A presentation pitching the Unity platform has been circulating around the gaming industry, prompting some to speculate that the game engine is going up for sale soon. Originally reported by CNET, the move would dramatically affect the millions of developers who rely on Unity to build games quickly; most of which happen to be on the mobile app developers.
Unity is one of the most ubiquitous game engines in the world, with nearly half of all mobile games relying on it. This stems from the cross-platform capabilities of the engine allow it to develop games for iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Xbox, PlayStation, and PC. Should Unity be sold off, it may end up affecting the licensing agreement used by these developers who rely causing them to look for alternatives; which are few and hard to come by. The CryTek CryEngine doesn’t support as many platforms and tends to favour high end gaming machines, while the Unreal Engine from Epic Games is simply not as popular due to it being slower in supporting iOS.
It is not certain that Unity is trying to sell itself, as the presentation being circulated could just be the company shopping around for interested parties. Unity itself has declined to comment on the matter; but it would not come as a surprise if it was looking for additional funding that could come from a sale. Continuous development of a game engine does not come cheap, as the CryEngine has discovered due to the current financial difficulties being experienced by CryTek.
[Source: CNET]
