Unity Announces the New Unity Wētā Tools

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/unity-announces-unity-w-t-130000119.html

 

Cool, more things that are barely tangentially related to gamedev and have pricing structures that put them out of reach of most people using the engine.

 

I see some very exciting tech here for game dev. I have not looked at the pricing but I hope there will a tier for everyone.

 

I've not seen anything. Basically I've clicked through the video, and it is all trying to bedazzle the viewer, throwing dust in one's eyes.

The demo reel could've taken insane amount of time to produce, for example.

How about something practical. Say they start with unrigged character an make a movie. In a hour. That would be interesting.

The reel looks like it is part of some huge technology stack that has no connection whatsoever to me.

 

TBH I wasnt clear from the video what the tools do.. Lots of film clips, some throwing in a premade background, but, like @neginfinity said, if you want to wow people show an example from scratch, even if there is a bit of timelaps and jiggery pokery. But From this, I couldnt tell you what they tools do, and I doubt us hobbiests will get to use most of it

 

Another sizzle reel just out

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/80-l...6-oRSA?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios

 

Isn't that mostly Ziva, and not Weta? This Ziva tooling is available right now but most creators are priced out of it. It's the territory of AAA and Hollywood.

 

Its effectively a repackaging and rebranding of the Weta Tools now that Unity has acquired them.

Yet to see the workflow for using any of these in the Unity Editor/Game Engine; so I think they are more likely just for separate film pipelines. Id rather have liked them to spend the $1.625 billion on the industries Unity excels at instead (Games, Mobile, VR/AR, etc) and improve those existing tools that majority of Unity users actually use daily.

 

Unity has been placing services like these into their Unity Industry package which is $4,950 per seat per year. If that's what happens with this service too there won't be a more affordable tier. It will be that tier or enterprise.

https://unity.com/products/unity-industry
https://store.unity.com/configure-plan/unity-industry

 

Any gamedev that is excited by any of these announcements is a fool.

 

We can get excited for the Weta tools when Unity gets these features and ease of use first:

 

man i wish we could opt in for old school ui like that. it is so much easier to identify everything. new UI is always so flat it is difficult to look at.

 

Pretty much all this stuff is the Ziva tools, which do not have accessible pricing.

 

Increasingly moving away from the Indie devs... This absolutely needs to be priced based on revenue of the customer/studios, not a flat rate. A dev who has never made a red cent should not pay a dime for this. It doesn't hurt Unity that the indie dev has access to this tool when neither Unity or the dev have been paid yet. I would specify that anything involving servers and data storage from Unity would be an exception. Obviously that costs them and can cost a lot when given out for free.

 

I'm skeptical that a free version would help anyone, really. This type of production tool comes from a whole other world of money and man-power than most of us have access too. These look like the sort-of tools for the type of studio that can afford to pay 10 people for three months to do technical rigging on a single character.

If I had this, for example, I doubt if I'd be able to make any use of it at all because it's like one piece of a puzzle that I don't have the rest of the pieces to.

 

Sort of, sort of not. These things are specifically to help reduce workload a fair bit in those situations.

 

None of what Unity have been doing for the past 5 years have had any kind of indie focus. They're too big of a company. Indies can't sustain them. Even the biggest indie titles around bring in chump change of what boils down to a few pro licenses and an asset store purchase or two.

 

Thing is though, I'd wager that barely any money coming in is from companies doing Big Deal S*** like this. I wouldn't be surprised if the bulk of sales are coming from things like licenses and ad revenue to mobile studios churning out energy based things like Rise of Nations and its ilk that themselves are massively supported by ads and IAP.

 

Their massive government military contract could benefit from some of this I presume. But yeah, their bread and butter is mobile as far as I'm aware. It's just that per current capitalism/corpo handbook, a company must infinitely grow and expand in all vaguely viable directions to increase value for shareholders and enrichen CEO man and his merry band of money suits. Even if it's not mandated legally, it's still what corps do. Profit first, product second. Hence Hollywood type S*** no one asked for.

 

Honestly? Nah. This is all pretty much aimed at high-end productions and film, both of which are things that Unity really only has some inroads in, which is why some of these things are also cross-compatible with Unreal, which people actually use in that context.

 

We are entering an era where the quality of VFX and game assets is merging. Technologies like Nanite Wig/Barbershop in Unity and Ziva-rt indicate that artists won't need to choose between the two in the future. This is exciting to me.

 

This is a nice sounding statement, but I don't see this happening in reality.

