Unity Software (NYSE:U) was founded in 2004 as Over The Edge Entertainment. Over The Edge Entertainment was a software company focused on video games and visualization best know for its gaming platform Unity. Unity is the result of the company’s first game which was a huge failure. The company’s success lay in the tools it developed for making video games, which is when Unity was born. Unity is a game development platform that allows users to create and build-out interactive 2-D and 3-D environments for gaming and other applications.
The company changed its name in 2007 to Unity Software Inc to better represent the business and its goals. Unity Software was founded in Denmark but it is now headquartered in San Francisco, California. It is a member of the Russell 1000 index and brought in over $1.1 billion in revenue for fiscal 2021. The company employs more than 5,200 people and operates with a network of at least 6 subsidiary businesses including DeltaDNA, Multiplay, and Vivox.
Unity Software’s success is tied to that of the iPhone. Unity was among the first developers to fully support the iPhone operating system, making it a go-to choice for game developers. While no market share data is available for Unity in regard to the iPhone App Store, there are over 1 million games listed, and Unity powers a large portion of them.
Unity Software expanded its offerings beginning in 2009. Over the years it has added platforms for desktop, mobile, tablets, gaming consoles, 3-D, web-based and virtual reality. Unity’s technology has also been adapted to the movie/entertainment industry as well as the auto industry. The Unity Asset Store is a marketplace for Unity and its users to sell tools, artwork, etc to developers. The addition of Vivox to the fold provides a VOIP feature for gaming that is used in games like Fortnight where players, who may be playing from opposite sides of the Earth, operate in groups.
Unity Software announced its intention to go public in the summer of 2020. The IPO priced above the expected price and gave the company a valuation of $13.7 billion. The company operates in 3 segments: Create Solutions, Operate Solutions, and Other. In 2022, the company announced a major partnership with Microsoft to use its Azure cloud platform as its platform of choice for building cloud-based 3-D experiences with the Unity Engine.
