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by jluk
3628 days ago
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1. Why do you believe Unity to only be a video game tech? It obviously has applications reaching much further when you consider AR/VR use cases. 2. Minecraft was bought for $2.5B which is literally a video game. I think its a fair valuation given the current landscape for their domain. |
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First, I think Minecraft was an over-valuation as well.
Second, it's more of a personal affront.
When I first saw Minecraft, I thought it was simple and something that anyone could make. I would rather see 15 unique block-building games made by amateurs gain success than one predictable commercial application. Obviously not the kind of success VC's want to see. Maybe this is because when I was the target demographic age (11-14) I was trying to make a Doom renderer. With the amount of time that your average kid plays Minecraft and with that amount of focus, you could easily instruct a child how to make Minecraft from scratch.
When I first saw Unity, I thought it was similar to what I was trying to achieve programming. This was back when I was working on making cross-platform (homebrew) games that supported PC, Linux, and Sony PSP, plus doing some Wii development commercially and making WebGL games. When you're thinking competitively, every framework is an enemy.
I have to agree that Unity has value, and perhaps this is a fair evaluation of their value, but when I first heard about Unity (2008?), it was unorganized and it didn't seem like the project organizers had the necessary know-how to actually build the project. One of those, I have a really great idea projects. Somehow, they've been able to make connections all over the industry and come a long way since then.
I'm not exactly sure what nearly $200 million will do for them now. For the upstarter, the real capital needed in this field is about $50,000 for development kits for each platform and twice that for licenses to develop as well, and a $100,000 education plus about $1000 in library books and about as much time as Unity has been in existence, a decade or so. That's just for one person, but that would be quite a bit of work for one billion dollars. The point is, the product is worthless unless it's built by experts.
The whole market of video game engines is upside-down, but that's another issue. Another reason to be upset is that lower entry barriers lead to lower quality commercial releases. Many top-selling games now have terrible performance and crippling bugs.
But I'm not an investor.