 

Stuff like Nanite and Lumen run somewhat properly on like 30-35% gamer PCs judging by Steam hardware data. It doesn't run on mobile, it doesn't run on Switch, it doesn't run on Web. If Nintendo will continue with their mobile chip approach, which is likely for battery life purposes, next gen Switch replacement also won't run this kind of tech. Not to mention that this ultra realistic style also has to translate to everything else - animation quality, gameplay, etc, which is out of scope for most. Western ultra-realistic AAA graphics is not the be all and end all of gaming.

Perhaps I just can't relate since all I do is small to medium scale independent stuff, which has no use for ultra realistic movie quality assets.

 

Last I was aware Nanite only required Maxwell which is the GeForce 700 series. I don't feel like adding up the numbers but they should be considerably higher than 30-35%. Switch is Maxwell-based too which makes me wonder if it truly can't run Nanite.

 

People have literally been saying this for decades and it's simply not true. The fact of the matter is that lowest common denominator hardware is always going to be outperformed by offline rendering and even high end RT3D. That's not something that's going to change.

 

Maxwell is minimum spec requirements and there's a vast difference between booting the game at lowest settings and subpar framerate and actually having a good experience. Fortnite, which is not that particularly graphically advanced, i.e. not hyper realistic, which the merge of movie level VFX and video games and Unity's recent hard-on for realism would imply, recommends relatively recent high end hardware:

Spoiler

And Nanite/Lumen still don't run and won't run on the web, mobile and by extension also on popular portable consoles like Switch and various VR headsets like Quest 2/3, etc. This new tech remains approachable only for current gen consoles and mid to high end PCs. I expect for this to be the case for any new Unity tech approaching that level of hyperrealism and real-time processing as well. The average Steam user games on a low to mid range laptop.

 

It seems like there isn't going to be a serious effort to integrate these tools into the engine.
And they didn't make the existing tools free for indies.
So the only explanation is another stock pump by Riccitiello.

 

I never understood the idea of saying that something isn't graphically advanced because it's not hyper realistic. It's just absurd. Fortnite is very graphically advanced. It's why it has the system requirements that it does. Don't look at that game and assume that everything will be that demanding.

I only mentioned Maxwell to point out that the minimum requirement is very low for Nanite.

Wrong. I've totaled up the cards on the survey that are greater than a GT 1030 on the side of NVIDIA: it's a little over 60%. Ignoring AMD and Intel almost two-thirds of Steam will have no trouble with Nanite.

 

I should've written "photorealistic". Language barrier. NPR rendering can be advanced. I'm just trying to frame things within the topic of the thread and ideas proposed by other users such the merging of movie VFX with the games industry based on this new tech advancements, which will always have limited reach.

EDIT:

Ah, yes. Glorious sub 30 fps on GTX1060, a card that's x3 times faster than GT1030. I'm sure a lot of perf is lost on Lumen alone, but it paints the picture nonetheless.

Spoiler

Remnant 2 made in Unreal 5 Nanite (without Lumen) massively stuttering with RTX2060 and even more performant cards of recent generations and CPU is not the bottleneck. Only playable with upscalers, best of which are locked to the last few generations of cards. Lack of VRAM seems to be one of the major factors, which GTX10xx series don't particularly excel at.

Spoiler

Minimum system requirements rarely paint the actual picture.

 

Looking at this video more closely:

Seems like half the examples are for Speedtree, even though the video shown implies other stuff and is really misleading.

Like they are showing this:


Which is vague, but can imply a whole ton of things (lighting? crazy geo handling solution? Compositing?

And then a few frames later, with faded laters that appear for a shorter time than the rest, (as to draw less attention to themselves) you can read:


"WetaTools SpeedTree". So 1. I guess SpeedTree falls under the WetaTools umbrella now for some reason, and 2. this is a super misleading way to tell us "hey, remember speedtree? it's still being used in stuff (not games obviously)".

Furthermore, looking at the video description it seems that 90% are things we already know about (SpeedTree, Ziva, and "Cinematic tools" (which afaik are Timeline / Cinemachine / Recorder etc, which I guess also fall under Weta now?)


Finally, on the beta sign up page ( https://create.unity.com/unity-weta-tools-interest ) it talks a bit more explicitly about what you are signing up for. It's some plugins for Nuke, and some plugins for Maya. That's it.

To recap, the video is whole load of nothing at all, it's telling us about things we already know but presented in a misleading S***ty way, and the sign up page makes it super clear the tools have nothing to do with gamedev.

