Unity and

📈Unity Technologies is the first big video game engine manufacturer to go public, 📹Amazon wants to know our every move and the game is tied between Apple and Epic

We’re taking a break from our usual broadcast to announce that Africa is now free of wild Polio, a decade after Nigeria accounted for half the number of cases worldwide 👏

IP Oh?

Whilst most expected a period of austerity to follow the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, the last few weeks have brought us a deluge of new IPO announcements. From Airbnb to Palantir, Asana, Snowflake, and Sumo Logic, the variety of industries represented here is quite large, but the one I’m going to look into more is one closer to my jam, Unity.

As I said at the time of the announcement, the numbers Unity showed in their S-1 filing were impressive for most, but not downright shocking for people working in the industry. According to them, there are 1.5M creators using the engine, more than half of the video games developed across all platforms are made with Unity making up for 3B downloads every month and fifteen thousand new projects are being made every day. Let’s dig a little deeper…

So what are you investing in when if you end up buying Unity stock? The company’s main product is the Unity game engine, with the acquisition of many other companies over the year being made in order to improve it in various ways. This software is currently being used by game developers as an easy solution to get up and running, but we can’t neglect the steadily increasing users coming from fields like film, animation, music, architecture, engineering, construction, automotive or manufacturing.

We can split the business aspects of Unity into two large groups: Creation, the ability to create a virtual world in the engine, and Operation, tools that allow developers to maintain their game once built, engage with their audience or monetize their content. Companies pay a subscription fee while in the creation phase, making up for 43% of the revenue right now, and, when they switch into operation mode, Unity transitions them into a revenue-sharing model, bringing up the rest of 57% revenue. Similar to the gold rush, the shovel-making company always wins.

One area that looked completely detached from reality is when Unity talk about the potential of a Total Addressable Market in the future, placing it around $29Bn. This is, more or less, the current valuation of Unity and Epic games put together. Mind you, we’re at the very beginning of things to come right now, and it’s safe to assume Unity representatives are aware of this as well.

I see a lot of opinions from various individuals not realizing the potential of game engines, many don’t seem to grasp the breadth of their usefulness and mistake the tools for making games as having the same usefulness as the tools for making movies. Because they’re both forms of entertainment, right? Not quite.

Products like Unity and Unreal Engine 4 offer astounding levels of scale, both concerning the creation/development phase and the potential for distribution of the final product. Creative teams using this type of software range from the now-notorious solo dev to the thousand-strong team dispersed on five continents while their game, once ready to be distributed, will be ready to function on all platforms at the push of a button. The interactive, real-time nature of video games —and by extension that of the tools that help create them— translates into a more engaging and immersive experience for consumers, an experience that’s ready to adapt to each individual style of play. Not that dissimilar to day-to-day life come to think about it.

If you’re familiar with the plot in The Matrix trilogy, or any other work that involves a fully simulated world that has humans plugged into it, chances are that IRL, that world will be designed in a software suite like Unity or Unreal Engine. With advancements being made in both VR and AR, the question now is not if, but when.

All of this looks pretty good, so why wouldn’t someone invest in Unity on Day 1. The main, and perhaps only, reason for this is that company that’s been fighting the most valuable company in the world in open court. The timing of this filing is no mistake. Epic Games is the other party involved in what developed to be a duopoly, and they’ve been raising money privately. Rumors of the company going public traveled over the past few years and everyone was expecting this one to be the year; then they decided to sue Apple.

The fact of the matter is that, while more than half of the games made today use Unity when looking at absolute numbers, the profitable games that involve experienced developers of a certain size use Unreal Engine 4. The lower barrier to entry of Unity attracts a lot more hobbyists that end up developing non-profitable products, while the expert knowledge needed to wield UE4 caters specifically for the more able. Make no mistake, it’s Pepsi that filed for an S-1 recently, and not Coke, it remains to be seen if potential buyers will realize this fact or if they even care. Being second when the market is made up of only two competitors doesn’t sound that bad to me…

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A Delayed 1984

All that data Alexa collected over the past years is finally paying off big time in Amazon’s new ‘lifestyle wristband’, quotation marks important.

The Amazon Halo wristband and APP combo are supposed to ‘help customers improve their individual health and wellness’ in exchange for $100 for the device and 6 months subscription, plus a $4/month fee after that. The new device looks pretty similar to older Fitbit products in style but also incorporates some innovative features never before seen on such devices. Depending on your personal level of paranoia against technology, you may want to replace ‘innovative’ with ‘creepy’ there.

