Unity has just signed a new deal with the tech firm CACI. This multi-billion dollar company works with the US government to provide homeland security and national defense tools, and with this three-year multi-million-dollar contract, Unity will become the preferred real-time 3D platform for the US government.
First reported by GameDeveloper, Unity went on to state,
“This win is the single largest Digital Twin Solutions deal for Unity to date and is a strategic deal that helps to solidify Unity as the preferred real-time 3D platform for future systems design and simulation programs across the US Government”
While this of course sounds like good news, this announcement comes less than a year after employees at Unity voiced their concerns about the company’s ethics in regard to working on military projects. It has been said that the employees have been working on technology over the last few years, that could be used as a vital asset within the US government, without even realizing they had been doing so. This is when the workers decided to ask the engine maker to be more transparent about each of their development processes.
It has also been claimed that Unity had been a part of an initiative called GovTech, where they were pursuing government and military contracts that would help the government learn more about AI developments and technologies. In Unity’s final statements, they stated that this is a very exciting project for them and that this will be the most substantial Digital Twins Solutions deal thus far.
It has also been noted that this deal was announced just mere days after AppLovin attempted to sign a merger with Unity, offering the company a valuation of $20 billion. This new deal could mean that Unity will no longer be pursuing that merger, which in turn means that the IronSource merge will also be put on the back burner. The news that Unity would be merging with the app monetization platform left a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths, even triggering some of the company’s users, such as game developers, to resign from using the engine’s services.
But why exactly were the users of Unity so angry with the IronSource merger deal? Well, this addition to the company shows that Unity is focusing more and more on its ad business. To be exact, Unity stated that they will have a perfect 50/50 balance between the Creation side of things and the ad growth. The community believed that the ads business should never have been made the main focus of the company. Some people also believe that they changed their strategies due to possibly losing the battle between themselves and Epic Games in the gaming engine department. It is also worth mentioning that IronSource is known for being Malware, which seems like a step in the wrong direction for Unity.
Another thing that may strike the engine users as odd is the fact that this multi-million dollar contract with CACI comes only a few months after Unity decided to lay off over 200 employees to “realign their resources.” After the job cuts were announced, a spokesman for Unity went on to state,
“As part of a continued planning process where we regularly assess our resourcing levels against our company priorities, we decided to realign some of our resources to better drive focus and support our long-term growth. This resulted in some hard decisions that impacted approximately 4 % of all Unity workforce. We are grateful for the contributions of those leaving Unity and we are supporting them through this difficult transition.”
The worst thing about these layoffs was the fact that just two weeks prior to the severeing of employees, CEO John Riccitello was allegedly telling his employees that the company was not in any form of financial trouble, and in turn, would not be letting anyone go . This meant that those who believed their jobs were secure may have been blindsided by the abrupt turn of events.