28 ms·

Unity merges with IronSource

397 points by Luc 4y ago

inglor 4y ago
Nit for @dang or OP - it's ironSource not IronSource (This comment is not an endorsement of the merger which I'm personally not a fan of - we get an ad/installer company merging with the biggest non-AAA game engine company which creates all sort of problematic incentives)
- wccrawford 4y ago
  I heard recently that most of Unity's money already comes from Unity Ads, so this is just the natural extension of that. It's sad, but that's our reality I guess.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    That is what happens when the price of a whatevercinno is too much to ask for a game.
- zamalek 4y ago
  > an ad/installer company Seems like Unity isn't too proud of that either. I wasn't able to figure out what ironSource do from the first few paragraphs due to them dancing around the truth.
- Luc 4y ago
  I used 'ironSource' when I posted. It must have been changed some time after by a moderator.
- giancarlostoro 4y ago
  > we get an ad/installer company merging with the biggest non-AAA game engine company which creates all sort of problematic incentives) Whatever pushes people closer to Godot. Seriously though, the only thing I see that Unity has that Godot lacks is a rich asset / resource store, with lots and lots of options for whatever you want to build your game with. I would think the maintainers could produce such a store to facilitate funding the project and even provide their own offerings like code snippets for specific game types and then keep 100% of those proceeds (aside from payment vendor fees) towards the project. It's either that or someone, somewhere with free time and energy builds their own and donates to Godot for every asset bought. I really like Godot but I'm only a dev, I don't have time to design my own graphics, I just want to code different ideas to see how they go and go from there, I just want to download a few assets and get cracking, and right now that is far easier to do with Unity than it is with Godot it seems like. I think Godot adopting a Unity importer might help significantly.
  - bodge5000 4y ago
    I can think of a few others, though I did move from Unity to Godot and never looked back so clearly they're not deal breakers (for me): - Doesn't handle 3D as well. Mostly optimisation stuff, though also things like procedural sky/sun is weaker I find with Godot than Unity. Though almost all of that are looking to change with Godot 4. - As you mention asset store, but also just the size of the community. Can't really blame Godot for this though, their documentation is certainly very good which is about as much as they can do. - GDScript is a great language, but I'm not a big fan of using engine-specific languages, rather than a generic one like C#. Of course it has its advantages, but it means you also miss out on whatever package manager comes with the language. Bindings remedy this, but they're not a simple out-the-box experience. - Similar to above, GDScript and a lot of areas of the engine feel more strongly orientated towards fast and easy dev time rather than game performance. Its a personal choice so I can't complain much, and again bindings can help, but out the box GDScript of course isnt as fast as C# with ECS. Thats about all I can think of, and as I say I use, and overall love, Godot so despite my complaints theres still more going for it than against it (for me)
    - giancarlostoro 4y ago
      > but it means you also miss out on whatever package manager comes with the language. I didn't even consider that! Good call out! > Similar to above, GDScript and a lot of areas of the engine feel more strongly orientated towards fast and easy dev time rather than game performance. Correct me if I'm wrong or way off, but isn't GDNative (or whatever it might be called now) basically for those moments where you need a little more beef, but don't want to rebuild the entire engine, so you bring in Rust or D or any other language you know and love and bridge it in through GDNative?
      - bodge5000 4y ago
        Yeh so the bindings with GDNative do absolutely help performance, and I imagine Rust with Godot would be even faster than Unity with C# (You can also use GDNative to add ECS as well I believe), but out the box, and therefore likely the direction Godot is heading in, seems to favour workflow above performance. That being said, it could be a "grass is greener" issue. There are plenty of engines that offer better performance but a worse workflow, Unity for one, that I'm not using and instead using Godot, and I guess bindings are as close as reasonably feasible to getting the best of both worlds, so I cant complain much.
laurencei 4y ago
They have a sub-title in their article "Redefining the game engine – this is more than ads" Then they go on to say "Advertising has long been and we believe will continue to be the economic engine for mobile games, driving players into their games and driving revenue at scale" Then finally "It also reinforces our strong conviction in the long-term strength and growth of the in-game advertising business" Seems like they are just doubling down on the ads in games mainstream...
- ravivyas 4y ago
  They actually doubled down when they started building their own Ads mediation platform after having an AdNetwork, but they struggled to grow. Their targeting tool "Pinpointer" failed and showed up on an earnings call.
- nemacol 4y ago
  "driving players into their games" I don't know anyone that plays a game because of the ads that are in it. I must be misunderstanding what they are saying?
  - paulryanrogers 4y ago
    Perhaps by making games ad supported where there otherwise would've been pay first or subscription based
  - RugnirViking 4y ago
    presumably they mean adverts elsewhere for the game they are being driven to. Although of course if those other places are also mobile games, there is a certain bizarre oroboros to the whole idea... talk about zero-sum games, this is negative-sum
    - GrinningFool 4y ago
      It does seem to be a circle: games carry adverts. The overwhelming majority of adverts is for more games. If you get the advertised game, you're now seeing ads in that game for more games... Mobile games are a weird, impossibly self-sustaining beast. Developers (usually have to) dump money into advertising, even as their own games are advertising the competition.
stephc_int13 4y ago
Why is it adverstised as a merge and not an acquisition? ironSource is a much smaller company than Unity, if I am not mistaken.
- bigtones 4y ago
  They're just labelling it a merger for optics - it's absolutely an acquisition with one party buying the other.
  - thsbrown 4y ago
    I agree, however I'm curious what the incentive for calling it a merge is? Is it part of the deal with ironSource? Do they, for some reason think that merge sounds better then acquired? Because I'm in the camp that acquired would be more appealing.
    - datavirtue 4y ago
      Merger sounds much better to the employees of Iron source.
      - techdragon 4y ago
        Does anyone there actually care about that… based on the history behind the company (well documented by other commentators on this story here) I can’t imagine management give a flying fuck about anything or anyone, except the money.
        Jasper_ 4y ago
        This whole press release was written for the executives of both companies, maybe the shareholders, but certainly not the employees, and definitely not the public.
  - psyc 4y ago
    The optics are atrocious for Unity.
throwawaycuriou 4y ago
I don't recognize this company anymore. What a gibberish announcement. Their game engine is hardly discussed. Apparently the future is ads on mobile apps.
- vvillena 4y ago
  Not the future. It's the present, and the reason behind this acquisition. I agree, it's a bit sad to see.
  - thsbrown 4y ago
