The vast majority of “new” tech companies operate at a loss.
This is a bullshit hypothetical that has no relevance for Unity. Unity is a well established company, that has been very successful after they revised their model to be more Indie friendly. This is a money grab pure and simple. And it’s a money grab that is so bad it might actually kill Unity.
jaaval@sopuli.xyz 9 months ago
Unity technologies has never made a profit since it was founded. It’s still a company aiming at growth by burning money. Their losses have only increased since they went public.
Buffalox@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I’m pretty sure that when Unity was headquartered in Denmark it made a profit. But I may be mistaken, because it was hyped as a danish enterprise success.
When they changed the license to be more Indie friendly a few years back, that too was hyped as a huge success.
But I can see on Wikipedia that Unity Software Inc. has a negative net income of $921 million on revenue of $1.4 billion.
That’s an insane loss, meaning that they basically operate at 50% loss! How or Why they ended up that badly is beyond me. It’s so bad it smells like something is not quite right with those numbers.
Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I took a look at some of their investor reports while trying to explain this earlier but couldn’t make heads or tails of what was additive and what was descriptive.
But at a high level: It is very believable
Let’s take a step back for a moment and look at nVidia. It is a VERY common statement (I think even Jensen has said it?) that nVidia is not a hardware company: They are a software company. They spend a LOT of money on Solution Architects/Engineers which are basically people that you buy the time of when you make a large order. They work with you to make your code more performant on nVidia hardware and are why so many games (and everything else) blazes on nVidia but struggles on AMD (less so these days) and Intel (ha!).
I believe Epic does the same with the Unreal Engine
And, presumably, Unity does the same for Unity.
And those people are pretty well paid and only have so many cycles per day. That drastically increases your Sales/Marketing department cost but is pretty much a necessity to function in a market dominated by… the companies who have been doing that for decades.
And then you just have product development. A LOT of money is thrown in to trying to make the next Nanite or whatever in an attempt to distinguish your engine and get market share when the next wave of games release… two or three years later. Which is the other issue. Every expenditure is about making profit 1-16 quarters later.
Buffalox@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I wasn’t talking about whether they have expenses, If I recall correctly they have about 7000,- employees.
Generally that kind of company only collaborate on huge projects, smaller projects don’t get that level of service, bust are generally referred to a developer forum, where their questions may be answered by in-house personel. This is as I understand is common, but I’m not a pro gaming programmer, although I used to know a few decades ago.
Fun fact, the story now is that it was a Unity employee who made the death threat!?
jaaval@sopuli.xyz 9 months ago
It was a private company back then so I don’t think there is financial info available. But at least it seems that the reports they filed for IPO indicated they had made loss for a few years prior.