Unity acquires streaming service Parsec for $320 million

Unity Technologies, maker of the Unity game engine, has entered an agreement to acquire the streaming service Parsec.

Parsec has proven to be rather popular, especially with quarantines forcing people to work remotely. Not only that but Parsec also does gaming services too, allowing you to rent a server from them to host games that you then connect to which works like GeForce NOW and Stadia but it uses all of your own stuff. We actually tested Parsec on Linux back in 2017 and it was really impressive.

Another interesting use of Parsec has been AAA studios using it to demo their games. Again, due to the quarantines going on thanks to COVID-19. Some, like Ubisoft, had accounts with Parsec setup and ready for press to take a look. There's lot of different ways it's being used and they've seen strong year-over-year growth.

Unity are buying them for around $320 million in cash, with the deal expected to close (pending all the usual regulation stuff) during their third quarter.

From the press release:

“In the past year, companies and their employees have been collaborating and working together in fundamentally different ways,” said Marc Whitten, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Create Solutions at Unity. “With the workplace becoming more flexible, teams expanding and collaborating across multiple locations and creators leveraging a myriad of new devices, it’s clear that the creative process will evolve from on premise devices to flexible and cost effective cloud architectures. Parsec has addressed the unique requirements to support this type of high-performance processing no matter where creators are, showcasing technology that is both highly innovative and prescient. We believe Parsec is a rocketship and we’re very excited to support their future growth.”

"When Chris Dickson and I started Parsec, we believed Parsec's ultra-low latency streaming technology could allow anyone in the world to remotely interact with real-time 3D content," said Benjy Boxer, Parsec's CEO and co-founder. "In the past year, Parsec has empowered the world's most inspiring and creative companies to freely work and play from anywhere, on any device, on their own terms. We're thrilled to partner with Unity, where we can offer even more creators this same kind of liberating access to content and technology."

It will be interesting to see what Unity do with Parsec from game engine integrations to being available in games, the Parsec tech has a lot of possible uses. Right now Unity are saying nothing will change for Parsec users.