Unity acquires Parsec for a whopping 320 million, making its biggest acquisition to date.
Waste of money, change my mind please.
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How does this help the engine?
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It doesn’t. It’s a waste of money. Unity went for 10 times the current valuation (~25-33m). Stupid idea.
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Yeah that’s… umm. Interesting?
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Anyone else feel uncomfortable using a game engine whose sole purpose is quickly becoming a money laundering scheme?
I’m only halfway joking…
Ok this is a real mindfuck… So why acquire a company that specializes in this kind of tethering tech when supposedly DOTS has been the core focus, improving the core hardware efficiency of devices running Unity. Wouldn’t this be a total 180 on the idea of DOTS increasing performance on core machines rendering this latency dependent hosting system irrelevant?
Cell phones are becoming more powerful by the day. In a couple years time, this tech will be useless as the average cell phone and tablet will have all the power to run any program you could possibly want it to…
You can also work from home using a half decent desktop machine and internet, why would a company dump 350 Million for a remote desktop solution when the optimal solution is free?
WTF are they smoking? Do they have to quantify or answer for any of this nonsense? Are they pivoting from gamedev and doubling down on a lockdown driven subscription model?
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Lead investor 6 months ago was Andreessen Horowitz. Google that with John Riccitiello. Would be interesting to know if Horowitz sold their shares.
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Traditionally remote desktop software has been bad for game development thanks to having both performance and responsiveness issues. Parsec is low-latency and capable enough that you can use it for gaming. For development it allows for remote collaboration which is now very important thanks to the pandemic.
There is a difference between how much funding the company has acquired and how valuable the company is.
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Considering the CEO was a former CEO of EA, well, yeah…
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I mean, with the only people happy with Unity being those that profit from Unity being a mess, (because they can get paid to sort out the messes for people that make games, or they can sell learning material / online courses / other bullshit services), is it really weird to see Unity catering to them and providing a framework for them?
I can see parsec embedded in the Unity editor, and the next time you struggle a little too long with an animator controller, have a clippy-like “helper” pop up and notify you, that for 100$ you can have someone else log in remotely and fix your controller for you (with Unity grabbing “an industry standard” 30% in the process).
Unity is not about empowering people that make games, it’s about empowering people to make money off of people that want to make games. Whether a game gets made or not in the process doesn’t matter.
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Irrelevant. People always like to point to the CEO of EA as if there were a differentiator between him and other CEOs but the truth is all CEOs are focused on money because it’s literally their job description. CEOs exist to maximize the value of a company. Nothing more.
If you are concerned about the future of the game engine itself you should be concerned with the CTO who has the role of being in charge of all technological aspects of the company including research and development. For Unity that’s Joachim Ante.
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I hope Unity buys me as I’m dirt poor lol.
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This will allow people to connect to their Unity account and code on their phone, basically, it could be massive. It’s something I would actually think is pretty amazing if they do it right.
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Realtime scene collaboration. Do it you cowards
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Very possible isn’t it? The amount of fluffy cloud potential is massive.
Already in Unreal, how do you imagine it with Parsec in Unity? A single pc would have to render 2 separate scene views for only 2 people.
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Surely doing gamedev on a phone is mostly novelty?
I can’t imagine working on a phone (or any handheld device for that matter) without it not being orders of magnitude slower than using a dedicated development workspace of 3+ monitors, keyboard + mouse, headset, and rainbow lighting (to keep morale high).
Game development on the go? Sure. Cool slogan. But the reality just doesn’t seem practical to me.
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Yep, anyway Unity is missing a lot of other more important features.
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My best guess is Unity is trying to claim their own unique market place with real-time business supplements as they’ve shown in various keynotes. They show the contractor on at a construction site planning the phases of construction in real time using a tablet.
I could see the appeal here, there are plenty of less tech savy people on the go who could benefit from real time technical solutions, billing, tech help, etc without having to be bothered to install a ton of apps and simply being tethered to a machine loaded up and ready to fulfill a given function.
I’d imagine after seeing Unreal just jump into the entertainment industry and make waves with the Mandalorian Unity was probably scratching their heads… “How do we make lateral moves to gain market share in other lucrative industries?”
In essence this is the anti-Unreal approach. Rather than focusing on the super high technical benchmark, assisting the cutting edge technical products, I’d imagine Unity is targeting other untapped markets with a lower barrier to entry. It’s smart.
Doesn’t benefit game makers though.
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This only works if there’s a market perception of the core product (Unity) being best-in-class or VERY close to it, and equivalent in costs to use.
The market’s perceptions aren’t close to that.
Unreal has won the narrative for every affiliated business and industry, and then some, due to multiple years of realtime rendering messaging and those amazing archvis and product demo vids on youtube simply proving the diversity of its abilities.
Unity’s advantage is mobile to multi-platform, and it’s been ignoring this unique selling point for half a decade, whilst Unreal’s optimisations of Fortnite have seen it become more efficient at the lower end of devices whilst Moore’s Law keeps helping them out, too.
It might already be the case that there’s no longer a natural market left for Unity, and no reasons to choose it when starting a production of any digital, interactive sort.
We might be the last generation of Unity users.
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