The Firms That Bought EA Are Reportedly in Talks to Buy Unity

Saudi Arabia's PIF and Silver Lake discussed valuing the engine maker behind Hollow Knight at about $25 billion, sources say.

Hollow Knight, Among Us and Genshin Impact were all made with Unity's tools, and the investors who just bought Electronic Arts reportedly want Unity next.

Private equity firm Silver Lake and Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund, approached the San Francisco engine maker in recent weeks and talked about a valuation of around $25 billion, Reuters reported, citing people familiar with the talks, according to IGN. The sources said the talks are early, Unity has an investment bank helping it weigh its options, and no deal is certain.

Unity declined to comment to Reuters, and Silver Lake and PIF didn't immediately respond, GamesIndustry.biz noted.

The buyers' last big games deal is still fresh. Silver Lake and PIF, along with Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners, closed their $55 billion takeover of EA in August. Since then, IGN noted, EA has restructured and closed studios, the latest being BioWare's closure and the cancellation of the next Mass Effect game.

Unity isn't a publisher, though. IGN counts thousands of games built on its engine and toolkit, across phones, consoles and PCs. It also runs an advertising business that brought in $457 million of its $622 million in revenue last quarter, according to the company's earnings release.

That quarter makes the timing interesting. Unity's results released Thursday showed $122 million in net income, against a $127 million loss a year earlier. CEO Matt Bromberg called it "the first GAAP profitable quarter since our IPO." Per Reuters' sources, the $25 billion figure came up before those results, which pushed Unity's market value to about $21.5 billion, GamesIndustry.biz reported.

Once word of the talks got out, Unity's stock rose nearly 15% in regular trading, IGN reported.

Silver Lake isn't new to Unity. The firm put $400 million into Unity in May 2017, back when the whole company was worth $2.6 billion, and it still holds about 8%, GamesIndustry.biz reported. The figure the buyers reportedly discussed is nearly 10 times that 2017 valuation. Unity went public in 2020 at $13.7 billion.

The group already owns some of Unity's customers. Scopely, the Monopoly Go! developer, and Niantic, the Pokémon Go maker, both use Unity's tools, IGN noted. Both belong to a group that includes Silver Lake, PIF and Affinity. If a deal goes through, the same owners would hold the engine and two of the studios that build with it.

Source: videogameschronicle.com.

Source: ign.com, retrieved November 6, 2026. Other sources: gamesindustry.biz, the SEC.