    As a game developer with a released mobile game made with Unity I'll admit I had very mixed feelings about the news. On one end it makes me wonder if Unity has it's priorities straight. On the other, I think there is definitely a lot of room for improvement with their own ad solution. Not too mention in order to fund any further improvements in the engine Unity needs to make money. Given that they produce no games of their own, it makes sense that they are expanding and improving their suite of services in order to bring in more revenue. At least that's my hope. Unity has been in a rocky place for a while now (straddling the line between what it is and what it wants to be) and I think news like this combined with the layoffs can lead many to wonder if Unity is still committed to making a world class game engine that can grow with them for years to come.
    - Jensson 4y ago
      > Unity has been in a rocky place for a while now (straddling the line between what it is and what it wants to be) Yeah, they tried to compete with Unreal for some reason, and of course they lost. And when doing so they made the engine worse for small creators. For example it got a lot slower after they changed the asset database in the 2019.3 version, it feels horrible to use after that and just creating a new project now takes minutes.
      - Pulcinella 4y ago
        It feels like they tried to compete with Unreal in the same way that Apple tries to enter gaming: very half-hearted attempts that they think are very serious. With Apple it’s “hey look we are a serious gaming platform. Look we have 3 new APIs just to support gaming and we paid a AA/AAA developer to port their game eventually” and with Unity it’s “Hey we can compete with Unreal. Look we even have new render pipelines with some of the features Unreal has and we bought Weta for some reason. Look we even put out a demo that barely works that we will never update showing just how graphically advanced Unity can be.” They both think these meager attempts are actually some great effort when it actually requires large investments of time and money to get where they say they want to go. E.g. Microsoft buying their way into the console market with the original Xbox. Basically just hemorrhaging money for an entire console generation so they could finally compete the next generation with the 360.
wokwokwok 4y ago
This is an ad platform, like unity ads. https://developers.is.com/ironsource-mobile/unity/unity-plugin/#step-1 https://developers.is.com/ironsource-mobile/unity/unity-plug...
abbabon 4y ago
I, for one, am happy for this merger / acquisition. As a mobile games developer, I feel that Unity as a game engine has lost its way in the last few years, and the recent acquisitions reflect that. Instead of capitalizing on its merits and strengths - an easy-to-bootstrap multi-platform engine which is perfect for mobile development - Unity has opted to try and compete in the AAA/AAA-like market against Unreal. The recent announcments and the features actually being delivered from Unity support that strategic transition, and this leaves the engine in a state of constant conflict with itself. Ask anyone who tried to integrate a 3rd party advertisment engine into their game and you'll understand why including a 'default' or an easy-to-bootstrap advertising and user-acquisition tool is a good move. This will hopefully streamline what is nowadays a less than ideal process. That is, if the merger will be capitalized upon instead of just serving the stock owners.
- bitwize 4y ago
  Maybe it's different now, but in the past I associated Unity mobile games with my phone running very hot.
  - porcc 4y ago
    Funny to think that the developers who haven't paid for the ability to remove the splash screen are also the ones likely to have optimized their games poorly
  - surmoi 4y ago
    That's because very often mobile games are not developed with performances in mind or when they are, they'll use everything the device can give, often pushing it into throttling mode, because mobiles are not made to be run at sustain load for a long time. Mobile is the most constrained platform to develop on if you want to actually have an optimized game, especially when supporting most Android devices.
  - tomc1985 4y ago
    Unity games run horribly on desktop.... how they think its legit a good mobile engine is beyond me Like, Valheim runs like ass, all things considered. Battletech takes up like 50gb for a game without more than a couple of cutscenes and a camera that sits in the sky, and takes forever to load. Graveyard Keeper -- a PIXEL ART 2d game -- is for some reason made in Unity, and it takes way too long to load a couple of megabytes worth of textures
papruapap 4y ago
prob is a matter of time before their force ads in the unity free-tier, all roads lead to Rome, good news for Godot I guess.
spywaregorilla 4y ago
> With ironSource, Unity will take the linear process of making games and RT3D content and experiences and make it an interconnected and interactive one - creating the opportunity to innovate and improve at every step of the cycle. > What if that process was no longer "first create; then monetize?” What if creators had an engine for live games that by default enabled them to gain early indicators of success for their games through user acquisition of their prototype, and gave them a feedback loop to improve their games based on real player interactions as early in the process as possible? Sounds like utter nonsense to me. Does anyone have an optimistic take on what this is trying to say in a good direction? I'm reading it as shipping more unfinished games, possibly with more ads
- thsbrown 4y ago
  Couldn't be any more vague if they tried.
- the_lonely_road 4y ago
  Sounds like Steam early access with metics and feedback. Maybe it’s referencing social media campaign to measure interest during the early prototype stage like star citizen has been doing.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- bdefore 4y ago
  Right? It disparages not putting profits first in the act of creation, but doesn't explain how its offering solves this problem. Instead it describes how to improve feedback loops. It leaves as an exercise to the reader how user acquisition leads to money. Filthy.
- kaetemi 4y ago
  Ah, like open source games where development drags on forever, and the player base is thinly spread out over time.
- 4y ago
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
> If you don’t know ironSource, they bring a proven record of helping creators focus on what creators do best – bringing great apps and user experiences to life – while enabling business expansion in the app economy. ironSource’s suite of tools and solutions provides the majority of the world’s top games and many of the leading non-gaming apps with the monetization, marketing, analytics, and discovery capabilities they need to build and run scalable app-based businesses. I'm sorry. I must be dense. I still don't understand what IronSource does. I thought, from the name, that it was like Perforce, but that is obviously not correct.
- cheschire 4y ago
  Right, which makes the condescending tone of "if you don't know this company" even more egregious. They easily could've rephrased that to talk about ironsource's strengths without making a subconscious concession to the fact that 99% of their audience has never heard of this company they are MERGING with, not acquiring.
  - sigmoid10 4y ago
    I mean, the phrasing might be needlessly contrived, but I fully understood what the company does (despite never having heard the name): Ad service and monetization. Granted, if you're not the type of game/app developer that Unity targets, you might not realize that this type of company even exists or how important they have become in recent years. But the quote perfectly describes what they do without going into unnecessary details.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
      I suspect that may be because you are familiar with the context. I now know what they do, thanks to these comments, but that blurb I quoted is almost the Platonic Ideal for "Marketing Dross," and tells me exactly nothing, in many words.
      - sigmoid10 4y ago
taken_username 4y ago
It seems acquisition and merger wave of failed SPACs is started. I think we will see many of these in the upcoming months.
- Schweigi 4y ago
