Is Unity Being Sold? Saudi Arabia’s PIF and Silver Lake Reportedly Discussed a $25 Billion Deal, Nothing Is Signed, and I Think the Price Looks Thin After Unity’s First Profitable Quarter

The detail that stuck with me wasn’t the $25 billion. It was the calendar. Within the same few days, Unity posted the strongest quarter it has ever had as a public company, and Reuters reported that two of the biggest names in gaming finance had come knocking. Silver Lake and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, who closed their $55 billion purchase of Electronic Arts in August alongside Affinity Partners, have reportedly approached the company behind one of the most widely used game engines on the planet. Nothing is signed, and nothing may ever be. Still, if you make games, play games, or just wonder who ends up owning the plumbing of the industry, this is worth understanding properly. Below is everything I could verify, followed by what I make of it.

What’s confirmed, what’s only reported, and what nobody has said

Deal reporting has its own grammar, and headlines tend to flatten it. “In talks” sounds like a handshake. In practice it can mean anything from an unsolicited phone call to a draft term sheet. So I sorted every claim I found by how much weight it can bear.

My shorthand: someone asked a serious question, Unity is working out how to answer it, and the public has seen exactly one side of that conversation, through anonymous sources. That is real news. It is not a sale.

Why Unity looks like a different company than it did a year ago

Start with what Unity itself put on file. For the quarter ended Sept. 30, revenue came in at $622 million, up 32% from $471 million a year earlier. Net income was $122 million, compared with a $127 million loss in the same quarter of 2025. CEO Matt Bromberg described it as the first GAAP-profitable quarter since the company went public in 2020. According to TIKR’s breakdown, adjusted EBITDA reached $257 million, a 41% margin, and the stock jumped about 8% after the results. Unity also guided to fourth-quarter revenue growth of 65% to 67% from continuing operations, per the earnings call transcript.

What’s driving it is not the part most people picture when they hear the word Unity. Vector, the company’s AI-powered ad engine, grew 126% year over year and 40% from the prior quarter. Grow Solutions, the advertising side, brought in $457 million. Create Solutions, the side that includes the engine and the subscriptions studios pay for, brought in $165 million, up 8%.

That split is the thing I’d ask every reader to sit with. A buyer looking at Unity isn’t only shopping for a game engine the way a hobbyist might imagine. It’s shopping for an advertising machine that sits on top of an engine which, by a commonly cited estimate, powers roughly half of all mobile games. The engine matters, because it’s where the machine finds its supply of games and players. But the growth, and the reason a private-equity firm would get excited, sit on the ad side. That is my read, not a fact in anyone’s filing, and I could be underrating how much an owner would value the engine’s reach on its own.

Is $25 billion a lot? It depends which Unity you remember

Seen against $57 billion, $25 billion looks like a bargain. Seen against $6 billion two years ago, it looks like a triumph. I think both framings are traps, because what matters is the price against Unity’s value today, and that is where the report gets interesting. The roughly $21.5 billion market cap quoted after earnings sits only about 16% below $25 billion. TIKR reports the shares rose about 8% after the results, and if that move came on top of the $21.5 billion figure, the gap shrinks to around 8%. That is my arithmetic, and market caps move by the hour, so treat it as a range rather than a measurement.

Buyers taking a public company private usually have to pay a more generous premium than that to win over shareholders. For comparison, the EA deal I analyzed in September carried a premium of roughly 25% over EA’s pre-announcement price. Reuters says the $25 billion figure was discussed before Unity’s numbers were public, which may be exactly why it feels stale now. I’d be surprised if a board that had just reported its first profitable quarter since the IPO accepted a price set before anyone saw that quarter. If this goes anywhere, my guess is that the number moves up, or the conversation cools.

Why Silver Lake and PIF keep turning up in the same sentence

Silver Lake isn’t a stranger at Unity’s door. It owns about 8% of the company, according to Reuters, and Silver Lake’s Egon Durban sits on Unity’s board, per TBreak’s reporting. The relationship goes back years. Silver Lake was among the investors that funded a $525 million tender offer letting Unity shareholders sell stock in 2019, and in 2022 it pledged, alongside Sequoia Capital, a $1 billion investment tied to Unity’s ironSource deal, according to Wikipedia’s history of the company. That history cuts two ways. It means Silver Lake understands the business well. It also means a board member’s employer would be on the other side of the table, which is the kind of conflict that normally calls for a careful process.

PIF is the newer name. It has no reported stake in Unity, according to TBreak, but its gaming arm, Savvy Games Group, has worked with Unity under a memorandum of understanding to support game development in Saudi Arabia, as PocketGamer.biz noted. And PIF just finished the $55 billion purchase of EA, which closed on Aug. 4 with PIF holding 93.4%. I laid out the debt math and the layoff history on that one in my September analysis of the EA buyout. A Unity deal would be a very different animal, because Unity is a tool studios rely on, not a publisher selling its own games.

I haven’t seen any reporting on what regulatory review a Unity deal would face, or how it would be financed, so I’m not going to guess at either. The EA purchase leaned on about $20 billion of debt that landed on EA’s own balance sheet, and financing is the first thing I would look for if this becomes real.

What a sale would and wouldn’t change for the games you play and make

For players, the honest answer is that a reported approach changes nothing about the games already in your library. Hollow Knight, Cuphead, Among Us, Genshin Impact and Pokémon Go are all built on Unity, and every one of them belongs to its own studio, not to Unity. Developers are a different story. The terms they work under today are the terms they have today, and the whole worry is about tomorrow’s terms.

The reason every Unity ownership headline gets read as a pricing headline is the runtime fee. In September 2023, Unity announced a fee tied to game installs. After a firestorm of developer anger it softened the plan within about ten days, and on Sept. 12, 2024, Bromberg cancelled it for games, effective immediately. In between came waves of layoffs, including roughly 1,800 jobs, about a quarter of the workforce, in January 2024. Unity has spent the two years since rebuilding trust, and a first profitable quarter is arguably the payoff. If you ship on Unity, its pricing page carries an FAQ on which Editor terms apply to older versions, and it’s worth a bookmark.

There’s one more thread I’d pull on. A summary of the earnings call from BigGo Finance says Bromberg reported that the opt-in rate for runtime data on newly created projects remains above 90%, and that 30% of the top 1,000 Vector spenders now share runtime data. I can’t verify the exact definitions from a summary, so read the transcript before leaning on those numbers. But they point at the same idea as the revenue split above: the engine and the ad business feed each other, and any new owner would be buying that loop.

Five signals that would tell me this is getting real

My verdict