Wow! Do you have a sense why it's not a profitable business for them? Just on the face of it, they have they have what is arguably the dominant product in this category, and they charge a reasonable license fee to use it.
I find it worrying if "make good software and sell it to people" isn't sufficient to have a profitable business.
And of course, Unity doesn't merely sell licenses, they also run an asset store and take a cut from every transaction, a business model that has been gold for other technology companies. Of course the market for Unity assets is smaller than mobile apps, but this is in addition to actual Unity licenses.
I do not have any insight into Unity besides looking at that plummeting profit graph.
But if they have a great product and a high price, then maybe they're just using way too many resources as input. It's easy to see that happening with bloated org charts / massive cloud bills / lots of overhead of some sort.
Is the fee reasonable if the company charging it has trouble making a profit?
I have no clue how profitable Unreal Engine is for Epic Games or if its subsidized by Fortnite. I believe their pricing structure only became favorable after that smash hit.
Well I guess that was my question! But starting at $200 per month per person seems relatively expensive, I'm surprised that's not enough to make a profit. (There is a free version, but as far as I know virtually no professional project is able to use that.)
They are like the angry birds company rovio entertainment, which had a whopping 500+ employees in 2022. The amount of bloat is insane and they had to enshittify their entire franchise as a result of this.
I find it worrying if "make good software and sell it to people" isn't sufficient to have a profitable business.
And of course, Unity doesn't merely sell licenses, they also run an asset store and take a cut from every transaction, a business model that has been gold for other technology companies. Of course the market for Unity assets is smaller than mobile apps, but this is in addition to actual Unity licenses.