I would love to know what sort of pitch they made to bring in that amount of capital. There seems to have been no business plan whatsoever besides enshittify to the max and alienate customers with ham-fisted retroactive cash grabs.
Video Games are one of the most potent attractions for peoples attention. In 2008 the whole industry was worth $12B. In 2010 it grew to $25B. It would have been easy to sell continued growth in 2016 because the industry actually did continue to grow to no one's surprise. $191B in 2021. Investing in the industry at the time would have been smart.
Unity sells shovels in a gold rush. In 2016 Unity was known for being easier than the competition while having fantastic multiplatform/mobile support. They were positioned to take a tax on games sold on every major platform. It's almost impressive how badly they ruined such a winning hand.
Among Us, Pokemon Go, Beat Saber, Genshin Impact, Hearthstone, Rust were all made in Unity.
They IPOed in 2020 at a valuation of 13.7B. Any investors in those rounds made fantastic profits. Dress it up, talk about revenue growth, dump it on the public markets and make it someone else's problem: the venture capital recipe.
$3B in 2018 seems quite modest for the amount of hype and mind-share/market-share they had from early 2010s to 2021. Since 2020, there are (were) probably a hundred companies valued at over $1B with less market fit, less product and less revenue in comparison. You have to remember pre 2022, it was all about growth. The economics and business dynamics of startups completely shifted with rates at 5% vs when they were sub-1%.
