Unity acquires Weta Digital for $1.6 billion

Unity has now acquired weta digital for an insane amount of money. For those who don't know Weta Digital, they're a giant in the VFX world for their work on every Lord Of The Rings movie, all the Planet Of The Apes remakes, and they've hand a hand in everything from Godzilla to Game Of Thrones. They have won six oscars for Visual Effects, and multiple other awards too. Simply put, this is a huge deal both for videogames and VFX industries - Unity is acquiring the insanely high-end AAA Weta tech with the intention of making those tools available to anyone with a Unity licence. I don't doubt this will also catapult Unity forward towards being a multi-purpose 3D package on par with Unreal (and their groundbreaking virtual production toolset), and will continue to blur the lines between VFX for games and for films.

Also joining Unity are 275 of Weta’s engineers; in addition, Unity is acquiring Weta’s data and SaaS cloud businesses as well as a large library of visual effects assets. Not included is Weta Digital’s core visual effects business; the company’s visual effects artists will instead be working under the roof of a newly formed entity called WetaFX

The US-listed Unity said the visual special effect tools created by Weta Digital, which has built characters and scenes from film spanning Avatar, LOTR, Wonder Woman and Planet of the Apes, will now be “democratised” and put in the hands of “millions of creators and artists around the world”. “Weta Digital’s tools created unlimited possibilities for us to bring to life the worlds and creatures that originally lived in our imaginations,” said Sir Peter, chairman and co-founder of Weta Digital. “Together, Unity and Weta Digital can create a pathway for any artist, from any industry, to be able to leverage these incredibly creative and powerful tools.”

More here.

Simply put, it's a huge investment in one of the most popular game development softwares in the world. It's pretty exciting to think what game devs will be able to do with free access to the weta toolset. Having said that, I do not envy the army of engineers that are now having to integrate all their shit into Unity!

That's pretty neat! It feels like it was only 7-ish years ago that Unity was mostly known for being the budget option for small time indie devs that want to make a 2d or very rudimentary 3d game. But now you look at games like Outer Wilds, Kerbal Space Program, Firewatch, Hollow Knight, Ori and Escape From Tarkov, and you realize that there has been quite a spread of quality games coming out of Unity.

Welcome to the Wetaverse.

I'm from NZ, and even for people here the inner workings of Weta Digital (a Weta is a native insect that looks kind of like a large locust) have always been a pretty closed box. Weta has a visitors center, but it's just a bunch of props.

The only sense I can make out of the purchase is that Unity wants to move into tv/movie CGI like Unreal has already.

Yup, totally, i don't currently see how this aquisition helps either Unity or Weta.

@cikame: One thing to remember is that these kinds of acquisitions often have financial reasons behind them that we don't know because we don't know the tangle of international tax and regulations the company is dealing with. Looking at it in terms of how it helps with the front facing business ignores aspects that are just as important in business but much more opaque. Maybe it creates a favorable tax environment. Maybe Unity found itself with a bunch of cash or credit and this seemed like a potentially good way to utilize it. Maybe there's a sweetheart deal going on for some board members. We have no idea.

How it helps Weta is that its owners get massive buckets of cash, probably more than the business was actually worth. That's the easiest part, especially if they are less interested in running the company as they've gotten older and want to just buy private islands and kick back.

There are obvious synergies between the businesses in terms of visual effects and the like but a lot of mergers and acquisitions are more about the financial aspect than the actual businesses. Companies do not always highlight that publicly, especially if the financial aspects include tax evasion games (note that I am talking about legal tax evasion, rather than any kind of illegal activity, and I have no knowledge of what's going on here specifically.)

My first reaction to this was "where the hell did Unity get that much cash". Turns out they went public last year and have a market cap north of $50 billion.

For some reason I still think of them as the people with the plucky little indie game dev toolset.

Unity having access to weta's toolset will make unity more versatile both for existing game developers and for unity as a software than can now also be used for film/VFX work. Unreal has been moving in that direction for years and it's working out pretty great for them, and it seems like the more versatile a software package can be the more likely it's going to be integrated into existing workflows. This is a big step towards blurring the lines between game and film quality vfx. So it's going to make Unity a much more desirable software to use for large scale/big budget film and game production.

As for weta, they just made 1.6 billion dollars. That's million bucks.

Once I heard that Unity will be licencing the tools back out to WETA, that's when this really made sense. Adding that entirely different set of tools to your internal team certainly broadens their capability.

But adding it to your licensing business adds more potential clients who can view Unity as more than what they were before.