  IronSource went public last year via SPAC at over $10B of market cap. The merger or rather aquisition? happens now at $4B. Definitely a big loss for many of the investors and most likely a lot of the employees who couldn’t get out fast enough.
  - phendrenad2 4y ago
    Still, if you're going to catch a falling knife, best to do so before it hits the floor.
    - drusepth 4y ago
      A falling knife has no handle. It's always best to catch the knife after it's settled on the ground. ;)
xg15 4y ago
Alright, "temporary challenges due to macroeconomic factors" will definitely go on this year's bullshit shortlist.
999900000999 4y ago
Welp, glad I'm working on learning other engines now. I'll take another look at Godot when it hits 4.0
- TOMDM 4y ago
  The Godot 4 alpha builds are surprisingly stable for playing around in, and feature wise pretty good too. Still not there for working on anything other than small toys or concepts yet, but once it's done it'll be great.
  - 999900000999 4y ago
    I didn't have a great time with Godot 3. I got stuck trying to call a function on a different game object. Find node didn't work. I'm hoping for Godot 4 to be a massive leap in quality/ ease of use. I'm also playing with some lower level tools.
huhtenberg 4y ago
From Wikipedia: ironSource focuses on developing technologies for app monetization and distribution, with its core products focused on the app economy.
bob1029 4y ago
Not sure what to think about this. I was hoping unity would be the way for the indie studio to build AAA experiences (and indeed it seems to have already achieved that in some areas), but this kind of merger makes me skeptical about the long-term viability of that vision. I do currently hold a long position in Unity, but this whole thing is starting to feel a bit yucky to me. Between Godot, UE, and the vast unknown of undeveloped engines, I think I need to re-evaluate my strategy.
- RugnirViking 4y ago
  I can recommend godot. Got into it last weekend and compared to unity it runs like a dream. No freezing for seconds every time you make a change to a script
  - grapeskin 4y ago
    I really wish I weren't years into a major Unity project, because I'd love to make the leap. Every single time I see Unity in the news these days, I simply think "oh god, not again."
  - mordae 4y ago
    While a Godot fan, there are some serious rough edges all over the place. Godot 4 finally solves the insane widget sizing/positioning hell, but is still itself super unstable (scenes corrupted between alpha releases) and buggy (scenes broken on clean import). It's going to take at least another year for it to stabilize and be close to production. Meanwhile, the 3.x branch is simply lacking features. It's OK for 2D, though. If you can stomach the UI widget hell.
- thsbrown 4y ago
  My feelings exactly. Lately I feel like Unity is getting wrecked by Unreal. I consistently look at Unreal acquisitions and developments and think, wow they are adding immense value to game developers / designers there. I have held off on migrating over, given that (from what I have read), I agree with Unity's long term vision (move to .net, package manager, rendering pipelines, UI toolkit, dots). The real question for me though is if they are going to pull it off, or get derailed along the way.
datalopers 4y ago
IronSource is known for leveraging their ad network and installers to distribute spam, malware, and adware bundlers. What the fuck Unity. [1] https://www.benedelman.org/news-021815/ https://www.benedelman.org/news-021815/ [2] https://blog.infostruction.com/2018/10/26/adware-empire-ironsource-and-installcore/ https://blog.infostruction.com/2018/10/26/adware-empire-iron...
- shmatt 4y ago
  I've interviewed IronSource employees who showed me their work. I was pretty shocked at how purely evil the products intent was (malware wrapped installers for popular Windows applications). And this is in Israel, so you regularly interview people from NSO and similar companies, but at least they can claim to be part of "The War On Terror". IronSource doesn't even have that as an excuse
  - andrepd 4y ago
    > but at least they can claim to be part of "The War On Terror". Can't decide if that makes it better or worse x)
    - atwood22 4y ago
      "Not only is this work evil, it also involves wasting 8 trillion dollars and killing civilians"
    - golemiprague 4y ago
      Terror might not be the main issue in Israel these days as it was for example around 2000 but it still happens and the reason it doesn't happen as much is partly due to those efforts. The main issue is that there are still entities in the region openly claiming that they want to destroy the country and turn it into another Arab country, most of the military efforts are against this threat. There is no need to judge it cynically as if we are talking now about the US or some European country going half way across the world to destroy some countries as part of the "war on terror".
pixelbyindex 4y ago
Does anyone have experience shipping monetized games that do not rely on ads? Were any of these titles successful? What are your monetization models? I, for one, hate ads. I will do anything to avoid using ads, but I also need to put food on the table at some point.
- badRNG 4y ago
  > Does anyone have experience shipping monetized games that do not rely on ads? Were any of these titles successful? I don't think I've ever played a PC or console game that relied on ads for revenue (nor would I ever.)
  - kroltan 4y ago
    I don't know if they _rely_ on it, but recent NBA 2K games apparently have interstitial ads, even though it's a full-price 60USD game with yearly releases already. Absolutely disgusting, I already doubt the value of yearly releases, as you basically pay for an updated roster, but this is just overreach.
- thsbrown 4y ago
  Not exactly answering your question here, but I shipped a mobile game worldwide about a year ago with both ads and ability to unlock whole game via purchase to unlock. My ads are as unintrusive as I could implement (watching an ad via button press to unlock a level). So far I have seen mostly iOS users are willing to purchase the game while Android users will heavily lean towards watching an ad to unlock a level. From what I have read (and seen so far) it looks as though the way I'm implementing ads is going to be highly unprofitable Additionally integrating ads in general was a huge pain in the ass. I initially looked to Unity, then Admob, and finally mediation of the two. Funnily enough at one point I looked at mediation via ironsource along the way as I had heard their Unity integration was pretty good. If your curious as to the exact monetization mechanisms you can check them via my game below. [1] https://commandcenterearth.com https://commandcenterearth.com
- linuxftw 4y ago
  On mobile, the best model seems to be FTP with ads, then a small amount ($5) to permanently remove ads. I don't develop games, but if I did, this would be a great addition, if I could 1-click this workflow to drive revenue. This could also have quite the network effect on the ad network itself. You're now able to say 'All Unity apps ship with this network' yada yada. The dark pattern will be "All games now ship with ads, and developers don't benefit from the ads" type stuff in order to drive premium subscriptions from developers. That or instead of the developer getting the 70% cut of the $5 'remove ads' purchase, they're instead going to get 40% and Unity gets the other 30%. I'm sure they'll figure out how to enforce monetization.
neals 4y ago
IronSource is pure evil. Godot is starting to look more and more interesting ...
- surmoi 4y ago
  I worked for too long on mobile games, ads mediation company are indeed the worst, IronSource included. It's a nightmare to work with their black box SDKs, and god knows what they do in that, in addition to tracking and showing ads (do you know some ads can take up more than 200MB ? That's sometimes more than the game I worked on...) I hope this will incite more developers to look into open source game engine such as Godot and find better way to monetize games than ads.
  - bdefore 4y ago
