What's next for Unity after the IronSource merger?
Today Unity announced that it and IronSource finally completed their merger in a deal that valued the Tel Aviv-headquartered business platform at $4.4 billion.
News of the merger (and a series of not-great headlines in the weeks that followed) pushed some game developers to openly question if Unity was still a company laser-focused on the video game market. In September, senior vice presidents Marc Whitten and Ralph Hauwert hastened to explain that the company is still a games-first firm.
Now where is Unity headed? In a follow-up call with Whitten, the senior vice president of Unity Create was able to share some interesting details about the company's direction. He's apparently spent the last few months on calls and in conversation with Unity clients, and he's bullish on the company's ability to improve the platform for game developers.
Whitten declined to describe any specific details about what the next few months for Unity look like, but our conversation kept dancing around the topic of having game developers ship on multiple platforms.
When we quizzed Whitten about how he sees Unity's major merger in relation to the waves of mergers and acquisitions taking place across the industry, he pointed toward the proliferation of multi-platform development. "There's more and more of an emphasis on the need to...reach across multiple platforms," he observed.
Whitten clarified that this topic includes multi-platform play (letting players on different platforms interact with each other) and multi-platform title availability (letting players purchase or download games on multiple platforms).
This topic spun off into a conversation about the proliferation of handheld video game consoles that have become a dominant trend in 2022.
Read more on gamedeveloper.com
