The Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund (PIF) and Silver Lake might be familiar names because, just recently, they were part of a consortium that bought EA, with Saudi Arabia now owning the large majority of EA. And now, they might be looking to buy Unity.

The information comes from Milana Vinna, Akash Sriram and Echo Wang at Reuters, who claim that the PIF and Silver Lake approached Unity in recent weeks with the goal of buying the company. Silver Lake already owns a small part of Unity due to a $400 million investment in 2017.

According to Reuters sources, Silver Lake and the PIF discussed a valuation of roughly $25 billion. Unity has apparently been working with an investment bank to figure out its options following the talks. However, sources did say no deal is certain, and Reuters doesn’t state outright that an offer was made.

Should any of this be true and should a deal actually happen, it would be yet another massive shift within the industry. Unity is one of the world’s most widely used game engines, particularly among independent and mobile developers. An analysis by GameDiscoverCo found that almost half of the Steam games released in 2025 that it examined were made using Unity, compared with around a fifth using Epic Games’ Unreal Engine.

A part of the reason Unity is so popular is that, under the Unity Personal plan, solo developers and small teams can use the engine for free and publish their games on PC, only having to pay if they cross a threshold made up of gross revenue and funding. Releasing on console is an exception, though.

Unity is also huge for mobile development, which is relevant here because the PIF-owned Savvy bought Scopely for $4.9 billion in 2023. Scopely runs titles like Monopoly Go!, Stumble Guys and Star Trek: Fleet: Command, all of which run on Unity.

It should be noted that companies and investment funds, and other interested parties, approach other companies all the time, and it often goes nowhere. But the mere fact that the PIF and Silver Lake approached Unity is still substantial, and a little worrying. We’ve seen some massive consolidation within the games industry over the past few years, and a lot of that is due to the PIF and Silver Lake.

If there were a deal made, it would likely be leveraged like EA was, and that’s concerning, too. EA’s buyout has now saddled the company with a massive amount of debt that must be repaid, and we’re seeing the results of that with layoffs and the closing of BioWare.

Unity already has around $2.2 billion in debt.

This is purely speculation, of course. For now, all we can do is wait and see.