    I feel like there's room to innovate on monetizing gaming hobby projects without ads. And that Kickstarter and Early Access have polluted the well by asking for a one-time payment for an unknown final quality. I'd be more inclined for something more of Patreon subscription model, with a game loop that had a very overt 'Hey if you enjoyed this latest update, consider becoming a supporter. If I get xxx supporters this month I'll keep making more cool stuff' with a clear connection to what would come. Regular monthly updates so long as monthly supporters exceeded a certain number.
    - surmoi 4y ago
      I like this approach, I often thought of having it integrated into a game directly. Players could browse and select to sponsor from a few features I'd plan to integrate and thus allow them to have some say on what they'd like to see first as a community.
PedroBatista 4y ago
It's the end of the road for Unity. ( at least what most of us think Unity still is, but it's not ) The technology was always more or less "fine". Unreal Engine didn't "kill" Unity and it will not in the future. For the better part of a decade, Unity tried to become not-sure-what but way more than "just a game engine", and that's the problem, I don't know exactly what and neither do they. To be clear, Unity is not "dead" and will not be dead for a while, but the writing is on the wall with this "merger". I'm not sure how is Boeing and who is McDonnell Douglas but I already wrote the off my mind.
- tomwojcik 4y ago
  > Unity tried to become not-sure-what but way more than "just a game engine", and that's the problem IIRC most of their revenue comes from Unity Ads, so they'd be dead if it wasn't for this weird pivot. From the business POV, not being "just a game engine" probably saved them.
  - dgb23 4y ago
    Unity is arguably the most popular game engine and has a large market place for plugins/extensions. It is almost unbelievable that there isn't a viable strategy to expand and refine the core product. My intuition here is that the product was taken over by people who wanted fast, huge financial growth, so they invested in what they saw as an opportunity to do just that, while weakening the core product and their image.
    - munificent 4y ago
      I think the key problem is that most game developers are broke and most games are unsuccessful if they even ship. The "picks and shovels" business model where you build tools for customers who use them in their own enterprises can be very successful. But it does require those customers to be successful in their enterprises. (Or you can rely on customers to be willing to pay out of pocket at a loss because it's a hobby, as with music instruments.) Without some kind of other monetization, Unity is essentially selling picks and shovels to miners on a mountain with almost no gold in it. To be clear, I don't think this justifies what Unity is doing. But they are clearly trying to be a $$$$ business in a $ market, and are willing to sell their souls to get the extra $$$.
yolo123 4y ago
For those who are considering other engines, try Godot Engine. It's open source and free to use. https://godotengine.org/ https://godotengine.org/
- radiKal07 4y ago
  No consoles support
  - klaussilveira 4y ago
    It does support consoles: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/latest/tutorials/platform/consoles.html https://docs.godotengine.org/en/latest/tutorials/platform/co... > In other words, there is no engine that is legally allowed to distribute console export templates without requiring the user to prove that they are a licensed console developer. Doing so would violate the console manufacturer's NDA. Just not out in the public.
    - WillPostForFood 4y ago
      From the page you linked: Console ports of Godot are offered by third-party companies (which have ported Godot on their own). Maybe it is semantics but it Sounds more like no console support. You pay a third party to port your game to consoles. Perhaps those third parties have built support into Godot, but as you said, it is not public, and not accessible to you other than as a paid service.
      - techdragon 4y ago
        It’s about commercial contracts and NDAs and that sort of thing. You can’t share the console SDKs, so you can’t ship the features with the rest of the code due to contract reasons, so after your done, you share for a nominal fee (because contract/business reasons) the bindings between Godot and the console SDk, and then the studio who wants their game on console still has to get all the console SDk contract stuff done before they can actually build and test a console version. I’ve looked into it with both Unreal, Unity, and a couple random engines that advertised their explicit support for various consoles… there is always some business contract stuff with the console owner company before you’ll ever be able to compile for the console, and then depending on the engine there is sometimes a deal you’ll have to cut with the company that built the console specific code/middleware/port/shim/adapter/etc … no game engine ships out of the box with a “build for XBox/Switch/PlayStation button” even in Unreal you’ll need the platform SDK installed and wired up which is documented from the Unreal side, but not provided, you have to get all the other half from the console vendor.
shadowgovt 4y ago
Unity is the most popular game engine on Steam and has majority share of the mobile game market. The fact that they can't survive two years of a pandemic without losing hundreds of employees and accepting a merger is indicative of the relative illness of the entire game tool service industry. This is a decades-old company that didn't have enough war-chest to float a few bad years. Given these market realities, one should not expect quality of life in the games industry to improve without unionization or government intervention.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > The fact that they can't survive two years of a pandemic without losing hundreds of employees and accepting a merger is indicative of the relative illness of the entire game tool service industry. This is a decades-old company that didn't have enough war-chest to float a few bad years. Bad years? I thought the pandemic was unusually good for at-home entertainment.
  - adoga 4y ago
    Worked for a mobile game company in 2020 and 2021. Can confirm that 2020 was a very good year revenue wise, if not dying off a little bit towards the end of 2021
    - shadowgovt 4y ago
      Meanwhile, Unity's stock is trading lower than its open 18 months ago. If revenue's up in the industry, they're not capturing it.
      - thaumasiotes 4y ago
        That makes no sense. 18 months ago was January 2021. For Unity to be down now compared to then is fully compatible with the idea that (1) 2020 and 2021 were high points for the industry, and (2) things have started to die off since the end of 2021. That's exactly what you'd expect. But the fact that 2020 and 2021 were historic boom years means that the description of Unity as just lacking the war chest to weather a couple of bad years is nonsense. These were great years, not bad years.
nurblieh 4y ago
Press release tried so hard to not say "ads" that it's conspicuous.
mathverse 4y ago
There's so many israeli software companies I have never heard of. It is truly a startup nation.
- capableweb 4y ago
  Do you know particularly few Israeli companies compared to lets say South African or Polish companies? Wouldn't that just mean it's not a "startup nation" as if it was, you would have heard about those companies? Your reasoning here seems backwards.
  - mathverse 4y ago
    Bad wording on my part but there's a lot of israeli companies i have never heard of on top of THAT MANY i have. There's prominent israeli startups and unicorns you usually know about like Wix or some old ones like (ICQ/Mirabilis) and then there's a myriad of small ones you stumble upon because they are in your domain area like logz.io. But then you hear about a company with like 1k employees and you are like...wth.
  - CharlesW 4y ago
