Yesterday the purchase of Mojang and Minecraft by Microsoft was confirmed, and today we get news of another possible acquisition, even more relevant for virtual reality. It is neither more nor less than Unity, the engine that is behind the vast majority of experiences compatible with Oculus Rift. Its creators are considering the possibility of selling it and Microsoft and Amazon sound like candidates for acquisition.
The VentureBeat report indicates that the price would be between 1000 and 2000 million dollars and, although they cannot confirm the accuracy of the price or if the operation will be carried out, multiple sources point in that direction. The names of Microsoft and Amazon come up because there were rumors before. Specifically, the global online sales giant would have already made an offer of 650 million last year that was rejected.
The company was founded 10 years ago by Helgason, Francis and Joachim Ante in Copenhagen, and since then it began a meteoric ascent to become the preferred engine for indie developers given its ease, its multiplatform capabilities and its Asset Store, full of contributions from developers and that today is a tool that saves a huge amount of development hours. There are currently about 3 million registered developers, and thousands and thousands of applications have been created for consoles, PCs and mobile devices. The long-awaited version 5 of Unity could be a great boost against the fierce competition of Unreal Engine, which with its new funding model has become a very serious option for small studios.
At the moment it is a mere rumor, but in VentureBeat they claim that their sources have things very clear, and they cite as an example when they published the news that Google intended to buy Twitch, although it was Amazon who took the cat to the water. Well, it seems that the sources of the Unity news are still more reliable than Twitch’s, so we’ll see what it all comes down to.
