[cableshaft]

Is this a good or bad thing for the long-term usage of their platform, do you think? My gut instinct says bad, since once they go public they will be under continued pressure by stockholders to keep making more and more money, and so they feel increased pressure to increase their prices and/or reduce featureset for the free version (or start charging for it again). They might be more focused on consumer facing features than bug fixing than they have been in the past, also.

I don't know, just seen this go bad with lots of other companies, that leaves me skeptical about how this will go and nervous about making games using their platform in the future.

[m12k]

The investors (Sequoia being the big one) will want to cash out at some point, and then it's either an IPO or an exit. The most likely buyers in an exit-scenario would be platform owners like Apple, Google or Microsoft, which would be terrible for Unity's viability as a cross-platform tool (or at least look that way - just see the reactions that came after Microsoft bought GitHub). Or they get bought by Epic/Tencent, and the market becomes a monopoly, which is pretty damn bad as well. So under the circumstances I think an IPO is by far the lesser evil, even though I do share your concerns about the shortsightedness of public investors (though I'd argue that's a general problem and not a problem with Unity specifically)

[lazerwalker]

I'd be curious to hear your characterization of the reactions to MS buying GitHub.

My observation was a bunch of people in places like the HN comments being angry, but no meaningful mass protest, or exodus from GitHub to competitors, etc.

[jayd16]

Seems like Microsoft would be the obvious choice. They just bought Xamarin, they're finally in a good spot with regards to C#'s growing cross platform viability and they're actually a game publisher.

I don't really know why MS would bother unless not doing so would risk a Unity collapse and a loss of a lot of C# development.

[Impossible]

Many of Microsoft Window Mixed Reality\Hololens apps are made in Unity also, so it makes sense there.

[jayd16]

You can already feel this as every other new feature seems to be attached to some kind of cloud service offering.

[dleslie]

Silver Lake invested 400 million in them two years ago.

As others have noticed, there's been a (coincidental?) increase in their SaaS line of products.

[blihp]

Your gut is giving you good feedback.

[anonymous5133]

Could go either way. If they are smart then they use any money raised in the IPO to create new products or services to grow the business. If they are stupid then they just take the existing customer base and figure out ways to extract more cash out of them by doing the things you mentioned.