The end.

If you are a gamedev, please stop caring about this.

 

Drink every time they say "meeting you where you are". This corporate-speak is hard to stomach. And yeah, it's all film stuff besides maybe pushing the USD format, which is generally good. The Sentis stuff at the end is semi-interesting but still largely hits the uncanny valley and is just a static head. Maybe would be nice for space game comms with some filtering, but otherwise seems quite limited. Also, it runs on 4090, so it seems out of scope for video games if processed real-time.

 

My favourite part is when they say...

"we love dog fooding" (at around 40:45)

when talking about making the next cinematic demo.

So it's not that the company hates dog fooding in general, apparently they just don't think they should do it for games.

 

I guess this is how Unity's road to profitability looks like. They're largely dominating video games so the focus now is on other industries, the Hollywood and separately monetized AI based tools being the prime examples. I guess it's time to plan an exit strategy, I'm growing real tired of disappointment at every new thing Unity announces while everything good is numerous years away in perpetuity.

 

I genuinely tried to get excited for this. I kept pausing the video and looking at the UI expecting to see more tools in the actual Unity editor.

It's so sad to see the people at Unity chasing other people's successes in completely different industries. This might be the only bone we've been thrown in the past 3 years and it screams "We are copying Unreal, we have no personal ambition or plans here at Unity, we don't understand our product".

All the potential of this engine squandered, all the accessible real-time goodness flushed. If you're incapable of seeing your unique strengths and building on them, why even work at Unity?

The potential was here for easily developed, realtime goodness that could run on anything for anyone in both the commercial and entertainment market. They could have been printing money in unfathomable ways for decades on end. Instead we're throwing money at Weta to integrate a few compositing tools. I'm at a loss of words for how pathetic that is. This is a premier game engine, and the big reveal after years of silence is compositing tools that will soon be dated when the next true big thing comes out.

Instead of getting the best and brightest to make tools for compositing in some third party tool specifically for video production, why didn't you guys integrate better compositing tools IN unity that all your developers could enjoy in a multitude of ways, from better scene management to unique real-time gameplay mechanics?

WTF is going on? What's the logic here? What unique strength does Unity have now that it integrates with a few compositing tools? Unreal has EXISTING animation tools that blow all the planned features out of the water. Unreal has EXISTING rendering that blows everything planned out of the water. What is the end goal here? To be an inferior Unreal? Do you guys have ANY idea what your product even f*cking does?

Year after year you guys put out these smoke and mirror demos to fool people into thinking the Unity engine somehow has more value. How many people have you commissioned to sell us snake oil year after year? How much better would this engine be today if instead of smoke and mirrors you invested into a better approach to building up your engine?

Why aren't you guys working on making the Unity engine more expandable for better in-engine tools? Who's going to gravitate to Unity and why if all you're showing is the best tools ARE OUTSIDE YOUR ENGINE?!

I don't see value here, I see a company that knows they're incompetent shamelessly outsourcing their jobs.

Imagine a new in-engine particle systems that allow for real-time fire and ice comparable to Houdini or various 3d toolset plugins. Imagine better rendering and lighting tools that makes external tools unnecessary. Imagine new motion capturing for use for phones. Imagine the next big entertainment blockbuster being made by some kids in their garage who put something together no one dreamt of because they had a robust, feature complete toolkit in Unity.

It's so tiring complaining about this sh*t time and again. There is a real problem here, this engine is going to be dead if the big push is to make the engine kind of integrate with tools that are 10 years old. Does anyone care about this engine competing in 5 years or is everything a stent to stem the bleeding? Is there any investment at all going on for the actual tools for this damned engine? It doesn't look like it...

You see the package manager, you see the improvements from DOTS and ECS, you see the online store. All the pieces are there for a bright future. If you guys created a better portal for fostering talent, creating a tangible vision with feasible goals for improving the engine at a responsible pace with the best talent. The future would be bright.

Hollywood has a similar problem right now, you get all the people who have no idea how the industry works into the decision making positions, give them all the fiscal responsibility, and they throw all the money and weight at existing big names, it's called "star f*cking". This feels like you guys star f*cked WETA because you lack a personal vision, or ability to assemble a team that can handle the surgical procedure of building out the engine of Unity.

You guys need to draw a line in the sand. Long term support ends HERE. Build out a better foundation, find some decent talent you haven't ground to dust, allow for tools in the future that actually impress and improve the games that come out of this engine. Build a team of people who have the grit and ambition to create really cool stuff and not sh*t on them after every speed bump.

