Unity, maker of the popular Unity Game Engine, has submitted to go public at an unlikely moment in time. Its main rival, Epic Games, is currently arguing that Apple is hostile to the Unreal Engine, and Epic will appear in court this afternoon to demand a restraining order so that Apple can not suspend access to developers.
What’s more incredible, though: the numbers revealed in Unity’s new S-1 entry show that the company is far more of a formidable rival to Epic than we thought.
We knew that the early rise of interest in Unity might have forced Epic’s hand, first when Epic dropped the price of Unreal Engine drastically in 2014, and in 2015 when it began building developers with Unreal for free.
But despite those moves, Unity says that in 2019, more than half of the top games on mobile, PC and consoles were created with Unity – including 53 percent of the top 1000 games in the iOS App Store and Google Play.
Unity says that as of June 30, it has a ‘global reach’ of 2 billion monthly active end users (read: consumers, not developers) and add up to 8 billion hours of gameplay per month, and 1.5 million monthly active makers. Those creators developed 8,000 apps and games with Unity each month in the six months leading up to June 30th.
And while sure many of those 8,000 apps and games are small projects (the charm of gaming engines like Unity and Unreal today is that anyone can try), Unity says it had 716 specific customers who made more than $ 100,000 a year contributed to its bottom line – 60 of which use Unity for something other than games.
The S-1 suggests that Unity continues to grow, both in terms of revenue ($ 542 million in 2019, up from $ 381 million in 2018) and headline figures – from 2,715 employees in December to 3,379 in June.
However, it is not all good news financially, as Unity admits it is never made a profit since the very beginning. It lost $ 163 million this year, up from $ 131 million the year before.
Of course, Unity would like you to think that it could solve the ongoing revenue growth for that loss, but like any IPO integration, it includes many reasons (aka “risk factors”) why it might not happen.
I will not have born you here with them all, but this one stood out:
If we or our customers violate, if an operating system platform provider or application store believes that we or our customers have violated their services or policies, that operating system platform provider as an application store may restrict or stop us or our customers from accessing its platform or store .
In some cases, these requirements may not be clear and our interpretation of the requirements may not be consistent with the operating system vendor’s interpretation as an application store, which may lead to a consistent enforcement of these Terms of Service or policies against us or our customers, and may also result in the operating system platform provider restricting or stopping application store access to its platform or store.
Sound familiar? These are the kinds of things Apple and Epic are fighting over right now.
Unity also spends a lot of time discussing how any changes to how China treats intellectual property, gaming software and business ownership could affect its business.
Unity plans to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “U”, which honestly, is a bit surprising. I did not know that you can still call dibs on a symbol with one letter.
