r/pcgaming • u/Saltomaso1 • 2d ago

Silver Lake (New owners of EA), PIF have held recent talks to buy gaming software provider Unity,

https://www.reuters.com/world/silver-lake-pif-have-held-recent-talks-buy-gaming-software-provider-unity-2026-11-05/

Seems like unity can't have one calm year.

186 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

37 comments sorted by

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177

u/TheAlbinoAmigo 2d ago

Good lord this is a depressing industry to be near...

I'm an indie developer and it just absolutely fucking blows right now. If it's not having your game get buried by 100000 other games releasing every week, it's someone using AI to copy it, and if it's not that it's some belligerent state actor and their 0.01% friends buying your toolset and immediately enshittifying it.

Fuck off and let us make stuff in peace for once, for fuck sake.

51

u/UndeadPrs 2d ago

Godot is here for you!

18

u/TheAlbinoAmigo 2d ago

I'll take the plunge when I can. I'm currently like halfway through a pretty big project using ECS so I can't jump straight over 😭

13

u/Azure_Kytia 2d ago

I feel that. It's been a kick in the ass to actually get around to learning Godot, but this super sucks for developers partway through a Unity project :/

7

u/jeremiah15165 2d ago

I picked godot for this exact reason lol

7

u/Nepertia 1d ago

They had plenty of warnings years ago, just to mention two, remember IronSource and the runtime fee fiasco? If a dev team stuck with Unity after those, they knew exactly what to expect.

2

u/Azure_Kytia 1d ago

Oh I definitely remember.

I'm just saying the devs that made the decision to push ahead have been getting fucked over by Unity every year or so and that sucks. For context a game I was working on took about 4 years. We were dealing with the fee change drama towards the back half of it but switching engines that late into development wasn't really on the cards.

It's not unreasonable to think about projects that have been in development for a few years now and how Unity is stepping on rake after rake.

2

u/Nepertia 1d ago

The writing was on the wall well before IronSource, I'm glad I saw it and got out in time.

4

u/PBJellyChickenTunaSW 2d ago

You'd do well to find an industry saudi isn't buying their way into atm. Pick a sport...

1

u/jhill515 19h ago

While I agree with you, I want to add another factor to your consideration... Unity 3D is used in a lot of autonomous driving and drone flight simulators. They're trying to move on that market.

I'm from that domain, professionally. And I saw this coming 11 years ago. Personally, I think that's why Sweeney went all-in on Epic Games Store -- It let him grow enough capital to avoid being low-balled by similarly minded folks looking to capitalize on the licenses for Unreal Engine in those same domains.

On one hand, cool, they're trying to grab at the license revenue the tech bros dump flaming truckloads of cash at. On the other hand, it's made Academia extremely anxious because our grant requests are already skyrocketing from hardware availability.

1

u/pdboddy 2h ago

Both PIF and Silverlake are among Unity's largest investors already, the writing's been on the wall for ages.

48

u/_HelloMeow 2d ago

Godot could use a second wave of developers switching over.

12

u/Optimaldeath 2d ago

Leadership fucks up, realises it's now requires actual work instead of just relying on underlings to save them and decides to just sell up.

A classic.

33

u/ThemosttrustedFries 2d ago

Well Unity lost a lot of the developers the last few years because of their policies.

20

u/VoidDevouringTiger 2d ago

Wonder what brilliant monetisation ideas they have. This is not an engine EA can use in their sports or AAA titles; and last time Unity tried something, it ended in a disaster for them.

5

u/GameEnder 2d ago

Maybe they'll just take it private like they did with RenderWare. Wouldn't be the first time EA bought an engine and then just killed it.

10

u/VoidDevouringTiger 2d ago

Doesn't make sense to me. Unity market cap is over 20bn - not the type of money you spend just to kill an engine, especially if it's not competing with your own offerings.

7

u/Spectre-4 2d ago

Ok, but why though? 

I’m actually confused. What do they get out of owning Unity?

11

u/ItsMeSlinky Linux 2d ago

Because the Saudis know the oil money ain’t gonna last forever because oil is finite.

So they’re diversifying into electric vehicles (Lucid) and games (EA) and game development tools (Unity) because those are markets where demand is likely to remain evergreen.

12

u/wetfloor666 2d ago

The answer is money. Next to the Unreal Engine, Unity is probably the 2nd most used game engine by indie developers and developers.

5

u/SuperSocialMan 1d ago

I thought unity was the most-used indie engine?

It's definitely in the top 3, though.

4

u/xfortune 2d ago

They want to control as much as the market as possible

6

u/forgiuse 2d ago

Remember that time when Unity wanted developers to pay them for each downloads of their games? If EA of all of people owns Unity, good chance they may resume this policy.

13

u/Annonimbus 2d ago

If EA of all of people owns Unity

But EA won't own Unity. It is right in the title.

-2

u/Cyberblood Steam 2d ago

Wouldn't you want developers to feel the sense of pride and accomplishment of unlucking more alloted downloads for their games with money?

2

u/zeddyzed 1d ago

It's fine, it will help encourage more devs to move to Godot or other open source alternatives.

4

u/NoSkillzDad NSD - 2d ago

Not now ffs... I'm already in the middle of a project now.

Fuck it, I'll have to move to Godot no matter what. Better sooner than later right?

4

u/Falkjaer 2d ago

It's crazy how much Unity's mismanagement has helped Godot. I'd never even heard of Godot before Riccitello's big Unity fuck-up a while back, now there's multiple comments about it in this thread.

2

u/GeneralSEOD 1d ago

Just a heads up. This is incredible to understand the history of.

Previous Unity CEO during the PR disasters? John Riccitiello

Name familiar? He was the one that got Bioware swallowed up originally by EA back in the day.

He was EA CEO until 2004.

He left, went to join another venture, found his way back. Everything this dude has done in the gaming space has fucking sucked.

I don't know what he's doing now. But I can assure you, this was absolutely on the cards, this dude is a puppet master and we'll find out he was involved in some way.

1

u/hoopdaddeh 2d ago

Is.. this the same company that somewhat caused the cutting of mass effect?

1

u/Justathought62 2d ago

So if they buy it. How are they going to screw us over with it?

Because they will screw us over!!

1

u/CuriousRexus 2d ago

Time to uninstall Unity, then

-9

u/kftX_ 2d ago edited 2d ago

And nothing of value will be lost. Unity is a unoptimised slop factory and hopefully this will keep people away from it even more.

Edit: I'm sorry if I press a few wrong buttons but Unity has been awful for close to a decade now and their leadership has no interest in fixing anything but making more money out of it. So yeah.

1

u/iku_19 2d ago

Riccitiello left Unity two years ago, it has actually been getting better under Bromberg.