This week, Unity, one of the most popular video game engine companies, announced a massive change in how they plan on charging video game developers to use their engine. This change (which you can read more about here) has enraged the development community. Some video games such as Cult of the Lamb, have gone so far as to say they are pulling their titles when the new pricing structure goes into place. Popular publishers like Devolver Digital have implied that they will be less likely to acquire games developed with Unity. Unity has attempted to retract some of their initial statement, but without a full retraction (and possibly some other guarantees) it will be hard to win back the trust of the developer community.
With all of this as background, now is the perfect time for Apple to acquire Unity. Apple is a company that likes to own their entire product chain. However, right now, because of Vision Pro, Apple is unusually dependent on Unity. During Vision Pro's debut at WWDC23, Apple seemed boasted that Unity based games and apps can gain full access to visionOS features... also how Unity apps are running natively on Apple Vision Pro, they can sit side by side, rendered simultaneously with other visionOS apps. At the time, this functionality seemed fantastic. Unity is one of the most popular video game engine and now porting them to visionOS would give Apple a huge boost in one VR's most important areas, gaming. Now however, with developer support in Unity quickly waining, this should be a cause for concern.
Currently, Unity's market cap is about 13.69 billion dollars. This would likely make acquiring Unity Apple's largest purchase. The advantage of this purchase is that it would be doing more than just protecting their future products. For years, Apple has struggled to get non-mobile gaming right. (They have rocked mobile gaming). Unity, which was first announced in the June 2005 Apple Worldwide Developer Conference, is one of three most popular engines around. Apple would endear themselves to the gaming community through this purchase and establishing clear licensing rules. By owning Unity, Apple could guarantee that Unity would be capable of using Apple's silicon to its fullest extent. Additionally, Apple could set up incentives to encourage video games developed using Unity are built both for PC and Mac (and Vision Pro).
As a fringe benefit from Apple's perspective, this would likely annoy Epic Games and their CEO Tim Sweeney, with whom Apple has been having a very public (and very legal) spat.