The State of Unity

Since the Unity run-time fiasco which caused a massive developer backlash, that lead to most of the leadership team being removed from the company. In May Unity hired a new CEO, ex-Zynga executive Mathew Bromberg, who promised extensive changes to the way the company would operate. Most recently that effort has borne fruit with the removal of the Unity Run-Time Fee. A few days back, Unity made their first earnings call under the new CEO and there were several interesting revelations about the direction at Unity.

Details from the Unity Q3 2024 Shareholder letter:

To Our Shareholders: It’s a privilege to address you once again on behalf of my colleagues around the world. We are at the beginning of a period of meaningful and productive change at Unity. The enthusiasm and excitement generated thus far, both inside and outside the Company, has been enormously encouraging. We saw real progress on our plan during the third quarter, and are looking forward to the transformational work ahead.

Unity is the only company we know of that can deliver value to developers of games and interactive experiences across the entire lifecycle, from prototyping to live service operation right through user acquisition and monetization. That capability, and its connection to the 3B monthly downloads of applications created with Unity, positions us well to become the global platform of choice. As we continue to improve our ability to leverage data to provide measurable increases in stability, speed, efficiency, innovation, and ROI to our customers, we believe Unity will continue to prosper.

Last quarter, we told you we’d focus on fostering a culture of execution and discipline, accelerating the pace of product innovation, and strengthening the bond with our customers and community. And that’s just what we did. The cancellation of the Runtime Fee for gaming customers, the reversion to a subscription-based model, and the introduction of price increases that customers could embrace has unblocked renewals and accelerated new relationships. Then we delivered Unity 6, the best performing, most stable version of Unity we’ve ever shipped, and outlined a new upgrade philosophy which is designed to enable customers to upgrade to new features without sacrificing stability. The combination of a new approach, new pricing, and new software has begun to change the decision calculus. When developers choose Unity, they’re potentially building a business on top of our platform for decades — and we’re dedicated to making that choice easier every day.

We also told you that adding world class talent to the team was going to be critical. In October we announced the hiring of a new Chief Technology Officer, Steve Collins, who brings decades of experience in game development (he was CTO at King, the studio behind hits like Candy Crush); engines (he was the co founder and CTO of Havok, the pioneering physics engine that helped define modern gaming); and marketing technology (he was the CTO of Swrve, a real time marketing automation cloud for mobile apps). Today, we’re equally excited to announce that we’ve hired a new Chief Financial Officer, Jarrod Yahes, who begins full time with us on January 1. Jarrod joins Unity from Shutterstock, where he has served as CFO for the past five years, helping to drive the company’s portfolio expansion into 3D content, data monetization, and digital advertising while emphasizing revenue growth and profitability. Steve and Jarrod join a new management team that has the quality and depth of experience to carry us through the exciting work ahead.

Finally, we talked last quarter about embarking on a fundamental rebuild of our machine learning stack and data infrastructure designed to enhance the return on investment we’re able to deliver to our advertising customers. We’re happy to report great progress on that work, which is already in testing on live data. We’re very encouraged by the early results we’re seeing. We believe that our new data platform will not only drive performance improvements in user acquisition and monetization, but also surface insights critical to game production and live service management, where understanding consumer behavior is core to being able to build and operate great games. These investments are core to our vision of a unified platform that can deliver for our customers across the full lifecycle of game development

Key Links

Unity Shareholder Letter (PDF)

Unity Investor Call Transcript on Motley Fool

You can learn more about Unity development priorities and future direction in the video below. This video was sponsored by TechSmith the makers of Camtasia (which is what I use to create all of my videos). You can learn more about Camtasia here and use code GAMEFROMSCRATCH at checkout for 15% off.

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