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Comment by jimmydorry | Hacker News Reader

100% agree on Zuckerberg really understanding Facebook and where it needed to go.

The most interesting part of the email to me was seeing his support for aquiring Unity. Not being able to land that acquisition almost feels like the critical reason Meta doesn't have much to show today, after all this effort. And it doesn't look like the aquisition failed due to lack of trying! ironSource ended up doing a merger acqusition that finally closed just a few days ago.

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For years I have wondered why all the big names pushed Unity in favor of Unreal Engine. Even before UE5 and before Fortnite, UE4 had better tech. than Unity.

Fortnite is the Metaverse currently.

I've used Unity and I'm still working on a solodev VR game with it. Unity has a lot of areas where it could improve. Meta seriously could have developed their own engine. With truly passionate people they could've used their capital to elevate an ECS engine like Bevy

That is so true, I really wish they had just given Carmack a hardcore team of graphics programmers and an infinite supply of diet coke and pizza and told him to go nuts.

They certainly could have, and would have been better off for it! The strategy they laid out was to acqui-purchase one, and I guess having nothing to show for it is the risk they undertook.

Buying Unity would have been a huge mistake. They should keep their focus on their core competency which is handling lots of concurrent users and providing an identity system. Let people use whatever engine they want to develop VR apps.

He outlined why it wouldn't have been a big mistake, and I can't see any disagreement with any of his points on that matter. Without owning an on-road to their platform, they run the risk of developers losing access to it.

why couldn't they buy Unity?

I haven't heard anything publicly. We can't even know how hard they tried.

What is stopping him to acquire Unity now? everything is on sale at the moment: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/U

The government, most likely. They’ve blocked other Meta acquisitions.

This may be the silver lining of the market cap evaporation for Meta. It is harder to argue that it is an all powerful monopoly now vs in 2021.

What sweet irony it would be if the biased coverage by NYT, WaPo, etc allowed Meta to resume making large acquisitions and maintain their dominance for years to come.

It merged with ironsource this year (and closed a few days ago). Considering the Unity board rejected other offers (even one from an ironsource competitor that was offering a significant premium), I think this ship has sailed.

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