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Unity, the maker of the popular Unity Game Engine, filed for release at an incredible time. Its main rival, Epic Games, is currently busy arguing that Apple is holding the Unreal Engine hostage, and Epic will appear in court this very afternoon to seek a restraining order so that Apple cannot cut off access. to developers.
What’s more incredible, though: The numbers revealed in Unity’s new S-1 dossier show that the company is far more of a formidable rival to Epic than we might think.
We knew that the early interest in Unity may have forced Epic’s hand, first when Epic drastically lowered the price of Unreal Engine in 2014, and in 2015 when it started leaving developers behind. build with Unreal for free.
But despite these moves, Unity says that in 2019, more than half of the best games on mobile, PC and consoles were made with Unity – including 53% of the top 1000 games on the iOS App Store and Google Play.
Unity claims that as of June 30, it has a “global reach” of 2 billion active end users per month (read: consumers, not developers), adding up to 8 billion hours of gameplay per month, as well as 1.5 million active creators per month. These creators developed 8,000 apps and games each month with Unity in the six months leading up to June 30.
And while many of those 8,000 apps and games are certainly small projects (the charm of game engines like Unity and Unreal today is that anyone can try), Unity says it had 716 specific customers who contributed over $ 100,000 a year to its bottom line – 60 of them use Unity for more than games.
The S-1 suggests that Unity continues to grow as well, both in terms of revenue ($ 542 million in 2019, up from $ 381 million in 2018) and number of employees – from 2,715 employees in December to 3,379 in June.
Not all good news financially, however, as Unity admits. never made a profit from the very beginning. It lost $ 163 million this year, compared to $ 131 million the year before.
Obviously Unity would like you to think that its steadily growing income could make up for this loss, but like any IPO filing, this includes many reasons (also known as “risk factors”) why it might not. happen.
I won’t bore you with all of them here, but this one stayed the same:
If we or our customers were to violate, or if an operating system platform provider or an app store believes that we or our customers have violated, its terms of service or its policies, that platform provider operating system or application store could limit or interrupt our customers or customers’ access to its platform or store.
In some cases, these requirements may not be clear and our interpretation of the requirements may not match the interpretation of the operating system platform vendor or the app store, which could lead to an inconsistent application. of these terms of service or policies against us or our customers, and could also cause the operating system platform provider or application store to limit or interrupt access to its platform or to his store.
Seems familiar? These are the kinds of things Apple and Epic are fighting for right now.
Unity is also spending a considerable amount of time discussing how any changes in the way China treats intellectual property, game software, and corporate ownership could impact its business.
Unity plans to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “U”, which, frankly, is a bit surprising. Didn’t know you can always call dibs on a single letter ticker symbol.
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