    > Do you know particularly few Israeli companies compared to lets say South African or Polish companies? "Startup nation" has been a well-known nickname for Israel for some time. On a per-capita basis, Israel excels at both the number of startups created and the amount of capital that they attract. "A striking conclusion is that on a per capita basis, capital flows into Israel were a whopping 28 times more than those in the U.S." — https://www.inc.com/peter-cohan/why-israel-drew-28-times-more-venture-capital-per-capita-than-us.html https://www.inc.com/peter-cohan/why-israel-drew-28-times-mor...
- keewee7 4y ago
  They also have many hardware companies. It's almost an annual thing that some megacorp buys an Israeli hardware or semiconductor company. We used to have a good hardware startup ecosystem in Denmark because former Giga employees had more money than they knew what to do with after Intel bought Giga in 2000. However it slowly burned out for some reason. Maybe the 2008 crisis had something to do with it.
numlock86 4y ago
So this is the nail on the coffin?
sempron64 4y ago
Some folks in this thread are characterizing this as a one-sided acquisition but what I did not realize was that ironSource is a public company ironSource ltd: mkt cap ~3bn Unity ltd: mkt cap 10bn This is an all-stock deal https://seekingalpha.com/news/3856307-ironsource-surges-after-unity-agrees-to-acquire-in-44b-all-stock-deal https://seekingalpha.com/news/3856307-ironsource-surges-afte... Ironsource also has 30-50% the number of employees as Unity: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/ironsource https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/ironsource https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/unity-technologies https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/unity-technologies So this definitely can be characterized as a merger.
- thsbrown 4y ago
  Given that Unity and ironSource stock prices have both dropped fairly substantially I wonder how that factors in to the deal going through at this time. Does that make this a better deal for one vs the other? It says ironSource share will trade for ~10% of a Unity share. Given that Unity is at around ~$33 a share and ironSource is ~$3 a share was the attempt to just combine forces for the benefit of both parties? Sorry if this is coming off as a dumb question, trying to understand how this works to the benefit of disadvantage of them both.
  - telchior 4y ago
    To me this looks like typical ad industry consolidation. It's part of the eternal circle of advertising: when a new ad format shows up (radio, TV, web, mobile, etc) a zillion little companies pop up. Twenty years later there are just a handful of big players. Unity made the choice to get into ads quite a few years ago when they acquired a company called Applifier. They ended up doing really well in mobile ads. IronSource, similarly, has done pretty well. But they're now competing with companies like Google, Facebook and Apple who have way more weight to throw around. At the least, if Unity had not done this acquisition, it leaves IronSource to be acquired or merged with someone else. You could say, why is Unity in the ad business at all? But they're in way too deep to back out now. Ads are a huge chunk of their revenue. Trying to gobble up smaller competitors just makes sense in terms of trying to be one of the eventual survivors.
yomkippur 4y ago
Unreal Engine having a field day with this one. Honestly I'm super disappointed in Unity and I regret having purchased so many plugins on their store that I never even used. Soon we will only have Unreal Engine dominating the scene as Unity essentially just signed their own demise.
honkycat 4y ago
So glad I ditched unity for unreal a year ago. Instead of chasing the ecs waterfalls they should have been iterating on their product... Or actually shipped one of their next gen features within a reasonable timeline.
zomglings 4y ago
Guys relax, check the date, it's April... oh :(
Devasta 4y ago
It'll be very interesting to see the impact on the games market 5 years from now on this, no competant business is going to use Unity for new projects after this.
Animats 4y ago
"This tighter integration between Unity’s Create and Operate means a more powerful flywheel and data feedback loop that further supports creators’ success and understanding of what’s working between gameplay, design and their monetization efforts." Aargh. Now what, built-in NFTs? Ads in games have mostly been failures. You can sell items to your users, but ads in games are a bad fit. Either they interrupt gameplay, or they're ignored in-game product placement. This is also true for "metaverse" systems. It's not clear there's any role for "brands" in the metaverse. The systems which are profitable don't have them.
- w-j-w 4y ago
- otabdeveloper4 4y ago
  > but ads in games are a bad fit Au contraire. Casual mobile games is the new television, and ads on television is a huge market. Or was a huge market; that spend will now eventually flow towards personal devices, a.k.a. mobile games.
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  They're being more honest than you realize. In that quote they are basically saying they want this to make it easier for you to better target and milk the whales who play your stupid free-to-play mobile game. "Gameplay" here is being used the same as the gambling industry
lencastre 4y ago
So no more updating of Unity’s base platform right?
Kye 4y ago
This is going to be like what happened to SourceForge.
drusepth 4y ago
Been using Unity for almost 2 years. Had no wavering when Unreal demoed lumen, metahumans, etc, nor when Unity doubled down on mobile games (even though it's not my market). I've always liked how Unity doesn't respond to what other engines are doing and instead has just forged forward with what they've always worked toward; it's always been ol' reliable in terms of functionality and future. However, I don't know how to interpret this in any other way than an exit plan for Unity. It's not an aquisition of ironSource, but a merger; this alone is a big change, but the release itself paints a clear picture of a complete reversal for unity: rather than being a capable dev tool for all platforms + non-games, it looks like they're now going to focus entirely on mobile and non-game applications? That's finally enough for me to consider a new engine (probably Unreal, maybe Godot). I'm not inherently against whatever this hand-wavy solution to "first create; then monetize" is they're proposing, even though it'll 100% result in more low-effort, highly-monetized games that already plague the industry. I still have a lot of faith in Unity as a company and a paradigm pivot like this could result in something new if they play their cards right but... this being a merger puts a big question mark on what cards they'll have left to play when merging their deck with ironSource. In short: there's a small chance this news will be very good long-term, but a high chance this news will turn out very bad for the future of Unity and unity devs that don't want to work with the kind of scammy monetization ironSource is known for.
jakearmitage 4y ago
If anyone is looking for a Unity alternative, the guys at rbfx are doing a great job revamping the old Urho3D codebase: https://github.com/rbfx/rbfx https://github.com/rbfx/rbfx It has good C# scripting support, a nice editor and modern rendering pipeline.
japhib 4y ago
This, right after laying off HUNDREDS of staff ... Source: https://kotaku.com/unity-ironsource-merger-ad-tech-layoffs-1849173304 https://kotaku.com/unity-ironsource-merger-ad-tech-layoffs-1...
- duped 4y ago
  It's an all-stock deal. Companies do this when they're in trouble.
madrox 4y ago
Unity must be in more trouble than I thought. There's no way a game engine company that's doing well would merge with a company like this. They're reporting earnings in a month, so it must be pretty bad.
ricardobeat 4y ago
> ironSource’s 3B+ monthly active users Why am I having trouble believing this...?
Rapzid 4y ago
There is no such thing as a "merger". Always a top and bottom. Who is the top here?
duxup 4y ago
I was thinking of trying my hand at making some games…. so what are the alternatives to Unity?

