So that’s, what, barely two years since acquisition? What a shocker. Totally unheard of for Unity Technologies.
Really, Ziva was a complete disaster from the start. The whole toolset was presented as some massive boon, but the only people who could use it had to shell thousands of dollars out of pocket to do so, and often the reason anyone would want any of those products was to fill roughly the same niche that Metahumans would.
Again, this is because Unity is first and foremost a game engine, not a deep simulation framework for animation tooling, and has next to no use in film and television when contrasted with stuff like tools meant for that, and even in comparison to Unreal. So now we have an expensive product that next to nobody needs and the few people who could find use for it would be better served by Metahumans in Unreal Engine, which is free.
Good riddance, but also this is just yet another example of how poorly mismanaged Unity has been over the last several years and its removal is pretty clearly a cost-cutting measure more than it is part of the “company reset.”
I’m fairly sure it was more a shot towards Hollywood, rather than metahuman competition since real time at scale was not really in scope for it afaik. Ziva tech has been used in some movies/TV/cinematics but like with most Unity acquisitions, it had next to no synergy with the engine technology.
And the current AI renaissance is likely putting all these older machine learning based companies out of business since the newer stuff is cheaper even if it produces worse results for now. Same with ArtEngine. Unity basically paid for incompatible tech of yesterday, didn’t properly integrate it in any form or fashion and some years later it’s practically irrelevant, so away it goes.
It’s impressive how the ex-CEO managed to miss all of his many shots in the dark.
My second paragraph covers this. No matter what their intent may have been, they had no customer base that would have wanted this in the first place.
no longer part of unity
but blog post says “Unity will continue to retain ownership of all the technology acquired from Ziva Dynamics”
In a practical sense, it doesn’t mean anything beyond them being able to license that tech out to some gamedev unrelated 3rd party for some change. Unity also retained rights to Weta and ArtEngine while everyone working on these technologies were laid off so it won’t benefit engine users in any form or shape. Ziva is following that same playbook, all products are discontinued. Them retaining rights is just PR speak for investors to soften the blow.
See also the Ziva page update:
Just absolutely STUPID. Unity could have integrated the tool into the engine and we could ALL use it
Unity has profitability issues. Integrating it for engine users is expensive and doesn’t generate additional revenue. And clearly they don’t consider Ziva to be profitable. Perhaps because newer AI tech is in the process of replacing Ziva’s utility at a much lower cost.
Its almost as if everyone told unity this repeatedly pretty much from the moment Ziva acquisition was announced… 
All they really had to do was listen to the customers, the people actually paying for and using their products. Instead we got this, weta, and a bunch of other stuff nobody ever actually asked for.
I don’t think they considered users much. The focus always was on IPO, marketing and trend chasing. Something they are still doing with AI btw. Can’t really tell if they actually consider it good or it’s just posturing for investors who don’t know any better until the bubble bursts and AI tools get discontinued in a similar way. They certainly are not cheap to upkeep.
AI can be cheap. You just need to make it so bad no one wants to use it. 
I haven’t used Unity in the last year and a half and I haven’t missed much
What a huge waste of money there has been - this is part of the blog post: “This decision is a part of our ongoing company reset. At Unity, we are focused on our core: the Unity Editor and Runtime, Unity Cloud, and our Monetization Solutions. By focusing on these few areas, we believe we can best serve our community’s needs.”.
Bit late!
Most of the folks from Ziva seem to have landed in VFX house DNEG: VFX House DNEG Acquires Exclusive License to Ziva Technologies
Seems like they had a few projects mid-production and couldn’t afford to lose the tools, so Unity took advantage and licensed it out to them together with handing off the employees.
A needed move to help refocus the company on what it should be focusing on.
However, acquiring and then gutting a tech (and it’s staff) within 2 years is shocking business practice; but it happens time and time again. 
I feel for those working on Ziva who had no control over this whiplash.
To me, it was a confusing purchase; and no-one could really see how it fitted into the feedback and requirements of studios using Unity.
Yeah, it was very confusing!
It’s a tragedy that a company has been deleted from existence. Especially since they were making good stuff, that some people probably wanted, they just got hit by the crossfire of modern corporate acquisition bullshit. If JR is looking for a job, maybe Embracer needs a new CEO? I think he’d fit right in!
For us Unity users, yeah, it’s a good thing that Ziva is gone - if it wasn’t making money, that is. As far as I could tell, it’s tech that’s only going to fit into your pipeline if you have content budgets that are out of range for the vast majority of Unity users. Putting high quality faces in something like Valheim or whatever just doesn’t make any sense. So it was mostly just a cash sink that wasn’t creating any value to us.
Sigh. Corporate acquisitions should just not be legal. It’s almost never good for users, or for the economy at large, or for the world.
IIRC it was tied to Maya. I use C4D and Blender. The 3DCC app stricture limited it’s customer base. Any modeling tools in Unity should be application origin agnostic as long as it exports FBX. As well for the multi-thousand dollars for muscle ripple and similar…well ole cheapskate here can get that done for about 3 grand worth of my hourly billing and have a framework for using it on other models…
I mean that’s the worst case scenario, it pretty much means “the tech is dead”.
I’m sorry, but huhh? Have you seen RPGs? I was holding to the idea that they may provide this to us for a reasonable cost, because it is perfect to create cut-scene talking heads for story-based games. Just to mention the currently crowned contender BG3. I would have been happy to make a lower res tactical and movement figure and a high res talking head for cut scenes and, well, talking. And Ziva actually would have helped a lot. I understand that you don’t need any character facial animation in your games, but it is not universal, some of us do. And since hiring real actors, space to record, etc is out of budget, continue with the more traditional, hand-made facial animations.
I suppose the problem here is that Unity is so desperately service-oriented at this point that there never was a hope these could be affordable tools. Anything that isn’t baked into the engine/package manager itself is something that comes with a subscription fee and Ziva was never meant to be priced for anything but UT’s attempts at AAA and film production.
The fact the product is being retired instead of reevaluated in the context of games actually produced with the engine is why I have little hope for this “reset” they keep going on about but never elaborating on.