If they're holding on and the full $525M isn't raised, then almost paradoxically, I'd wager that Unity is doing really really well. If they're selling, I don't think it necessarily can be construed as good or bad without proper context.
This is assuming the employees and stock holders are rational and can maintain long-term risky assets. Plenty of people will be looking to cash out as they've held stock for a long period and want to buy a nice house or car or something.
I'm sure the wealthier percentage will take a longer term look at it. But I wouldn't generalize the average equity owning employee as you would a typical public market.
A lot of people discussed what they should do openly, and recognized the potential for the stock to go up later on- many defaulted to selling half of their holdings as soon as they could to put some cash in their pocket, and holding on to half for potential gains. Not super sophisticated, but it seemed like it made good sense to me.
Services represent an opportunity to scale based on the success of products built on Unity, not just on the size of the developer community.
Because out of the engines that any game studio can use for a new project, there's really only Unity and Unreal.*
* = If they do not have their own internal engine or it is not applicable to their new game.
Is CRYENGINE no longer an option?
Also the idTech engine is limited to games that are published by Bethesda. So you can count it as an in-house engine now, just like Frostbite is for EA.
So, my point is, these kinds of deals are very often win-win, and can't signify that there's something wrong with the company.
Quoting from https://www.fool.com/slideshow/7-things-you-can-learn-mark-c...
5. Diversification is extremely important
It’s important to maintain a diverse investment portfolio, whether you’ve just come into billions of dollars as Mark Cuban did in 1999 or you’re starting with a few hundred dollars.
When Cuban and his partners sold Broadcast.com in 1999, they didn’t get billions in cash -- it was all in the form of Yahoo stock. Instead of holding virtually all of his wealth in one company’s stock, he did a great job of diversifying his investments. Cuban spent $20 million hedging his Yahoo stock with synthetic indexes, and shortly thereafter acquired assets such as the Dallas Mavericks and Landmark Theatres.
It’s a good thing Cuban did all of that. Yahoo’s stock price dropped by more than 96% from January 2000 through September 2011. To put this in perspective, $1 billion in Yahoo stock would have fallen in value to just over $34 million.
My understanding is that he used puts.
Either way, any derivative strategies he employed back then almost certainly violates any corporate stock agreement today.
Maybe they just want to be rich, now? Of course depending on how much I would get, but my decision to sell would have very little to do with how well I thought the company was going.