The Halo wristband can track your activity levels—but not specific fitness exercises—, sleep patterns, voice tone, and, with the help of a smartphone, it can 3D scan your body and suggest how much of it is body fat. Let’s look at all these items individually and see how they could benefit the Amazon mothership in the future.

The Halo APP tracks the user’s number of steps and cardio fitness on a weekly basis—as opposed to the millisecond version of other such devices— and outputs a more general report of fitness. The inactivity tracker will start deducting from your activity score if you were stationary for more than a few hours and the heart rate sensor can help differentiate between the intensity of various exercises. The band+APP package can help you break down your sleep into REM and nREM and track your body temperature as you sleep.

Mothership Benefits. The list of all the diseases and maladies that are caused or worsened by the lack of physical activity or due to bad sleep is only getting larger as scientists come out with new papers every year. Amazon teamed up with Berkshire and JPMorgan with the mission of transforming employee health care, the Halo ecosystem looks like the physical part that will enable that effort in the field. Some companies started offering employees sleep trackers years ago and offered them benefits if they averaged eight hours of sleep per night. From this, we can extrapolate outwards to infer future behavior that’s at least disturbing at the moment, if not outright sickening.

While the Halo band doesn’t have Alexa integration, so you can’t issue it voice commands, it does have a pair of mutable microphones that pick up what you say; along with all the ambient sound data in your immediate vicinity. The device then analyzes the pitch, intensity, rhythm and tempo of your voice and deduces your emotional state throughout the day. Then the consumer can go back and review whether they were hopeful, hesitant, confused, or worried at any point previously. Users can opt-out of the feature and Amazon assures us that the APP deletes each voice sample right after the sentiment of it is identified.

Mothership Benefits. Every time I hear about a piece of technology that’s able to deduce human emotion in one way or another, I get chills down my back. The possibilities for exploitation here are endless when you think these moods are stored per consumer account. AI could easily cluster these emotions based on time of day/week and aim to change them for you via shopping recommendations in the endless race to increasing Amazon.com revenue. If they would be able to sync this data together with positional data from an APP, the insight becomes even more powerful. Layer on top all the insight that can be gathered from the ambient sounds around the wearer as they move through the world and it becomes easy to see how any company could easily change human behavior en masse with a data trove that’s this large and diverse.

The 3D body scan is done by using your phone’s cameras, taking photos from three different angles, and then sending the data to Amazon’s cloud that creates a three-dimensional scan of yourself. After the scan is put together, the data is sent back to your phone and deleted from the servers, then an Artificial Intelligence algorithm will calculate your body fat. Mind you, Amazon says this process is more accurate than smart scales that deduce body fat content by way of bioelectrical impedance.

Mothership Benefits. Some implications of giving Amazon your body shape and body fat content are pretty obvious, other, long-term ones, less so. Knowing that someone is over or underweight will enable Amazon.com to suggest fixes for it, be it weight loss solutions or weight gain products like protein powders. It will even be able to suggest more aggressive items like drugs if the situation is dire. Another obvious one is clothing, Amazon is going increasingly more into the sphere with its own brands, and having millions of body shapes linked to their respective user accounts will be useful to doing everything from optimizing inventory to showing how an article will look on each individual consumer in real-time. I have no doubt this will turn out to be a leap in fashion eCommerce.

Predicting that after this announcement we’d have a lot of questions on privacy, Amazon created a special page where they break down how your Halo data will and won’t be used. The company mentions Amazon accounts will not have access to this health data, but on the other hand, the company’s track record for sharing data between departments that shouldn’t share data is less than stellar. The internal term for this is, famously, is ‘throwing it over the fence’. Amazon used this to spy on the sales data of third-party sellers so they’d know which products would be most successful when launched as first-party products. The implications would be a lot more severe if this was to happen with personal health data; and a lot more prone to class-action lawsuits from the masses and governments alike.

As I mentioned in the beginning, there are some new features in Amazon’s new solution, but a lot of functionality we’re used to on top-of-the-line watches is obviously missing. From the looks of it, the company kept its MO and focused on the lower end of the pricing range, cutting both hardware, in the form of the lack of a screen, GPS, WiFi or skin conductivity sensors, and the functionality they bring. Instead of focusing on the hardcore fitness enthusiast, Amazon is going after the average person who just wants to track their health and lifestyle across their day-to-day life. The temperature and heart rate sensors along with the week-long battery life and waterproofness will do well in satisfying the needs of a lifestyle consumer.