This would have been a fantastic presentation and exciting 10 years ago. I don't mean to attack the people in the video who have had a long storied career of pushing the envelope and making great things.

This screams "bandaid". Failure after failure you took a safe bet of hiring a capable team to come in and do something you weren't capable of: making something exciting. This ain't it. This is external system built on external system because you guys have lost faith in your own ability to improve your core tool set, because you lacked the patience and took on too much too fast without having a proven track record of success, now you have a giant ball of duct tape and broken glass.

Honestly, feels like Unreal is eating your guys' lunch and it's hard to feel bad. This is karma for years and years of making the same mistakes, burning out and bleeding talent, poor decisions, and following get rich quick schemes in the stead of sucking it up and learning from these mistakes. Who cares? Just some nerdy f*cking engine, you guys did your presentations, made all the investor money with all the buzz words, it's all about the money anyhow.

Unless things change big time in the relatively near future, a returning ambition for the core tools of Unity, getting your ass in gear and fixing render pipelines and improving the kinks in various aspects of the engine, my current project is the last I will be making in this engine. It's hard to put into words how poorly it looks like this engine is being run, absolute dysfunction in team management, understanding your product, ignoring low hanging fruit, chasing waterfalls. You're one of the #1 engines in the world, your customers are an infinite well of resources to help you create better tools and find better talent, and yet SOMEHOW you have managed to squander ALL OF IT.

The state of this engine is embarrassing.

 

Unity's obvious goal is to expand further than just the engine and offer services and tools that are seperate from the engine and editor. They have been shifting to this 'suite of tools' in acquisitions and messaging over the past 5 and more years. Vivox, Multiplay, Ads, and now Weta & Ziva offers more things to sell, intentionally not dependent on the editor, to studios that dont use Unity. Can now get sales-fingers in other-industry-pies that the engine and editor can't touch (such as film, AAA, etc).

Its a smart move from a purely business and money perspective. Can't compete in a new market with what you have currently? Just acquire specialist products in that market and rebrand them. Countless tech corps have done this before. Time will tell if these potential studios will choose these instead of Unreal etc.

Its just painful, as a 15 year fan & user of the engine & editor, that the focus is less on making the existing tools more improved through these recent acquisitions (but there have been some positives over the years like TMP, Cinemachine, etc) and more on gambling on tools to rebrand them so the stock price goes up. Countless features that have been unresourced for years because 'tightening the belt' but suddenly $1.6 billion for tools most of the current user base can't figure out how it fits into the day-to-day workflows or even afford.

Granted, I haven't tried the Weta tools at all so happy to re-evaluate this POV if I get the chance.

 

Unity is a complex organism, a game engine is unlike anything else out there: a collection of tools that come together at a grand scale to create other complex works of art. It's frustrating that unity, in order to remain healthy and relevant needs a group of people behind it that understand the complexity and importance of maintaining this software, and the larger impact and potential it could have on humanity if taken care of.

If we go back 4 years, we absolutely saw that drive and that want to push the entirety of the engine forward to be powerful and efficient, damn I miss those days.

But all we've seen since then is the engine put into limbo. Unity is nothing without the core engine. What I don't get is how chasing older pipelines and tools is even considered to be a viable path forward. Film and TV themselves are on the cusp of total revision, so why chase older pipelines? You have a realtime game engine and you're chasing tools for frame by frame compositing? Is this some kind of out of season April fool's joke, Unity?

The messaging from Unity is so off base for what is healthy for a tool with the breadth of this engine, that one has to wonder if they will ever recover from the current plans moving forward. How much rot is there internally that they have abandoned all internal plans of creating things of value?

I don't have to say "imagine you worked at Unity" because you did. We are how many years since the announcement of the HDR pipeline? Since the announcement of the URP? When you think of Unity, you think of a collection of tools that are half finished and poorly implemented.

There is an inherent problem with the very DNA of this company. We hear nothing but excuses, see random flailings of new features on the horizon that leave you absolutely scratching your head wondering... "Who the heck is going to use these tools when Unreal is going to have a complete toolset right out of the box that crushes this stuff?"

Unreal is exactly where you expected it to go a few years ago, they have INCREDIBLE rendering, lighting, and design tools for hyper realistic first person style stuffs. On top of that their blueprints are absolutely taking off. A few more bells and whistles and Unreal won't just compete in the high end market of gaming, but also be the better stopping point for beginners as well. It's remarkable the disparity here, Unreal is just tearing it up, the only thing slowing them down is the marketplace.

