Unity’s IPO filing shows how big a threat it poses to Epic and the Unreal Engine • The Curious Technologist

Unity, maker of the popular Unity Game Engine, has filed to go public at an incredible moment in time. Its chief rival, Epic Games, is currently busy arguing that Apple is holding the Unreal Engine hostage, and Epic will appear in court this very afternoon to demand a restraining order so Apple can’t cut off access to developers.

What’s more incredible, though: the numbers revealed in Unity’s new S-1 filing show the company is far more of a formidable rival to Epic than we thought.

We knew the early surge of interest in Unity may have forced Epic’s hand, first when Epic drastically dropped the price of Unreal Engine in 2014, and in 2015 when it started letting developers build with Unreal for free.

But despite those moves, Unity says that in 2019, over half of the top games on mobile, PC, and consoles were made with Unity — including 53 percent of the top 1,000 games in the iOS App Store and Google Play.