Unity is officially cementing its long-rumored plans to go public in 2020.
The company filed a Form S-1 with the US Government today to get the ball officially rolling, though the number of shares up for grabs and the price range for those has yet to be determined or shared.
Given the popularity of its game development engine, Unity’s future as a public company is something developers will no doubt want to pay attention to as this opens the door for more outside parties to pick up stakes in Unity and potentially have a say in the company’s future decisions.
Interestingly, Unity’s filing does give us a peek at how the company’s finances have fared over the past two years. Particularly of note, Unity reported and overall loss for both 2018 and 2019, though revenue increased across those same years.
For the 2018 calendar year, for instance, Unity reported $380,755,000 in revenue and a net loss of $131,602,000 while 2019 saw the company report $541,779,000 in revenue and a loss of $163,190,000.
That tendency towards losses is one of the risk factors Unity points out in the filing; while only two years of numbers are disclosed, Unity specifies that it has “experienced net losses in each period since inception.”
Another heading in that risk disclosure section mentions the risk that ”If we or our customers were to violate, or an operating system platform provider or application store believes that we or our customers have violated, its terms of service or policies, that operating system platform provider or application store could limit or discontinue our or our customers’ access to its platform or store.” While its a risk that makes sense given Unity’s structure, its an particularly interesting thing to note considering that seems to be exactly the situation competing game dev engine maker Epic Games currently finds itself in as it goes head-to-head with Apple over iOS.