397 points by Luc 4y ago

Nit for @dang or OP - it's ironSource not IronSource (This comment is not an endorsement of the merger which I'm personally not a fan of - we get an ad/installer company merging with the biggest non-AAA game engine company which creates all sort of problematic incentives)

wccrawford 4y ago
I heard recently that most of Unity's money already comes from Unity Ads, so this is just the natural extension of that. It's sad, but that's our reality I guess.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  That is what happens when the price of a whatevercinno is too much to ask for a game.
zamalek 4y ago
> an ad/installer company Seems like Unity isn't too proud of that either. I wasn't able to figure out what ironSource do from the first few paragraphs due to them dancing around the truth.
Luc 4y ago
I used 'ironSource' when I posted. It must have been changed some time after by a moderator.
giancarlostoro 4y ago
> we get an ad/installer company merging with the biggest non-AAA game engine company which creates all sort of problematic incentives) Whatever pushes people closer to Godot. Seriously though, the only thing I see that Unity has that Godot lacks is a rich asset / resource store, with lots and lots of options for whatever you want to build your game with. I would think the maintainers could produce such a store to facilitate funding the project and even provide their own offerings like code snippets for specific game types and then keep 100% of those proceeds (aside from payment vendor fees) towards the project. It's either that or someone, somewhere with free time and energy builds their own and donates to Godot for every asset bought. I really like Godot but I'm only a dev, I don't have time to design my own graphics, I just want to code different ideas to see how they go and go from there, I just want to download a few assets and get cracking, and right now that is far easier to do with Unity than it is with Godot it seems like. I think Godot adopting a Unity importer might help significantly.
- bodge5000 4y ago
  I can think of a few others, though I did move from Unity to Godot and never looked back so clearly they're not deal breakers (for me): - Doesn't handle 3D as well. Mostly optimisation stuff, though also things like procedural sky/sun is weaker I find with Godot than Unity. Though almost all of that are looking to change with Godot 4. - As you mention asset store, but also just the size of the community. Can't really blame Godot for this though, their documentation is certainly very good which is about as much as they can do. - GDScript is a great language, but I'm not a big fan of using engine-specific languages, rather than a generic one like C#. Of course it has its advantages, but it means you also miss out on whatever package manager comes with the language. Bindings remedy this, but they're not a simple out-the-box experience. - Similar to above, GDScript and a lot of areas of the engine feel more strongly orientated towards fast and easy dev time rather than game performance. Its a personal choice so I can't complain much, and again bindings can help, but out the box GDScript of course isnt as fast as C# with ECS. Thats about all I can think of, and as I say I use, and overall love, Godot so despite my complaints theres still more going for it than against it (for me)
  - giancarlostoro 4y ago
    > but it means you also miss out on whatever package manager comes with the language. I didn't even consider that! Good call out! > Similar to above, GDScript and a lot of areas of the engine feel more strongly orientated towards fast and easy dev time rather than game performance. Correct me if I'm wrong or way off, but isn't GDNative (or whatever it might be called now) basically for those moments where you need a little more beef, but don't want to rebuild the entire engine, so you bring in Rust or D or any other language you know and love and bridge it in through GDNative?
    - bodge5000 4y ago
      Yeh so the bindings with GDNative do absolutely help performance, and I imagine Rust with Godot would be even faster than Unity with C# (You can also use GDNative to add ECS as well I believe), but out the box, and therefore likely the direction Godot is heading in, seems to favour workflow above performance. That being said, it could be a "grass is greener" issue. There are plenty of engines that offer better performance but a worse workflow, Unity for one, that I'm not using and instead using Godot, and I guess bindings are as close as reasonably feasible to getting the best of both worlds, so I cant complain much.

laurencei 4y ago

They have a sub-title in their article "Redefining the game engine – this is more than ads" Then they go on to say "Advertising has long been and we believe will continue to be the economic engine for mobile games, driving players into their games and driving revenue at scale" Then finally "It also reinforces our strong conviction in the long-term strength and growth of the in-game advertising business" Seems like they are just doubling down on the ads in games mainstream...

ravivyas 4y ago
They actually doubled down when they started building their own Ads mediation platform after having an AdNetwork, but they struggled to grow. Their targeting tool "Pinpointer" failed and showed up on an earnings call.
nemacol 4y ago
"driving players into their games" I don't know anyone that plays a game because of the ads that are in it. I must be misunderstanding what they are saying?
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  Perhaps by making games ad supported where there otherwise would've been pay first or subscription based
- RugnirViking 4y ago
  presumably they mean adverts elsewhere for the game they are being driven to. Although of course if those other places are also mobile games, there is a certain bizarre oroboros to the whole idea... talk about zero-sum games, this is negative-sum
  - GrinningFool 4y ago
    It does seem to be a circle: games carry adverts. The overwhelming majority of adverts is for more games. If you get the advertised game, you're now seeing ads in that game for more games... Mobile games are a weird, impossibly self-sustaining beast. Developers (usually have to) dump money into advertising, even as their own games are advertising the competition.

stephc_int13 4y ago

Why is it adverstised as a merge and not an acquisition? ironSource is a much smaller company than Unity, if I am not mistaken.

bigtones 4y ago
They're just labelling it a merger for optics - it's absolutely an acquisition with one party buying the other.
- thsbrown 4y ago
  I agree, however I'm curious what the incentive for calling it a merge is? Is it part of the deal with ironSource? Do they, for some reason think that merge sounds better then acquired? Because I'm in the camp that acquired would be more appealing.
  - datavirtue 4y ago
    Merger sounds much better to the employees of Iron source.
    - techdragon 4y ago
      Does anyone there actually care about that… based on the history behind the company (well documented by other commentators on this story here) I can’t imagine management give a flying fuck about anything or anyone, except the money.
      - Jasper_ 4y ago
        This whole press release was written for the executives of both companies, maybe the shareholders, but certainly not the employees, and definitely not the public.
- psyc 4y ago
  The optics are atrocious for Unity.

throwawaycuriou 4y ago

I don't recognize this company anymore. What a gibberish announcement. Their game engine is hardly discussed. Apparently the future is ads on mobile apps.

vvillena 4y ago
Not the future. It's the present, and the reason behind this acquisition. I agree, it's a bit sad to see.
- thsbrown 4y ago
  As a game developer with a released mobile game made with Unity I'll admit I had very mixed feelings about the news. On one end it makes me wonder if Unity has it's priorities straight. On the other, I think there is definitely a lot of room for improvement with their own ad solution. Not too mention in order to fund any further improvements in the engine Unity needs to make money. Given that they produce no games of their own, it makes sense that they are expanding and improving their suite of services in order to bring in more revenue. At least that's my hope. Unity has been in a rocky place for a while now (straddling the line between what it is and what it wants to be) and I think news like this combined with the layoffs can lead many to wonder if Unity is still committed to making a world class game engine that can grow with them for years to come.
  - Jensson 4y ago
    > Unity has been in a rocky place for a while now (straddling the line between what it is and what it wants to be) Yeah, they tried to compete with Unreal for some reason, and of course they lost. And when doing so they made the engine worse for small creators. For example it got a lot slower after they changed the asset database in the 2019.3 version, it feels horrible to use after that and just creating a new project now takes minutes.
    - Pulcinella 4y ago
      It feels like they tried to compete with Unreal in the same way that Apple tries to enter gaming: very half-hearted attempts that they think are very serious. With Apple it’s “hey look we are a serious gaming platform. Look we have 3 new APIs just to support gaming and we paid a AA/AAA developer to port their game eventually” and with Unity it’s “Hey we can compete with Unreal. Look we even have new render pipelines with some of the features Unreal has and we bought Weta for some reason. Look we even put out a demo that barely works that we will never update showing just how graphically advanced Unity can be.” They both think these meager attempts are actually some great effort when it actually requires large investments of time and money to get where they say they want to go. E.g. Microsoft buying their way into the console market with the original Xbox. Basically just hemorrhaging money for an entire console generation so they could finally compete the next generation with the 360.

