I spent the past 2 days of holidays reading the 200 pages of Unity's S-1 (I blame Covid).

Here's a thread on what I found relevant from a game engine developer point of view - and as it relates to the use of game engines outside of the games industry.

The games industry has grown from <$15B industry 20 years ago to >$140B in annual revenue today.

Unity's revenue grew from $380.8M in 2018 to $541.8M in 2019, YoY growth of 42%.

Unity generated net losses of $131.6M in 2018 and $163.2M in 2019 (unmentioned YoY "growth" of 24%).

Most people associate Unity with the game engine (Create Solutions), but an increasingly large part of their revenue comes from content monetization, cloud back-end, and analytics (Operate Solutions).

During the first half of 2020, Operate Solutions brought in 62% of Unity's total revenue - up from 54% during the first half of 2019.

This means things such as Unity Ads and IAP, deltaDNA, Multiplay, and Vivox.

Unity has committed to spend $189.0M on Google Cloud Platform between 2018 and 2024.

This is an indication on the importance of Operate Solutions to their growth plan.

"[...]AAA games represent an attractive growth opportunity for Unity. The highest grossing games of each gaming hardware cycle have been built by ~100 of the world’s largest studios."

Another growth area is driving migration away from proprietary technology stacks (and Unreal).

"We are investing in the development of products, services and go-to-market strategies that serve industries beyond gaming, where we believe our long-term potential is many times greater than in gaming."

60 out of 716 customers contributing >$100K yearly are outside of gaming.

Market Opportunity:

* Gaming: $12 billion in 2019 across over 15 million potential creators

* Other industries: 17 billion today across an estimated 43M architects, engineers and technicians in industries beyond gaming

Uses of Unity outside of gaming include architecture, engineering, construction, automotive, transportation, manufacturing, film, television and retail.

Use cases include automobile and building design, product configurators, AR safety training and autonomous driving simulation.

In a letter from CEO John Riccitiello about the use of Unity in industries beyond gaming:

"What started as an unproven thesis, transformed to being an opportunity where we needed to hone product market fit, and now, today, it seems inevitable."

This reminds me of a recent conversation between @ballmatthew and @patrick_oshag on the importance of more interactivity and feedback loops in media beyond games:

http://investorfieldguide.com/matt-ball-the-future-of-media-movies-the-metaverse-and-more-invest-like-the-best-ep-185/

Other interesting facts I found:

Unity had 2715 employees by the end of 2019 but by the end of June 2020 it had 3379.

This means they added more than 100 people per month on average during this period.

"Competition is intense [...] for engineers experienced in designing and developing cloud-based platform products, data scientists with experience in machine learning and artificial intelligence[...]"

Notice there's no mention on the difficulty of hiring game engine developers..

This affects everyone:

"[...] the data protection authority in Berlin, encouraged companies under its supervision to stop transfers of personal data to the United States and switch to service providers based in the EU or other countries providing adequate data protection."

I'm excited to host a @whatstheii salon this Sunday about the use of game engines outside of the games industry!

This S-1 and its broader impact will also be a focus.

cc @andymmmmc @TheAlexYao @timsoret @davidbarrie @juandanielgr @SiMono3D https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/how-game-engines-are-eating-the-world-interintellect-salon-tickets-117716927499