I mean, they both are. That's the whole point of this post here, to show Weta and Unity and the tools they have for movie makers. With your "Unity... Well.", what did you mean? Weta and and Unity aren't doing this?
It's good that Weta/Unity has competition now with Unreal and vice versa. We've seen what happens when one entity controls nearly everything (Looking at Autodesk here).
Currently, Weta is an outsider. Even internally, the acquisition had raised eyebrows among the trenches. The decision was criticized quite a bit by game developers using Unity as well. Unity itself is also somewhat troubled direction wise; their biggest product is a game engine, but their biggest revenue source is ads. They merged with an ad company recently, and purchased a movie VFX studio. They seem ready to pivot to whatever tech trend that they can catch.
> With your "Unity... Well.", what did you mean? Weta and and Unity aren't doing this?
I would say that "Epic is deeply invested in building stuff for the movie industry," while Unity isn't. Weta may be established in the movie industry, but the Weta Unity bought is the tool division, not the VFX division. Weta tools is also an acquisition, and does not create waves throughout Unity like how movie production make waves inside Epic. It is the difference between an acquisition to compete, and a vision to expand.
I don't think that's true if we group all the subscription, "strategic partnership" and other engine related revenue together but yeah, but Ads is about half.
To be fair it might not be that bad because there isn't that much revenue to gain from engine sales, especially using a subscription model (though I don't think royalties are bringing that much revenue for Epic either..). Unity is quite expensive if you're a hobyist, indie or just use it occasionally but it's dirt cheap if you're a mobile ad-filled P2W shovelware developer. IAP is monopolized by Apple/Google so Ads allows Unity to get a bit larger bite of the pie compared to the pittance (compared to overall revenue games made with it make) they get by directly selling the engine.
Weta was an entity of its own for longer than Unity as a company has been around. Unity bought them (well, the tech assets) as a reaction to Epic moving into and firmly setting up shop in the film business.
I mean, Mandalorean had already shot season one with Epic's tech before Unity woke up and decided/realised that it's being left behind [1].
Unity is a game engine company that hasn't produced a single game, moving into film making tools by never producing, and only acquiring, film making tools as a reaction to competition. Competition is good, but is Unity a company that can actually compete in this space? I hope so, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
[1]
Epic already boasting about it in early 2020 https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/forging-new-paths-fo...
Unity announcing aquisition in late 2021 https://blog.unity.com/news/welcome-weta-digital
To be fair this isn't that different from Adobe or Autodesk for instance. Aren't most professional tools, middleware etc. like that?
Historically game engines seem to have been an aberration in that regard since they were almost exclusively built in house and they sometimes made available to third parties with very limited commercial success in almost all cases.
In a gold rush, the one selling the shovels is usually the one making the most profit.
