Unity sell shares at $75 in IPO, stock market debut

Video game software company Unity raised its IPO price above $52 last week, valuing the company at$13.7 billion. The price as raised from a previous $44 to $48 range.

The news was first reported by Reuters, but a Unity spokesperson declined to comment on the matter.

The video game software developer debuted on the stock market on Friday at $75 a share with its shares jumping 44% making the company’s IPO one of the tech IPOs that investors can’t stop talking about.

Unity which now trades under the ticker symbol “U” is a popular video game developer known for creating games such as “Pokémon Go”, “Fall Guys”, and Call of Duty: Mobile”. The company sells the software to other companies through a subscription plan with a starting price of $399 to $2,400 per year as the sizes of studios vary.

This season is flooded with tech company IPOs and stock market debuts. On Wednesday, Snowflake, a cloud data company became the biggest software IPO ever, hitting double the price of its shares on the first day of trading. On the same day, a small software tools developer, JFrog, also went public, with shares jumping nearly 50%.

Unity’s software is a top competitor to Fortnite maker Epic Games’ Unreal Engine. However, Unity CEO John Riccitiello said he doesn’t consider Epic as a competitor, according to CNN.

“[Epic is] a very good and noble company, and they do some really cool things that we benchmark against. But… I don’t think of them as competitors,” Riccitiello said.

In 2014, Riccitiello joined Unity, after leaving Electronic Arts the year before. The CEO says Unity has strong advantage in the mobile games market where developers tend to rely on its software to make 2D adventure and puzzle games.

“At his former post as CEO of EA, Riccitiello managed to create a credible company narrative that made sense to anyone interested in investing in games,” said Joost van Dreunen, founder of New Breukelen, a video game investment firm. “Compared to Epic, Unity will seem like the tamer option, led by someone with less of an ax to grind.”

Since its founding in 2004, Unity has since grown to play a significant role in game creation over the past decade by providing developers with tools to easily create 3D tiles for phones, consoles, and webs, without having to go through the stress of coding for each platform.

In its prospectus, the company said it has 1.5 million monthly active creators and that developers that use its platform see more than 3 billion downloads in a month.