After Swallowing EA, Saudi Arabia's Wealth Fund and Silver Lake Are Circling Unity at About $25 Billion

The buyers who took Electronic Arts private for $55 billion want another piece of the games business. Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund and Silver Lake have approached Unity Software's management in recent weeks about buying the company, and the engine behind a huge share of the world's games could end up with the same owners as EA.

The two firms valued Unity at about $25 billion in the talks, Reuters reported on Thursday, based on people familiar with the matter. Unity has been weighing its options with an investment bank since the approach. No deal has been reached.

An insider on both sides

Silver Lake is hardly a stranger here. It already owns roughly 8% of Unity after putting in around $400 million in 2017, and its Egon Durban sits on Unity's board. That dual role would typically lead him to recuse himself from any board deliberations on a sale.

The approach came before Unity's latest earnings, which beat estimates. Strong growth in Vector, its AI powered advertising platform, helped the company post its first quarterly GAAP profit since it went public in September 2020. The report lifted Unity's market value to around $21.5 billion, so the valuation discussed in the talks now sits closer to where the stock trades.

The EA template

The EA deal is the obvious reference point. PIF, Silver Lake and Affinity Partners bought the publisher earlier this year, and PIF ended up with 93.4% of it, against 5.5% for Silver Lake and 1.1% for Affinity. EA came out of the buyout carrying about $18 billion of debt and went through mass layoffs.

Then came the cut fans felt most. Two months after the deal closed, EA shut down BioWare, the studio behind Mass Effect and Dragon Age, and ended early work on the next Mass Effect as part of roughly 400 job cuts.

Unity would be a different kind of asset. EA makes games. Unity makes the tools other people use to make games, and more titles, especially on mobile, are built with Unity than with Epic's Unreal Engine. Recent releases on the engine include Big Walk, Endless Legend 2 and Agent 64: Spies Never Die.

A company still rebuilding trust

Unity was founded about 22 years ago in Denmark and is now headquartered in San Francisco. Its standing with independent developers took a beating in 2023, when its Runtime Fee plan blew up and eventually led to the resignation of CEO John Riccitiello. Since then it has been pushing AI into its products.

Developers are watching the talks warily. Nobody has said what new owners would do with Unity, and there is no confirmed offer beyond the valuation floated in the talks. But the people who build on the engine have just watched the same buyers load EA with debt and close one of gaming's most storied studios, and that is the precedent they are weighing.

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