$55 billion in August. Now, reportedly, $25 billion more. The investment consortium that took Electronic Arts private — Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund alongside Silver Lake — has turned its attention to the games industry’s engine room, with Reuters reporting that Unity Software is in acquisition talks.
If a deal materialises, the same investors would control both one of the world’s biggest publishers and the software that a huge share of the world’s games are actually built on. That is consolidation of a different order.
What Reuters reports
According to people familiar with the matter, Unity held recent talks to be acquired by a consortium including Silver Lake and the PIF, with a valuation of about $25 billion discussed before Unity’s latest earnings report lifted its market capitalisation to roughly $21.5 billion. Shares rose around 4% in extended trading after the report.
Unity is now said to be working with an investment bank to evaluate its options. Insiders stress that no deal is certain and terms may change, and Unity declined to comment. But if it goes through, it would rank among the largest leveraged software buyouts in recent years — and Unity would leave the stock market entirely, just over six years after going public in September 2020.
Silver Lake never really left the building
The approach is less of an ambush than it looks. Silver Lake has been one of Unity’s biggest shareholders since investing up to $400 million in 2017, and still owns roughly 8% of the company. As Reuters notes, Silver Lake’s Egon Durban also sits on Unity’s board — “a dual role that would typically lead him to recuse himself from board deliberations on a sale.”
The PIF, meanwhile, has never invested in Unity directly but has been working alongside it for over a year through its subsidiary Savvy Games Group. In August 2025 the two signed a memorandum of understanding giving Saudi game developers access to Unity’s tools — the kind of groundwork that makes a later buyout look less like speculation and more like a plan.
Key point: The EA acquisition was a leveraged buyout that saddled the publisher with roughly $18 billion of debt and was followed by mass layoffs. Reuters describes the Unity approach as the same LBO structure — which is why staff are unlikely to be celebrating the interest.
Why Unity suddenly looks so attractive
The timing is no accident. Unity has just posted its first quarterly profit on a GAAP basis since its 2020 flotation, beating Wall Street estimates, with strong growth in its AI-powered Vector advertising platform doing much of the heavy lifting. The company has come a long way since the 2023 Runtime Fee scandal that torched developer trust, and the engine keeps improving — including its ability to integrate with Unreal.
Recent games made in Unity include Big Walk, Endless Legend 2 and Agent 64: Spies Never Die, while the consortium’s existing prize, EA, is the maker of EA Sports FC. A freshly profitable Unity, right after an earnings beat, is exactly the kind of asset private equity circles.
The consolidation worry
The reaction from industry commentators has been grim rather than giddy. PC Gamer’s Andy Chalk put it bluntly: the first thing that happened to EA after its acquisition was mass layoffs and an $18 billion debt load, and the videogame industry “does seem determined to speedrun its way into a consolidation crisis where three consortiums own everything and almost everyone is unemployed.”
That is the fear in miniature. Studios already face a brutal funding environment; the idea that the same handful of investors could own the publisher, the engine and the advertising layer underneath the industry concentrates an uncomfortable amount of power in one place.
Whoever owns the tools owns the industry
Unity powers a vast slice of the games world — mobile hits, indie darlings, VR experiments and classroom projects alike. Engine choice is supposed to be a neutral technical decision, made by developers for developers. A private, PIF-backed Unity answering to a leveraged balance sheet introduces a new variable into that equation, and studios watching the talks will be weighing contingency plans for the first time.
Nothing is signed. Unity may yet stay independent, or find another buyer, or simply ride out its best quarter in years as a public company. But the direction of travel is hard to miss: after the publisher, the consortium wants the workbench too — and the games industry is about to learn what happens when the toolmaker and the tycoon are the same people.