But where is Unity going? 5 years ago I would have guessed super tight, ergonomic coding revamps, a serviceable render pipeline that easily ports to various graphic levels, a super polished package manager and a la carte style gamedev where people can load up super polished gameplay packs for creating games of a variety of genres. Affordable price points and profit sharing with devs who take advantage of these robust perks. Just push the modularity and ease of dev to 11. Make up for the graphics by doubling down on making Unity THE BEST easiest to use engine, most easily expanded and integrated upon bar none. Sell asset packs that give you fully fleshed out games that developers can use as a starting point. Polish the heck out of every aspect of the engine and foster an open, modular toolset that grows with a happy, engaged user base.

What have we gotten in 5 years? What are we expecting in the next five? We don't know, we see only a failed vision, hear only silence, we see only bizzare financial flailings like these WETA tools that beg the question: "WTF is the plan here? What does Unity see as the future of gaming? What does Unity want to be?"

In tech, often times software becomes sorta static, it uses a rigid code base, only a handful of burned out coders know how the darned thing works, but it's used a ton so people begrudgingly put up with how the old thing kinda works. Sure it has issues, but you're used to them. We just never saw this coming. After all the DOTS and ECS excitement... everything is just dead now.

What's the plan Unity? Are we going to fix this S***? Get the foundation in order and pump out super badass new tools? Or are we stuck in this never-ending loop of taking little baby steps forward forever, eternally worrying about backwards compatibility, putting out little patches that fix a slew of things and break others.

This engine is so damned boring these days. Lighting is a joke, same old little idiosyncrasies in code you deal with every day, 2 imperfect bloated input systems. It's deja vu all over again just complaining about this crap.

Gamedev isn't supposed to be like this... stagnant.

If things are as bad as they appear, it's going to take many years before we see the fruits of the turn around if things get into order RIGHT NOW. It takes time to develop a work ethic, to foster an enterprising spirit in a company, to get people excited again to push forward without feeling their efforts will yield positive returns.

I don't see a company that puts out these pressers creating anything exciting any time soon. I see a company here that has no idea WTF their potential is and I can't imagine anyone at Unity right now feeling as though they're about to rock the gaming world when for the past 5 years it's been nothing but missed marks and bizzare schemes.

 

"Pointed statements" are a huge waste of time which achieve nothing.

Unity does not answer to you, and unity rarely reads general section of the forums. So you could direct those questions to the nearest wall with about the same likelyhood of getting an answer.

If you're unhappy with the engine, move on. Pick another tool. It always worked this way. Tools come and go. When one stops working, you pick another.

 

This post doesn't have to reach someone working at Unity, it could be read by a multitude of devs who might pick up on some of the concerns we express and one way or another these thoughts reach corporate. My post itself is formulated by reading a multitude of others posts in these forums. I'm not looking to get the CEO's ear, I'm trying to discuss this engine in an open forum and air valid and pressing grievances among other devs. Unity absolutely has listened to user feedback in the past.

Maybe you're right, maybe it's pointless in this day and age to voice concerns about the direction of a company, seems like most places are perfectly happy crashing and burning doing terrible, terrible business, disregarding the customer and forgetting what it is their product is.

People said the same thing about the Sonic movie. Look what bitching and moaning did for that franchise.

 

I'll be blunt.

For it to matter, reaction has to be massive. Sonic movie has wider audience than unity. Additionally, you're one person, there's no army of people standing behind you and this subforum has audience in ballpark of 100 people.

You're literally screaming in the middle of the desert while thinking that you're making the world better, when there's nobody to hear you (for the record I probably represent a nearby cactus). There are few other people trying to do the same, but thing is, you guys had been going at it for a couple of years with zero effect from all the complaining.

That time is enough to begin creating a unity's competitor and release a first demo of it.

It is really the time to move on. Unity is what unity is, and it won't change because of someone's objection. So acting upset is simply a waste of energy and "voicing complaints" achieves nothing.

Instead useful action would be releasing libraries, tools, frameworks, to the community. For free, under MIT/BSD, on github or other hosts. Or maybe trying to roll your own solution, and maybe releasing it for free. This will have more positive impact, and, if you get lucky, in time you'd actually get following you.

At least that's how I see it.

