[HN Gopher] Unity to acquire Parsec for $320m
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Unity to acquire Parsec for $320m
Author : charlietran
Score : 51 points
Date : 2021-08-10 21:14 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (investors.unity.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (investors.unity.com)
| VortexDream wrote:
| I hope this doesn't mean the end of Parsec as a standalone
| service. There's nothing out there that comes close to Parsec's
| performance and it'd be a huge loss.
| stormbrew wrote:
| Same. Hopefully some alternatives come along.
|
| On the client side at least a lot of what Parsec was leveraging
| seemed to be built on webrtc, so there's a lot of potential for
| similar things to come along I think.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| I'm working on something similar, which will be called
| CloudGamepad. The trick to getting good quality and low
| latency is forward error correction and UDP. UDP will arrive
| quickly but is lossy. And the FEC allows you to recover a
| certain percentage of lost packages.
| w-ll wrote:
| They have a web client, but their desktop client was way
| better in every way.
| stormbrew wrote:
| Just because it's a desktop client doesn't mean it's not
| using webrtc. WebRTC is a much broader standard than "in-
| browser videoconferencing".
|
| The main thing is that it's an open(ish) standard built
| around peer-to-peer low latency connections, with a lot of
| software already built up around using it.
|
| [edit] Ah I guess I'm wrong they use a proprietary thing
| outside the browser after all that they call BUD.
| https://blog.parsec.app/game-streaming-tech-in-the-
| browser-w...
|
| Still I suspect that there's some cross-pollination there.
| dsissitka wrote:
| > Oh, and one more thing: we love the communities around games
| as much as anyone, and have no plans to change anything about
| the free Parsec app. We hope creative professionals get as much
| joy out of creating the next great fighting game as you do
| playing them.
|
| https://twitter.com/ParsecTeam/status/1425206344467034113
|
| The Parsec folks are good people but I'm still a little
| worried.
| m12k wrote:
| Is there any way you ever make $320m back by selling a better
| performance version of teamviewer/remote desktop? Or is there
| some other play here - e.g. a Stadia/GeForce Now competitor?
| marc__1 wrote:
| Unity can always cross-sell their services
|
| from the press release
|
| "Parsec has become a go-to solution for hybrid work models
| among gaming companies such as Electronic Arts, Ubisoft and
| Square Enix and is integrated in many of the industry verticals
| where Unity sells solutions, including media and entertainment,
| architecture and design, and more. _Together, Unity sees an
| opportunity to drive shared momentum with these customers
| through targeted cross-selling and bundled solutions. "_
| moomin wrote:
| Let me rephrase your question: can they sell three thousand
| more enterprise license seats by bundling this in? Because
| they'll have made it back in a couple of years if they do.
| mrkramer wrote:
| When Teamviewer was at its peak it was worth at least $100m,
| now I'm not so sure it got displaced by other competitors
| probably.
|
| Edit: Somehow they got $460m revenue. Voila for Remote Desktop
| app. I would never thought they can make half a billion of
| dollars in revenue.
| zibzab wrote:
| Revenue increased probably because of the hack, because that
| seems to be how it works in this twisted world.
|
| (i am looking at you Zoom)
| mrkramer wrote:
| Yea I heard TeamViewer is insecure. And average internet
| users don't care about privacy. More than 2 billion people
| using Facebook confirms my hypothesis.
| chewmieser wrote:
| Microsoft's Game Pass xcloud service for iOS leverages Rainway,
| a competitor to Parsec. As a user of both I can say that Parsec
| outperforms Rainway although Rainway works in the browser.
|
| Seems like Unity is looking to build a similar stack with
| Parsec at the helm, but I guess we'll see...
| CryptoBanker wrote:
| Parsec also works in a browser and quite well I might add. I
| get very similar performance between their web and desktop
| clients
| dhruvrrp wrote:
| Interesting, I was expecting parsec to close shop after they
| stopped offering their paid hosting for gaming and refunded
| people's balance.
|
| Looks like they just pivoted towards business users instead.
|
| Anyway, congrats to the team!
| reilly3000 wrote:
| Congrats to the Parsec team, I'm a big fan of the service.
| Perhaps I'm out of touch, but it seems like $320M is a bit low,
| although I know it was still somewhat niche. Twitch turned out to
| be a huge bargain at $1B. These server-intensive video streaming
| services seem to require a lot of engineering and opex, although
| maybe Parsec was mostly on the client. It looks like they raised
| 2 rounds last year A at $7M in May and B at $25M in Dec- but I
| couldn't find a valuation. I guess that's nice cashflow for those
| investors, but I would think they would rather swing for the
| fences, no?
| Delfino wrote:
| I'm in a group for educators that use unity in the classroom and
| the most requested feature I've seen is having a way to utilize
| the tool from low power/cost devices like chromebooks. This seems
| right in line with that.
| astlouis44 wrote:
| Our startup is working on Unity and Unreal Engine games and
| applications exporting to WebGL, targeting Chromebooks. Join
| our Discord if you're interested in learning more:
|
| https://discord.gg/zUSZ3T8
| charlietran wrote:
| (disclosure: I work on the backend at Parsec)
|
| For those who don't know either company: Unity is a popular 2D/3D
| commercial game engine, and Parsec is a low-latency remote
| desktop tool that initially focused on gaming, but pivoted to an
| enterprise product for remote creative teams during the pandemic.
| SinParadise wrote:
| Amazing app, glad to see the pivot. It is a great fit.
| ipsum2 wrote:
| Congrats on the (hopeful) windfall!
| ummonk wrote:
| What's the goal here? Cloud hosted version of Unity? Support for
| cloud-hosted gaming?
| dinkleberg wrote:
| Congrats to the Parsec team! I remember using it several years
| ago when it was still fairly early on and it was impressive then.
| I wasn't sure if it was a model that could really take off at the
| time but glad to see it has.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Wow, shit. Parsec increased their prices after they stopped
| providing their gaming service.
|
| Used to be that the client was free and you paid for the machine.
| Deathmax wrote:
| They don't do cloud hosted machines anymore, but the client is
| still free. You pay to get additional features (full 4:4:4
| color, multi-monitor, drawing tablet support, and other
| enterprisey features). https://parsec.app/warp has the
| comparison between free and the other paid plans.
| binarynate wrote:
| In addition to using Parsec's tech for cloud-based gaming, I also
| foresee Unity using it to stream shared applications into multi-
| user mixed reality apps (for example, multiple users in AR or VR
| sharing a Windows desktop).
| m12k wrote:
| Isn't VR extremely latency sensitive? I remember reading
| Carmack's blog posts about needing to reduce input and screen
| lag even on local machines to make it bearable. It just seems
| to me like the least likely place for streaming to actually
| work.
| astlouis44 wrote:
| Don't know why Unity is pursuing cloud, you're still going to
| need a good network speed. They'd be better served investing
| further in WebGL support, specifically in reducing the file
| binary size so we can have lightning fast load times for console-
| quality games running at near native performance in the browser.
|
| Shameless plug, my startup is working on exactly this at the
| moment but for Unreal Engine 4, but we have plans to bring this
| tooling to Unity as well. The web has the opportunity to become
| the #1 distribution platform of choice for real time 3D
| developers, and it's the path to the decentralized metaverse.
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