Unity to raise $125 million in funding & IPO?

Source article:

https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/09/with-new-raise-unitys-valuation-could-climb-towards-6-billion/

Also, three years ago they raised $181 million:

https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/13/unity-announces-181-million-monster-round-led-by-dfj-growth/

I'm just curious, since Unity traditionally has been the indie developer's choice, which doesn't mean big business, but with Unity seemingly wanting to do crushingly big business, where does that leave small indie developers?

There's no way that the Asset Store will ever recoup that amount of money, and I find it difficult to understand how traditional game development would also ever recoup that amount of money (surely the investor's aren't gambling that the next Fortnite will be made in Unity, and even if it is, how can that ever be enough with the current licensing)?

Then there's the spectre of IPO, which will require Unity to constantly grow in all directions, at any cost. That seems like the antithesis of how indie developers operate (yes, I know, we're not the center of the world, but still).

Perhaps I'm missing something, and if so, I'd like to hear what that is! Now, I really, really hope this thread doesn't devolve into a shouting match of Epic vs Unity, because that is not my intention. I'm just curious about the long-term meta-roadmap of Unity, if you will.

 

Nobody knows but it'll probably suck if it happens.

 

It could be for Unitys big pushes into Architecural Visualisation and the Film Industry or even to spin off it's Burst compiler technology to a wider development community...

Or they could be going for a Unity Game Store / Arcade or streaming games service.

 

Hopefully the forum won't change since it's incredibly rare for customers and company to talk so politely and freely. It's one of the main things that I try to protect too.

 

There is no reason why a software company cant cater to both independent developers and big businesses. IE: Microsoft, Sony, Apple, Nintendo, and countless others. All of which have partnerships, programmes, tools, services, etc for a broad spectrum of developers wanting to use their platform(s).

 

Yes! and to build on that, I'm expecting Unity to be totally accessible in the end: you could open a browser and start wiring nodes together to solve something, play something or work on something.

Be it game, movie, app, just for larks or to solve a current problem you're facing personally! Unity probably won't stay just a local executable any more than it will stay just for games.

 

None of this makes any sense as a direction for Unity to take. Unity is huge in archviz, muscling out a lot of existing solutions. Unity is not ready for major film production yet from a pipeline perspective. Why would they spin off Burst when it makes dramatically more sense to keep it as a proprietary thing, bringing people to the rest of the Unity ecosystem? To add to that, the UGS idea is ridiculous on its face and streaming game services have historically been nothing but a waste of everyone's time and money.

 

Sounds like a funding round solely designed to boost their valuation before the go public...Most of the recent tech ipo's did something similiar.

 

If I can quell wild theories, it's probably meaningless. Most companies that can obtain capital will do so regardless. It's typically just ongoing.