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Earlier this year, Electronic Arts was snapped up by a consortium including Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) and the investment firms Silver Lake and Affinity Partners in a deal worth $55 billion. According to Reuters, now the PIF and Silver Lake have their sights set on Unity Software, the company behind the multiplatform game engine of the same name.
Silver Lake is already one of Unity’s bigger shareholders, owning roughly 8% of the company since investing around $400 million in it back in 2017. “Silver Lake’s Egon Durban also sits on Unity’s board,” as Reuters notes, “a dual role that would typically lead him to recuse himself from board deliberations on a sale.”
The deliberations so far apparently include a valuation of about $25 billion, though since then Unity’s most recent earnings report has come in, showing profits higher than estimated. Unity’s come a long way since the Runtime Fee scandal, but it’s not all about improvements to the engine like its ability to integrate with Unreal. As Reuters reports, “Strong growth in Unity’s AI-powered Vector advertising platform helped it post its first quarterly profit on a GAAP basis since going public in September 2020.”
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The first thing that happened to EA after it was acquired was mass layoffs and being saddled with $18 billion of debt. I can’t imagine anyone actually working at Unity has their fingers crossed for this deal to go through, but the videogame industry does seem determined to speedrun its way into a consolidation crisis where three consortiums own everything and almost everyone is unemployed.