Couldn't find an existing discussion on this so I hope I'm not being repetitive.

As someone who goofs around with Unity, the idea of them looking for a buyer raises a bunch of questions. The main one of course is who buys them. When I saw their last press release about their closer connection with Oculus, it got me thinking maybe it was Facebook who started asking about purchasing them.

Seems like it would make sense in order to build out the Oculus business. Though I'm sure Unity would then see if anybody else wanted to buy them for a higher price.

I've heard Autodesk might also be interested. It'd be a shame if, say, Unreal bought them just to get the engineers.

@grimpopo: I just moved this to the Unity page fyi.

I hope they get picked up by a third party so people can continue to use this engine however they please. Seeing a Microsoft or Sony lock it up and place restrictions on it would be a bummer.

I wonder what this will be going forward for developers on Unity. Especially those in early access and such.

By far one of the biggest advantages of Unity is its ubiquity across all platforms, so I really hope that regardless of what happens, we still end up having a solid engine with a low barrier to entry (i.e. free version) that makes multiplatform releases easy. It would be nothing short of disastrous to a large portion of the indie development community to see restrictions placed upon the Unity engine.

Autodesk's interest makes sense, and it seems like it could be a good fit.

@chaser324 said:

Autodesk makes a ton of sense. Unity would align pretty neatly with some of their other acquisitions, and I think they'd be much better stewards than a lot of other potential buyers.

Whoever potentially ends up purchasing Unity Technologies, I sincerely hope that they keep supporting a free version. I am certain that Unity and Gamemaker are going to be the foundational building blocks for future game developers. Autodesk would be neat, having integrated send to Unity or send back to Maya functionality would be awesome for workflow. Unity already does an excellent job handling all sort of file types, hopefully they wouldn't limit those either.

I am getting really annoyed by all of the "small companies" that are starting to make it big selling to the highest bidder. It's like no one actually cares about the things they make anymore and just want as much money for their great ideas as possible.

I hope Unity stays its own thing.

Autodesk charges about 1,000% of what their software is worth, and it typically runs about 10% as fast as the open-source counterparts, so I really get scared by the thought of Autodesk purchasing them. And, Facebook... my god, that could be scary. Only time will tell who purchases them and how much control they'll have, so I'll suspend any more anger and fear a bit longer.

With Epic primarily just being a game engine provider these days, I could see how they might be interested in buying Unity. (Like Autodesk buying up Alias and Softimage) I just question if they could afford the bidding if Google or Facebook is calling.

Same is true of Autodesk. Autodesk is certainly a much bigger company, but the bulk of that is CAD and Architecture - oh wait, Unity certainly would make sense to build out pre-viz. And they already have their foot in the game tools door with Scaleform.

Hmmm, interesting.

I think Epic would probably get the capital from Tencent, who have a 48% stake in the company.

As for Autodesk, they've been moving aggressively into games middleware over the last couple of years with acquisitions like Kynogon, Illuminate Labs (Beast GI), Grip and Scaleform, as you mentioned. Something like Unity would be huge addition to the Gameware portfolio.