 

Their devs were literally posting on this forum not that long ago across several teams attempting to engage with the community, if anything I felt bad for them because WE didn't engage that much. Do I expect anyone from Unity to come on here and high five me in the open? Of course not. I've been around the block enough times to know that a few might see this and secretly agree. Most of us have been that employee lurking on a "dead forum" that no one posts on.

Again you might be right, but where you see a void, I see a vacuum. I choose to believe we can affect change if we voice our opinions and as things get crazier and crazier in this world, I believe it becomes more and more important to do so. I'd rather spend time writing passionate appeals than sitting around mulling over how pointless it all is.

I don't spend too much time on here, TBH. I think it's a fair bit considering how much I've invested into this engine, most days I just quietly work on my project. It does kinda suck to see that the engine I'm developing in isn't really taking its future very seriously.

 

Let's not completely ignore that there is a new Unity version coming out every few weeks.

Could they be faster with promised features if they were an agile, fresh start-up?
Yes.
Would available Unity be as versatile as it is if it were by a fresh start-up? Likely not.
Is Unity development dead? Definitely not.

 

"...and eventually you won't be able to compete in multiple markets!"

 

They certainly can compete in Weta's target market. They are hundreds of times in the credits of Avatar 2!

In every case it doesn't feel like with Twitter/X which also apparently got their thousands of workers through company acquisitions. However with them that resulted in their core cashflow being nearly unaffected when 80% were laid off.
Unity Technology's cashflow would likely suffer greatly if they did the same.

 

Except this isn't really true. Core cash flow was and is almost entirely based on ad revenue, which saw a pretty sharp decline because the new CEO basically caused major ad purchasers to pull out not just because of public comments leading to potential PR problems, but because his management of the company made things a risky proposition. On top of that, site stability decreased dramatically and it saw repeated exoduses of users.

I don't think you could have actually picked a worse example here.

 

Besides that tweet-view limitation for a couple days, the product itself did not detoriate at all through the layoffs though.
That the market reacted negatively to the leadership and the rule/atmosphere changes are a whole other topic.

 

That's untrue. It was a complete dumpster fire and barely worked for several weeks after the takeover. More bots keep following and unfollowing me more than ever. I start reading some tweet, and suddenly the whole page refreshes pushing that tweet somewhere down below and I have to start looking for it again.

Multiple indie developers have commented that they don't have the same reach anymore despite not changing anything in their posting habits. Muskrat is throttling outgoing links to websites he doesn't personally like by adding a 5 second delay. Musk has also approved 83% of authoritarian government requests for censorship. The self described free speech absolutist has done way more to diminish free speech on the planet than any other single person in recent years.

People need to stop putting Muskrat on a pedestal and namedropping Twitter's mess of a takeover as a success story. He's all marketing no substance under the hood. His only talent is hiring actual real talent, then working them to death in startup like conditions while taking all the credit for himself, which attracts new talent. Repeat the cycle indefinitely.

Ironically, Unity would be probably better off with far less employees. Cut all the non-engine related nonsense off, focus 100% on the core product, but that's not how megacorps lead by non-technical business men work these days. Eternal, unsustainable growth is the name of the game.

 

That's when Weta was an actual CGI company. Now Weta is just a brand that Unity slaps on random stuff (Speedtree is Weta? Ziva? "Unity Recorder" is part of Weta now somehow?).

 

The Unity engine? Maybe (if they can still secure investors). Unity Technologies as a whole: Definitely not.
That was my whole point.

 

I don't particularly care for Unity Technologies - all the digital twins, Hollywood and other stuff that doesn't benefit video games in any way. And focus on core engine can still include ads, the hundreds of millions in revenue ads that are necessary for mobile dev. Together with subscriptions and their military contract It's more than enough money to sustain a lean engine development team. They could've just not spent 2-3B on nonsense acquisitions, downsized and had enough funds for a couple decades. But nah, capitalism demands endless growth, so we have whatever this S*** is.

They could've easily acquired gamedev tools, include them in Unity licensing sub tiers to raise value besides the generic revenue treshholds and they'd have an Adobe alternative for the gamedev world. People would sign up the get the actual tools. Instead, they spent 1.6B on high end tools only the select few can use in a completely different industry and without engine integration. There's a reason why this announcement didn't do anything for the stock, which continues on a downwards trend. There's barely any overlap with the core product.

 

I believe that rather than writing passionate appeals a MUCH better idea would be developing tools or participating in some sort of project. Because appeals is screaming into the void and hoping for the best. And hoping for the best is less efficient than doing something. As they say, if you want something done well, you know...