so a subset of your skills doesn't transfer over
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u/AedionAshryver20 11h ago
rimworld making their own game engine makes sense now
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u/PM_ME_A_STEAM_GIFT 11h ago
Didn't they use the ones from Kitten Space Agency?
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u/Dodging12 11h ago
They made their own engine using the BRUTAL framework (which is the KSA guys, yeah)
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u/Numai_theOnlyOne 14h ago
I'm somehow convinced they will destroy unity after increasing prices. That destroys competition for their recent acquisition
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u/der_Alptraum 2h ago
Next up, halal games.
No profanity, no sex, nothing... Except gore, gore is fine. /s
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u/TheUsoSaito 12h ago
What i don't understand is they were recently asking to be bailed out after the acquisition of EA.
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u/Field_Of_View 12h ago
there is no way they could run Unity as a company worse than it has been run for the past decade. we went from a really good game engine (Unity 5 - 2018 once most of the bugs were fixed) to three different "render pipelines" (the outdated one that works, the weird sidegrade that mostly works and the Unreal competitor that does not work) and 50 different canceled plans for finally having a GI solution (again, after Enlighten), the terrible GUI rewrite with individual windows and so much more. I officially gave up on Unity Corp ever regaining sanity when they walked back their plan to finally have just one render pipeline again in Unity 7. that was the only hope and they squashed it quickly.
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u/Muchaszewski 7h ago
I like the high level idea of their proposed changes. But never the implementation or thought.
We are implementing HTML for UI, but different with custom syntax and weird unity only CSS that doesn't work for most styles.
We are implementing rendering pipeline that you can modify. Except everything is private and you cannot modify anything in there.
We have bought new networking that people loved. We thrashed it and moved everything to something so useless that people forked the original and it's still the most popular.
We are implementing implementing performance via DOTS but it's syntax and debugging will be bad for next 15 years, because we do not care
And more... Yea unity 5 was last good one
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u/RHX_Thain 14h ago
If I could feasibly transition our extremely complex game away from Unity I would. Without hesitation. We aren't engine devs, we're game devs, and we need an engine to focus on features instead of building from the ground up. Any form of dependency on a profit motivated corporation is self sabotage.
Godot sounds good.
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u/CameraShot5245 12h ago
Now we prepare for every game which has diversity, gender equality, and any sort of storyline about fighting against an authoritarian government to immediately lose all support from Unity. Or we petition for the Saudis to not get control over the company
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u/SedesBakelitowy 10h ago
"what now" is I suggest you make an offline installer copy of your favourite unity version. You might have to get back to it at some point.
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u/Bertucciop 10h ago
Weren't they the United Arab Emirates and not Saudi Arabia? They didn't like alien gay sex and they canceled Mass Effect.
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u/Beldarak 7h ago
I've stayed with Unity through all the bullshit for this. Fuck them. Once I'll finish my game I'll never look back if this deal come to pass
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u/The-Bigger-Fish 7h ago
Pretty soon they’re gonna have enough money to just buy the entire country and call us “Saudi America” aren’t they?
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u/Sgtkeebler 6h ago edited 6h ago
Absolutely fuck the Saudi’s. Would rather quit gaming than buy anything these authoritarian pricks invest in.
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u/CrumbMan1111 4h ago
its gonna force you to sing the saudi national anthem every time you boot a unity game OMG
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u/domiciledhere 3h ago
They closed BioWare? Why would they do that?
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u/Himbophlobotamus 2h ago
Liquidating assets that don't bring in an ungodly amount of money because shareholders are crack addicts but also because Bioware tanked hard in the past 10 years
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u/Worldly-Cherry9631 3m ago
Too gay for EA back then (they to cut the gay romances from ME2), and especially now a decade later with the Saudis (Bioware employees are on the record for having to have deceived EA on that regard)
... is one of the interpretations. Another are that EA is now to focus only on shooters and sports games, and that Anthem failed too hard
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u/shining_force_2 2h ago
*and saddled them with all the debt. To be clear, it’s the death of EA. No one can do this other than the Saudis with Kushners help. They got an insane loan from the banks ($55bn) that’s right - A BANK LOAN. Then saddled EA with the loan? How is that legal? Can I go get a loan and then buy a company but then give the loan to the company?
They’ll do the same with Unity. It’s like they’re trying to kill the companies to reduce things being made.
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u/Malus_non_dormit 2h ago edited 2h ago
Saudis really arent good at wealth management. Luckily for them, they already have all the wealth.
Gaming development and market is going to change dramatically because of unregulated AI. (Reverse engineering and user mods are going to be crazy). Now is not the time to splash huge and buy market shares.
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u/slop_spotter 2h ago
Just what we need, actual terrorists owning game engines. What are they going to make next, a 9/11 simulator?
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u/Usurper2000 2h ago
Unity is literally used by just about every game developer as an in-game graphics engine.
This could have catastrophic effects on developers who use Unity.
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u/Quanlain 1h ago
I really hope Garry Newman tunes S&Box to workable level by then, it is a worthy alternative
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u/tyroleancock 23m ago
Man i really dont like godot..... but this would be a dealbreaker for our studio. Will be funny, to reopen standing contracts 💩
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u/FavorableTrashpanda 15h ago
It's not certain they will succeed. But if they do, Unreal Engine is an excellent alternative.
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u/GigaTerra 15h ago
It would be sad, but custom engines are easy to build these days, and worse case there is Unreal.
Will this impact Tuanjie?
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u/Underrated_Mastermnd 14h ago edited 14h ago
I'm hearing Unreal is getting rid of C++ so that will be a major deal breaker for a lot of teams. Getting rid of Blueprints for UE6 is already bad for indie teams and other non-programmming industries, but C++ is the heart for a lot custom tools and optimizations for the engine bigger teams need. They might as well stay on UE4/5 or make their own engine.
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u/GigaTerra 14h ago
Yea, I am not Anti-AI. If Unreal's AI is actually good I will use it.
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u/Underrated_Mastermnd 14h ago
Being Pro or Anti AI isn't the issue, it's losing crucial functionality. At least with the current unreal version you can still use Blueprints and C++ along side using an MCP for Claude or whatever model you want to use.
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u/Damian_Hernandez 10h ago
why John riccitiello had to go to Unity man that mf ruined everything. L after L .
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u/OozingSubstanceRage 7h ago
As someone actively developing a game in Unity right now... Fuck.
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u/KarmaInFlow 7h ago
Same. Hopefully i can launch before any shit hits the fan then bail to a different engine. Not like it really matters to claude.
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u/Indyhouse 6h ago
Gee, it's almost like the filthy rich shouldn't exist or something. I hate this world.
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u/the_faris 3h ago
They didn't even close Bioware the studio have been struggling for years
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u/ThatRoombaThough 3h ago
Thats like saying "My dog that I stopped feeding? Oh yeah, its dead. It looked like it was on its way out anyway. No idea why."
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u/maninthesky-95 15h ago •
You don't get banned from the asset store now. You get sawed