Did Apple's latest release of Vision Pro make Unity the biggest winner?

To the Moo wrote a column · Jun 8, 2023 16:59

After years of rumors and speculation, $Apple (AAPL.US)$finally unveiled its mixed-reality headset.

The device, called the Vision Pro, made its debut at the company’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference (WWDC) alongside reveals of new Macs and iOS 17, the next-generation iPhone operating system.

Did Apple's latest release of Vision Pro make Unity the biggest winner?

However, after Apple's stock price once hit a record high, it ushered in a downward correction.

The market generally believes that the price of the newly launched VR headset is too high (3499$), and the mass production time is lower than the market's previous expectations.

Unity rose to 26%!

Despite the high pricing of Vision Pro, the market is worried about whether Apple's stock price can continue to rise.

But what is unexpected is that the 3D game engine company $Unity Software (U.US)$ benefited the most from this WWDC conference, and the highest intraday price rose by more than 26%^ that day!

^% change from 05/06/2023 - 06/06/2023, moomoo app

"We know there is a community of developers who have been building incredible 3D apps for years," Apple's vice president of worldwide developer relations said during the WWDC presentation.

"And today we are excited to share that we've been working with Unity to bring those apps to Vision Pro. So popular Unity-based games and apps can gain full access to vision OS features such as pass-through, high-resolution renderings, and native gestures."

"We've been building towards this moment for years," Mike Rockwell, vice president of the technology development group at Apple, said during Monday's presentation.

"Our work together with Unity to deeply support their tools combined with the World-class rendering of vision OS and powerful displays makes Apple Vision Pro an incredible platform for game developers."

This means that third-party developers will also need to use Unity's tools, which will potentially bring more revenue to Unity.

So, what are the highlights of Unity?

$Unity Software (U.US)$ is a cross-platform 2D and 3D game engine company that develops cross-platform video games. Unity was first announced and opened to the public at Apple's WWDC conference in 2005. At that time, it was only a game engine for the Mac OS X platform.

In 2021, the Unity engine will occupy a 49% share of the full-featured game engine market, and 71% of the world's top 1,000 most popular mobile games are created with Unity.

Famous games developed using the Unity engine

Future development: AI will continue to drive company growth

On May 10, Unity reported first-quarter earnings that beat Street estimates for revenue. Unity reported first-quarter revenue of $500 million compared to Wall Street estimates for $477 million, per Bloomberg data.

Like others in the gaming sector, Unity spent its first quarter earnings call positioning itself as an AI winner.

"AI is going to have a profound effect on the industry," Unity CEO John S. Riccitiello said on the company's earnings call.

"First, it's going to lead to inflection up in growth as game types are built that were no longer — were not previously possible. And secondly, we're going to see, I believe, some of the crazy expense that goes on in some high-end production come down some. It's a favorable part for the game industry for growth. And I guess it'd be very favorable for Unity as we drive some of these changes through the industry."

Data source: moomoo - Unity Details Page - Analysis

What does Mooer say?

@leeyang

Apple and Unity's cooperation may have the opportunity to more naturally transform the existing rich 3D game library into the VisionOS ecosystem, which is conducive to making games become the MR and future Killer application ecosystem and lifting the ceiling of the game industry.