Unity is arguably the most popular game engine and has a large market place for plugins/extensions. It is almost unbelievable that there isn't a viable strategy to expand and refine the core product. My intuition here is that the product was taken over by people who wanted fast, huge financial growth, so they invested in what they saw as an opportunity to do just that, while weakening the core product and their image.

I think the key problem is that most game developers are broke and most games are unsuccessful if they even ship.

The "picks and shovels" business model where you build tools for customers who use them in their own enterprises can be very successful. But it does require those customers to be successful in their enterprises. (Or you can rely on customers to be willing to pay out of pocket at a loss because it's a hobby, as with music instruments.)

Without some kind of other monetization, Unity is essentially selling picks and shovels to miners on a mountain with almost no gold in it.

To be clear, I don't think this justifies what Unity is doing. But they are clearly trying to be a $$$$ business in a $ market, and are willing to sell their souls to get the extra $$$.

What? The video games is nearly a $200 billion dollar industry[0] and Unity is one if the most popular engines, if not the most. How is that a “mountain with no gold”?

[0] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2022-05-05-video-game...

There's a lot of money in games, yes, but much of that flows into large game studios using their own engines and the production costs are also high.

Unity is primarily used by smaller game developers and there is much less money available there.

That may be true, but you just need to look at Unity's financials to see what fraction of the games market flows to them. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/U/key-statistics?p=U

It's not _terrible_ but it's not great.

Just like in any kind of arts, it might be worth millions, but only for a selected few.

There are plenty of street performers that can hardly play the rent.

However most users of Unity don’t make very much money if any at all. So unless they switch to a revenue share based model (instead of fixed license pricing) $200 billion is not that meaningful.

There's lots of money, but it doesn't go to developers. The big profits go to publishers. If you're selling tools to developers, you'd better hope they're able to pass the cost along to the publisher. If they can't, they're not going to be able to pay anything significant for your tools.

They could have hired less people and tried fewer risky non-core investments. Plenty of tools-only companies survive well indefinitely.

They got greedy. The grow into a unicorn or die trying mentally is cancer to good technology.

> From the business POV, not being "just a game engine" probably saved them.

I agree, but if they were a "game engine and everything around games" instead of spreading focus and recourses all over what they have been trying to do, my guess is they would be in a very good position now.

>> IIRC most of their revenue comes from Unity Ads

This was and is a really interesting business for them and I still think it is a great way for them to grow.

Unity is so entrenched in the game business that if they were seriously worried about profitability they could just raise their prices and curtail investment and they would have a solid business. Like many unicorns they have been favoring growth. But at their core they have a solid product that people who make a lot of money depend on. Yes, 99% of game developer make zero or less, but its a huge industry and some very profitable developers / publishers use Unity extensively.