So this just came up in my news feed…
Is Venture Beat a reliable source of news anyway?
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What makes me sick is that MS is offering for Minecraft what Unity technologies is valued at in the article 
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Thats what happens when investors and venture capitalists enter a company … they look for exit strategies to sell when the company is hot so they can gain profits on their investment before the company loses steam and drops in value.
So it was bound to happen. Now its only a waiting game to see who will offer the most.
My guess is Autodesk.
I certainly hope not. Having just discovered Unity less than a year ago and getting to where I like it… would be a shame for some new company to come in and decide, for example, to throw out the free version entirely. Sure it is unlikely but certainly not beyond the realm of reason once investors start pushing for maximizing income. Guess we’ll just have to wait and see if Unity themselves post anything about this.
I don’t mind what they do behind the scenes regarding the sale of the company but what I do mind is if it all goes to shit after they sell it. The founders ( Not the ones from Star Trek Deep Space Nine ) who helped make Unity the power house that it is right now need to think not only about their pockets but the people that bought Unity that helped fill them pockets.
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Microsoft began releases of Visual Studio Express on October 2005. Unity was only a few months old at that point and it didn’t get a free version until four years later in 2009.
The exact opposite is far more likely to occur. Microsoft may eliminate or reduce the Unity Pro price to make it more appealing over the competition.
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Putting that aside, all it says is “exploring options”, and that one of the options is a sale. It’s exceptionally vague and doesn’t actually say that they’re considering pursuing a sale. The closest it gets is saying that one shareholder sold their shares and that this prompted an evaluation of their future… nothing about what the focus of that evaluation might have even been.
So I’d say it might be reliable, but not to let the key words in the headline spin the story’s context.
Damn, that means I got duped into the clickbait headlines. I just wanted to post here in case someone knows more.
IMHO, any purchase of Unity Technologies in the near future(next six months) is unlikely based on pure financial factors.
It has not been that long since the system shock that was Unreal 4. Reasonable Price discovery can only be done once the full impact of this has been assessed.
Always possible that some buyer for whom immediate financial considerations are secondary might make an offer but I think that is less common
There is not a lot of company who can afford this price. Whoever buys it, “terrible” political decisions will be made (Apple would stop android, microsoft would kill IOS/Android, amazon would mean shit, etc).
I hope Unity will officially comment soon…
If anyone killed Android/IOS it would ruin the engine and make it worthless.
Everyone was quick to forget what happened to Renderware. As a developer, putting all your eggs in one middleware basket is dangerous.
More recently, we’ve seen Testflight rapidly drop Android support instantly after being bought by Apple, and we’ve seen OpenFeint killed as it was absorbed into Gree.
Unity is great, but there’s always been the risk of it being utterly destroyed by a sale to, say, a platform holder.
Obviously, if Apple, MS, or Sony buy them, it’s going to be devastating as they quickly kill/cripple support for other platforms. By comparison, a buyout by Autodesk or heck, even Facebook, doesn’t seem so bad.
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With Autodesk there would be a tiny chance of a Linux editor too, considering they still keep Maya up to date for that platform.
If Apple, MS or Sony buy one of the biggest engines in the world, they sure as hell won’t do it just in order to kill off 90% of the userbase by dropping all the multi-platform support that makes Unity so appealing. Okay, Windows only is at least remotely plausible, but PS only or Apple only? That would be an economic trainwreck, I guess.
But why are we even discussing this when the only information we have is that UT might or might not do something at some point in the future?
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let’s the paranoia and speculation begin 
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The whole thing seems potentially dicey, but could be good for everyone.
Best case scenario: They get bought out and are allowed to stay on the successful course of focusing on stability and cross platform while injecting extra funds to develop more "out of the box " tools such as 3d modeler or a better terrain editor.
Worst case scenario: They get bought out by someone that makes Unity exclusive to their platform, missing the whole reason Unity works so well. Pours all of the funds into marketing and bullcrap. Overly monitor the community and kill threads like this one. Users get fed up and bail to Unreal. Then the company tanks and they fire off the staff.
Most likely scenario: Nothing happens.
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I think this is a standard case of “We do not comment on rumors or speculation”, or in other words, rumors gonna be rumorin’
I’ll get back to making shaders load faster now.
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Of course selling the company is an option, it always is; doesn’t mean it’s a very weighted one though.
Am I the only one around here who thinks UE4 is a pretty poor substitute for Unity? If you choose to go with it you’re basically cutting your userbase in more than half because of the hardware requirements. Even in a scene with virtually no objects you’re getting low framerates unless you have a powerful desktop pc with a new graphics card. I’m sure UE4 is great for next-gen AAA console and pc games, but how many indies have the resources to pull something like that off anyway?
Sorry if I’m coming off as annoyed, but I’m just puzzled that people seem to assume UE4 can be a substitute for Unity when this actually isn’t true at all for a lot of developers.
I wish no matter what happens to Unity, it will continue to be the simple and versatile game development tool it has always been.
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Second.
And if the day comes that Unity has their CEO go on stage at E3 in designer jeans holding a chainsaw gun is the day I go back to Torque.