Unity in the process of buying Parsec for $320 Million Dollars

[LstpersonalOF]

 

Summary

The parent company of Unity, it's in plan of its biggest acquisition of another gaming company. The deal, that was announced on Tuesday, sees Unity taking control of Parsec.

 

 

Quote

In the years since Unity's 2005 inception, its tools have been used to make games for pretty much every console, smartphone, and VR platform imaginable. It's similar to other publicly available game engines like Unreal, as it revolves around a general toolset that can be used to build video games from scratch or expanded upon as developers see fit. Unity users can then nimbly port finished games across a variety of weaker and stronger platforms.

 

My thoughts:

Even Doh Parsec Announced that part of the aquisition meant that parsec would still be free mentioned in a tweet from their official twitter page: https://twitter.com/ParsecTeam/status/1425206344467034113 

we will probably see some stuff of it change in the future however i dont see how necesarilly it is benefitial for unity being a game developer only and parsec being a game streaming platform 

 

Sources:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/08/game-engine-meet-game-streaming-unity-acquires-parsec-for-320m/

[HarryNyquist]

Parsec isn't just for playing games, it's also used by enterprises as a more comprehensive remote work solution than traditional remote desktop.

 

Unity's probably buying them to sell a package deal to developers. Buy a Unity license for your game, you get Parsec as well. Now you don't have to pay a lease for a real office, you can just have everyone work remote via Parsec.

[Taf the Ghost]

Epic has made it clear they're getting into the back-end infrastructure of gaming. Unity is simply responding. This one seems a little strange, but it's also a profitable company with room for growth and integrating remote functionality right into game engines could be very interesting. 

[Taf the Ghost]

44 minutes ago, HarryNyquist said:

Parsec isn't just for playing games, it's also used by enterprises as a more comprehensive remote work solution than traditional remote desktop.

 

Unity's probably buying them to sell a package deal to developers. Buy a Unity license for your game, you get Parsec as well. Now you don't have to pay a lease for a real office, you can just have everyone work remote via Parsec.

I don't think its about remote work in quite the way you're thinking. The area that strikes me as most fruitful is full integration into the development environment. Think of being able to spawn VMs on a remote (either in-office or fully remote) development server to test something or do work. Imagine 6 other developers doing the same thing. Also think about it for Playtesting or remote QA. A designer could basically set a Unity Instance of what they want tested and ship it over to QA for work. You cut out hours of work & prep time and lower the time on bug fixes. It kind of looks a bit what Stadia was supposed to bring about, but will actually happen.

[Chris Cook]

As someone who has worked with Unity extensively over the years.  I think that this is a great acquisition for them.  with them having Parsec, I can see that people will now be able to build/launch/test from the IDE and target specific platforms i.e. Linux, Windows, Mac etc without actually having to own that hardware.  Also it will give Unity and its users the ability to leverage cloud computing for such things as their already integrated machine learning 

[BondiBlue]

Interesting. I've been quite pleased with their software on the consumer side, and for a time I was actually using an iMac as a second monitor through Parsec. It worked quite well. 

[Kisai]

16 hours ago, Lesantir_Personal said:

Parsec Announced that part of the aquisition meant that parsec would still be free mentioned in a tweet from their official twitter page

You can never trust that kind of pledge. Look no further than CentOS, CPanel, and various other attempts to buy up vital parts of the internet via changing licensing models.

 

Now, that said, I don't think Unity is a complete disaster. It's a moderate disaster under some scenarios. As a game engine for small games, indie games, and low-effort games, It's fine. But for Multiplayer it's been rather awful.

 

https://parsec.app/sdk

Quote

Simple Integration

Minimal. Intuitive. Straightforward.

With a Unity plugin, code samples, and an active community, you’ll be able to get the Parsec SDK in your game quickly. The SDK is a single library under 5MB.

5MB is actually huge when it comes to code.

 

At any rate, my guess here is that they will incorporate Parsec directly into the Unity game engine and jettison the existing netcode or move the old code to plugins. Parsec will likely get used for stadia-like experiences.

 

 

[Taf the Ghost]

@Kisaiwhile I would favor the view that Parsec is more for development integration, l hadn't thought about using Parsec netcode as a baseline for Unity. That could actually be a real benefit to the engine.