wokwokwok 4y ago

This is an ad platform, like unity ads. https://developers.is.com/ironsource-mobile/unity/unity-plugin/#step-1 https://developers.is.com/ironsource-mobile/unity/unity-plug...

abbabon 4y ago

I, for one, am happy for this merger / acquisition. As a mobile games developer, I feel that Unity as a game engine has lost its way in the last few years, and the recent acquisitions reflect that. Instead of capitalizing on its merits and strengths - an easy-to-bootstrap multi-platform engine which is perfect for mobile development - Unity has opted to try and compete in the AAA/AAA-like market against Unreal. The recent announcments and the features actually being delivered from Unity support that strategic transition, and this leaves the engine in a state of constant conflict with itself. Ask anyone who tried to integrate a 3rd party advertisment engine into their game and you'll understand why including a 'default' or an easy-to-bootstrap advertising and user-acquisition tool is a good move. This will hopefully streamline what is nowadays a less than ideal process. That is, if the merger will be capitalized upon instead of just serving the stock owners.

bitwize 4y ago
Maybe it's different now, but in the past I associated Unity mobile games with my phone running very hot.
- porcc 4y ago
  Funny to think that the developers who haven't paid for the ability to remove the splash screen are also the ones likely to have optimized their games poorly
- surmoi 4y ago
  That's because very often mobile games are not developed with performances in mind or when they are, they'll use everything the device can give, often pushing it into throttling mode, because mobiles are not made to be run at sustain load for a long time. Mobile is the most constrained platform to develop on if you want to actually have an optimized game, especially when supporting most Android devices.
- tomc1985 4y ago
  Unity games run horribly on desktop.... how they think its legit a good mobile engine is beyond me Like, Valheim runs like ass, all things considered. Battletech takes up like 50gb for a game without more than a couple of cutscenes and a camera that sits in the sky, and takes forever to load. Graveyard Keeper -- a PIXEL ART 2d game -- is for some reason made in Unity, and it takes way too long to load a couple of megabytes worth of textures

papruapap 4y ago

prob is a matter of time before their force ads in the unity free-tier, all roads lead to Rome, good news for Godot I guess.

spywaregorilla 4y ago

> With ironSource, Unity will take the linear process of making games and RT3D content and experiences and make it an interconnected and interactive one - creating the opportunity to innovate and improve at every step of the cycle. > What if that process was no longer "first create; then monetize?” What if creators had an engine for live games that by default enabled them to gain early indicators of success for their games through user acquisition of their prototype, and gave them a feedback loop to improve their games based on real player interactions as early in the process as possible? Sounds like utter nonsense to me. Does anyone have an optimistic take on what this is trying to say in a good direction? I'm reading it as shipping more unfinished games, possibly with more ads

thsbrown 4y ago
Couldn't be any more vague if they tried.
the_lonely_road 4y ago
Sounds like Steam early access with metics and feedback. Maybe it’s referencing social media campaign to measure interest during the early prototype stage like star citizen has been doing.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
bdefore 4y ago
Right? It disparages not putting profits first in the act of creation, but doesn't explain how its offering solves this problem. Instead it describes how to improve feedback loops. It leaves as an exercise to the reader how user acquisition leads to money. Filthy.
kaetemi 4y ago
Ah, like open source games where development drags on forever, and the player base is thinly spread out over time.
4y ago

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

> If you don’t know ironSource, they bring a proven record of helping creators focus on what creators do best – bringing great apps and user experiences to life – while enabling business expansion in the app economy. ironSource’s suite of tools and solutions provides the majority of the world’s top games and many of the leading non-gaming apps with the monetization, marketing, analytics, and discovery capabilities they need to build and run scalable app-based businesses. I'm sorry. I must be dense. I still don't understand what IronSource does. I thought, from the name, that it was like Perforce, but that is obviously not correct.

cheschire 4y ago
Right, which makes the condescending tone of "if you don't know this company" even more egregious. They easily could've rephrased that to talk about ironsource's strengths without making a subconscious concession to the fact that 99% of their audience has never heard of this company they are MERGING with, not acquiring.
- sigmoid10 4y ago
  I mean, the phrasing might be needlessly contrived, but I fully understood what the company does (despite never having heard the name): Ad service and monetization. Granted, if you're not the type of game/app developer that Unity targets, you might not realize that this type of company even exists or how important they have become in recent years. But the quote perfectly describes what they do without going into unnecessary details.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
    I suspect that may be because you are familiar with the context. I now know what they do, thanks to these comments, but that blurb I quoted is almost the Platonic Ideal for "Marketing Dross," and tells me exactly nothing, in many words.
    - sigmoid10 4y ago

taken_username 4y ago

It seems acquisition and merger wave of failed SPACs is started. I think we will see many of these in the upcoming months.

Schweigi 4y ago
IronSource went public last year via SPAC at over $10B of market cap. The merger or rather aquisition? happens now at $4B. Definitely a big loss for many of the investors and most likely a lot of the employees who couldn’t get out fast enough.
- phendrenad2 4y ago
  Still, if you're going to catch a falling knife, best to do so before it hits the floor.
  - drusepth 4y ago
    A falling knife has no handle. It's always best to catch the knife after it's settled on the ground. ;)

xg15 4y ago

Alright, "temporary challenges due to macroeconomic factors" will definitely go on this year's bullshit shortlist.

999900000999 4y ago

Welp, glad I'm working on learning other engines now. I'll take another look at Godot when it hits 4.0

TOMDM 4y ago
The Godot 4 alpha builds are surprisingly stable for playing around in, and feature wise pretty good too. Still not there for working on anything other than small toys or concepts yet, but once it's done it'll be great.
- 999900000999 4y ago
  I didn't have a great time with Godot 3. I got stuck trying to call a function on a different game object. Find node didn't work. I'm hoping for Godot 4 to be a massive leap in quality/ ease of use. I'm also playing with some lower level tools.

huhtenberg 4y ago

From Wikipedia: ironSource focuses on developing technologies for app monetization and distribution, with its core products focused on the app economy.

bob1029 4y ago

Not sure what to think about this. I was hoping unity would be the way for the indie studio to build AAA experiences (and indeed it seems to have already achieved that in some areas), but this kind of merger makes me skeptical about the long-term viability of that vision. I do currently hold a long position in Unity, but this whole thing is starting to feel a bit yucky to me. Between Godot, UE, and the vast unknown of undeveloped engines, I think I need to re-evaluate my strategy.

