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Comment by VonGuard | Hacker News Reader

This should be a monster. We have no direct game development tools exposure on the stock market, unless you count Autodesk, but their tools are usable by other industries. That means it's gonna be shouldering a burden for an entire industry, and one that the stock market doesn't understand or appreciate. Potential for going either way, really.

Development tools have traditionally been a poor investment long term, but that's not been the case since about 2010, especially since Atlassian went public.

Unity is also gonna be a proxy for Unreal. Since these two competitors are not directly competing on the stock market, Unity should be a bit of a mirror for what the market thinks Unreal would be worth on its own.

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Not 100% sure I agree with analysis, for two reasons:

1. While the primary use case of Unity originally may have been game dev, the ubiquity of the software for other use cases (primarily VR/AR and other forms of online media) has been what's propelled it to this level.

2. Epic Games is much much more than the Unreal Engine. Highly recommend looking into Matthew Balls' Epic Primer [1], but Unreal is one corner of the Epic flywheel. Which is probably why they opted to raise a billion [2] in funding recently instead of IPO-ing post-Fortnite

[1]https://www.matthewball.vc/all/epicgamesprimermaster [2] https://venturebeat.com/2020/08/06/epic-games-unveils-1-78-b...

> That means it's gonna be shouldering a burden for an entire industry

> Unity is also gonna be a proxy for Unreal

Why do you think it has to do all these things? Why can't it just be a stock on its own?

There's always a sector influence on the valuation of stocks - if an analyst writes a report saying the gaming sector as a whole is going to grow 1000x in the next 10 years, you can bet people will be looking for stocks to ride that wave.

If Unity is the only buyable stock in the sector, then they'll feel the impact.

There are lots of existing stocks in the gaming sector though, so it would need to be more like "game engines are going to grow 1000x".

Excellent point with regard to dev tools not being a successful LT investment, with Oracle being an exception. I find Atalassia being sellers of dev "app", a standalone final product rather than a component in an overall solution that is effectively tax on every copy.

Think less as in development tools and more as in content tools, and how hard it is to pick a winner for content (but it's been obvious that content is exploding!). Games and AR/VR are just another form of content.

I put some money into a strategy around the proverbial shovel salesmen for content creation last year, and I really wish I put in more and bought the dip harder.

I agree until you say Unity will proxy Unreal. I intentionally looked for investment options for Unity in order to possibly _short_ Unreal based on the recent Epic v. Apple news.

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