I’ve seen reports saying that the Halo is ‘a departure’ from Amazon’s past devices. That in the past Amazon made home-based devices like the Echo and Fire range. A valid, if shortsighted, interpretation of the situation. The reality is Amazon has always made data-gathering devices, the home-tied solutions just happened to be easier in the beginning. The Halo is just a mobile, personal, always-with-you data-gathering device, a natural evolution towards device ubiquity in our lives.

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Love-All

The first court skirmish between Epic and Apple took place last week with Epic requesting the judge to mandate that Apple put Fortnite back on the AppStore immediately and forbid them from blocking the development and distribution of Unreal Engine on Apple devices.

After saying that Epic could have been more forthright about adding the code that allowed for direct transactions in the latest version of Fortnite but also acknowledging that consumers have no choice of an app store on the iPhone, the judge ruled that Apple doesn’t need to reinstate the APP to its store, but they couldn’t ban Epic’s Unreal Engine access to its SDK either. The first encounter appears to have ended in a tie game.

Frankly, I don’t imagine Apple ever thought they could go through with banning UE from accessing its system considering the status quo. As mentioned by Microsoft in their support statement, a lot of developers have already invested hefty sums in creating pipelines that are quintessentially dependent on using Unreal Engine for the development of their products and have ongoing multi-year deals with the company. A ban would have harmed thousands of developers a lot more than it would Epic Games.

Apple’s motivations behind that decision feel more like a promise relating to the magnitude of things to come for anyone who decides to sue Apple in open court: thermonuclear war.

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1. Teachers are ready to use whatever means necessary to connect with students when they go back to school, including gaming products like Minecraft and Roblox. There was a time when learning institutions relied on games for teaching new skills to pupils but, unfortunately and for obscure reasons, today this is limited to lower education. I’m glad to see games reemerge from their existing image of entertainment for the lazy and into fully-fledged education tools for the next generation 🎒🎮

2. Sony opened pre-orders for the PS5 in the US last week, but there are conditions. There’s only a ‘limited supply’, so just one console per person and no more than two accessories, orders will be filled as they come and no, there’s still no word on the pricing. Sony is either trying to raise its visibility through this artificial scarcity play or making an attempt to gauge player interest but it’s hard to get an accurate measure of the latter without more details, especially without the pricing element. Also, a ‘limited supply’ of a console that’s supposed to ship millions of units come Fall? You can do better…🕹️

3. Facebook is moving every AR and VR-related propriety under its own umbrella. At the way things are evolving with the two areas, I’m surprised this didn’t happen earlier, AR and VR technology are moving on parallel tracks at the moment and, as I mentioned previously, they will merge into one in the future. On the other hand, Facebook have been trying to consolidate their other proprieties under one roof in the expectation of being ordered by some government or another to break up their business, bringing Oculus in is just shooting two birds with one stone here 👓👓

4. This interesting article that looks at iOS APPs published outside the AppStore itself, but still accessible for regular users, is very much worth a read. I’m digging the feeling of exclusivity given by the low maximum number of users and with Apple increasing restrictions on AppStore-published products, I could see how this boutique-meets-community vibe might catch on. It doesn’t help that Apple owns TestFlight and they could further restrict it to account for such developments but hey, one can hope📰👍

5. After promising an investigation into its Studio Head for inappropriate behavior that never happened, multiple employees at Lab Zero games resigned in protest last week. Good⚖️👍

6. As DJ Khaled would say, ‘ANOTHER ONE!’ The latest gaming franchise to be turned into a live-action TV adaptation by Netflix is Resident Evil, the newly-announced series will be made up of eight hour-long episodes and it will involve the creators of ‘Supernatural’ and those from ‘The Walking Dead’. Great news for TV, great news for gaming, see more of my thoughts on crossing video game franchises and movies in the future here📺🕹️

7. We see a lot of people joining the gaming industry this day being motivated by tales of high salaries and with little-to-no other motivation in mind, this is one of the reasons most people only stay in the industry for ~6 years. Technet made a solid Salaries and Insights Guide for this year, you should see it and spread it around to anyone you might think is interested in taking the step 💰💰

8. BTW, as thousands continue to die every day in the US, Wuhan is back to music festivals🎶🥳

This weaving job requires workers to file their nails in a that they can be used as tools…

Did someone just acknowledge they were basing their DC character on a Marvel IP? Is that even…allowed? #douchyCaptainAmerica

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