Unity just made its largest ever acquisition with $320 million Parsec purchase

Unity is acquiring game and desktop streaming platform Parsec in a deal worth $320 million, the two companies announced on Tuesday. It is Unity's biggest acquisition to date.

Parsec made an early name for itself in 2016 as a game streaming solution for bringing Windows applications to Mac and for allowing the streaming of high-fidelity, intensive PC games to less powerful machines. But since the start of the pandemic, the company's enterprise offering has become a major growth area, as large game publishers and developers have relied on Parsec to power remote work solutions.

With Parsec, you can run virtual machines off almost any device anywhere in the world, making it an ideal tool for remote game development. In particular, Parsec's Warp offering is tailored for creatives and supports drawing tablets and accurate color display for remote artists, illustrators and animators.

"In the past year, companies and their employees have been collaborating and working together in fundamentally different ways," Unity's Marc Whitten, its senior vice president and general manager of create solutions, said in a statement. "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's subscription business is growing 170% year over year, the company said in Tuesday's announcement, and the company's customers include large game makers like Electronic Arts, Ubisoft and Square Enix. "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," Parsec CEO Benjy Boxer said in a statement. "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."