this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
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Technology
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🥴 brilliant decision makers at unity
Love how this plays in relation to all the arguments of "well, you have to understand, Unity doesn't turn a profit yet, they need to be able to make money", from when they first announced the change.
It's by design, you don't need to pay taxes if you don't generate profit, you can just shovel more value into the company with investments and acquisitions that then hopefully generate you even more money in the future.
And at the same time you can point at that loss and use it as an excellent scapegoat for doing shitty things.
I believe they can also load all that debt into these acquisitions before taking what they want and selling the rest off in bankruptcy, no?
Weta was an especially weird and expensive acquisition, since they're not even in the same field.
Weta is researching and building (amongst other things) graphics processing technologies.
Being able to take cutting edge technologies from the film industry, optimising them and selling them as “click and go” solutions in Unity would be a huge win.
StageCraft is the only thing where there is even a small overlap between game tech and the film industry, and that one is using Unreal Engine. Other than that, the special effects used in movies render at minutes per frame, not frames per second as in games. There's no technology suitable for Unity in that.
I can think of applications of Weta’s MASSIVE in games.
They do a lot of work on mocap technology, which is used in game dev.
And sure, movies run at minutes per frame, but reusing the knowledge and skills developed during the production of them can be applied to game development. It’s not 1:1, but there’s transferable skills. And there’s always emerging technology. Take Gaussian Splatting, that potentially could take realistic low-fps CGI scenes and make them realtime.
That's usually called a slideshow 😁
They're talking about the rendering speed, not the playback speed.
Wait, they acquired Weta? I thought it was just cooperation or something like that
https://variety.com/2021/digital/news/unity-acquires-weta-digital-1235107544/
Ah, thanks. I completely missed that somehow, although I haven't really been keeping all that much of an eye on Unity (or the games industry in general, really) in the years since I quit working there
The talk was that Unreal was starting to get used in the entertainment industry for real-time set effects and they had no way to compete in that space.
Well yes, but for that they need to develop a competitor to Nanite, and Weta won’t get them any closer to that.