RugnirViking 4y ago
I can recommend godot. Got into it last weekend and compared to unity it runs like a dream. No freezing for seconds every time you make a change to a script
- grapeskin 4y ago
  I really wish I weren't years into a major Unity project, because I'd love to make the leap. Every single time I see Unity in the news these days, I simply think "oh god, not again."
- mordae 4y ago
  While a Godot fan, there are some serious rough edges all over the place. Godot 4 finally solves the insane widget sizing/positioning hell, but is still itself super unstable (scenes corrupted between alpha releases) and buggy (scenes broken on clean import). It's going to take at least another year for it to stabilize and be close to production. Meanwhile, the 3.x branch is simply lacking features. It's OK for 2D, though. If you can stomach the UI widget hell.
thsbrown 4y ago
My feelings exactly. Lately I feel like Unity is getting wrecked by Unreal. I consistently look at Unreal acquisitions and developments and think, wow they are adding immense value to game developers / designers there. I have held off on migrating over, given that (from what I have read), I agree with Unity's long term vision (move to .net, package manager, rendering pipelines, UI toolkit, dots). The real question for me though is if they are going to pull it off, or get derailed along the way.

datalopers 4y ago

IronSource is known for leveraging their ad network and installers to distribute spam, malware, and adware bundlers. What the fuck Unity. [1] https://www.benedelman.org/news-021815/ https://www.benedelman.org/news-021815/ [2] https://blog.infostruction.com/2018/10/26/adware-empire-ironsource-and-installcore/ https://blog.infostruction.com/2018/10/26/adware-empire-iron...

shmatt 4y ago
I've interviewed IronSource employees who showed me their work. I was pretty shocked at how purely evil the products intent was (malware wrapped installers for popular Windows applications). And this is in Israel, so you regularly interview people from NSO and similar companies, but at least they can claim to be part of "The War On Terror". IronSource doesn't even have that as an excuse
- andrepd 4y ago
  > but at least they can claim to be part of "The War On Terror". Can't decide if that makes it better or worse x)
  - atwood22 4y ago
    "Not only is this work evil, it also involves wasting 8 trillion dollars and killing civilians"
  - golemiprague 4y ago
    Terror might not be the main issue in Israel these days as it was for example around 2000 but it still happens and the reason it doesn't happen as much is partly due to those efforts. The main issue is that there are still entities in the region openly claiming that they want to destroy the country and turn it into another Arab country, most of the military efforts are against this threat. There is no need to judge it cynically as if we are talking now about the US or some European country going half way across the world to destroy some countries as part of the "war on terror".

pixelbyindex 4y ago

Does anyone have experience shipping monetized games that do not rely on ads? Were any of these titles successful? What are your monetization models? I, for one, hate ads. I will do anything to avoid using ads, but I also need to put food on the table at some point.

badRNG 4y ago
> Does anyone have experience shipping monetized games that do not rely on ads? Were any of these titles successful? I don't think I've ever played a PC or console game that relied on ads for revenue (nor would I ever.)
- kroltan 4y ago
  I don't know if they _rely_ on it, but recent NBA 2K games apparently have interstitial ads, even though it's a full-price 60USD game with yearly releases already. Absolutely disgusting, I already doubt the value of yearly releases, as you basically pay for an updated roster, but this is just overreach.
thsbrown 4y ago
Not exactly answering your question here, but I shipped a mobile game worldwide about a year ago with both ads and ability to unlock whole game via purchase to unlock. My ads are as unintrusive as I could implement (watching an ad via button press to unlock a level). So far I have seen mostly iOS users are willing to purchase the game while Android users will heavily lean towards watching an ad to unlock a level. From what I have read (and seen so far) it looks as though the way I'm implementing ads is going to be highly unprofitable Additionally integrating ads in general was a huge pain in the ass. I initially looked to Unity, then Admob, and finally mediation of the two. Funnily enough at one point I looked at mediation via ironsource along the way as I had heard their Unity integration was pretty good. If your curious as to the exact monetization mechanisms you can check them via my game below. [1] https://commandcenterearth.com https://commandcenterearth.com
linuxftw 4y ago
On mobile, the best model seems to be FTP with ads, then a small amount ($5) to permanently remove ads. I don't develop games, but if I did, this would be a great addition, if I could 1-click this workflow to drive revenue. This could also have quite the network effect on the ad network itself. You're now able to say 'All Unity apps ship with this network' yada yada. The dark pattern will be "All games now ship with ads, and developers don't benefit from the ads" type stuff in order to drive premium subscriptions from developers. That or instead of the developer getting the 70% cut of the $5 'remove ads' purchase, they're instead going to get 40% and Unity gets the other 30%. I'm sure they'll figure out how to enforce monetization.

neals 4y ago

IronSource is pure evil. Godot is starting to look more and more interesting ...

surmoi 4y ago
I worked for too long on mobile games, ads mediation company are indeed the worst, IronSource included. It's a nightmare to work with their black box SDKs, and god knows what they do in that, in addition to tracking and showing ads (do you know some ads can take up more than 200MB ? That's sometimes more than the game I worked on...) I hope this will incite more developers to look into open source game engine such as Godot and find better way to monetize games than ads.
- bdefore 4y ago
  I feel like there's room to innovate on monetizing gaming hobby projects without ads. And that Kickstarter and Early Access have polluted the well by asking for a one-time payment for an unknown final quality. I'd be more inclined for something more of Patreon subscription model, with a game loop that had a very overt 'Hey if you enjoyed this latest update, consider becoming a supporter. If I get xxx supporters this month I'll keep making more cool stuff' with a clear connection to what would come. Regular monthly updates so long as monthly supporters exceeded a certain number.
  - surmoi 4y ago
    I like this approach, I often thought of having it integrated into a game directly. Players could browse and select to sponsor from a few features I'd plan to integrate and thus allow them to have some say on what they'd like to see first as a community.

PedroBatista 4y ago

It's the end of the road for Unity. ( at least what most of us think Unity still is, but it's not ) The technology was always more or less "fine". Unreal Engine didn't "kill" Unity and it will not in the future. For the better part of a decade, Unity tried to become not-sure-what but way more than "just a game engine", and that's the problem, I don't know exactly what and neither do they. To be clear, Unity is not "dead" and will not be dead for a while, but the writing is on the wall with this "merger". I'm not sure how is Boeing and who is McDonnell Douglas but I already wrote the off my mind.

tomwojcik 4y ago
> Unity tried to become not-sure-what but way more than "just a game engine", and that's the problem IIRC most of their revenue comes from Unity Ads, so they'd be dead if it wasn't for this weird pivot. From the business POV, not being "just a game engine" probably saved them.
- dgb23 4y ago
  Unity is arguably the most popular game engine and has a large market place for plugins/extensions. It is almost unbelievable that there isn't a viable strategy to expand and refine the core product. My intuition here is that the product was taken over by people who wanted fast, huge financial growth, so they invested in what they saw as an opportunity to do just that, while weakening the core product and their image.
  - munificent 4y ago
    I think the key problem is that most game developers are broke and most games are unsuccessful if they even ship. The "picks and shovels" business model where you build tools for customers who use them in their own enterprises can be very successful. But it does require those customers to be successful in their enterprises. (Or you can rely on customers to be willing to pay out of pocket at a loss because it's a hobby, as with music instruments.) Without some kind of other monetization, Unity is essentially selling picks and shovels to miners on a mountain with almost no gold in it. To be clear, I don't think this justifies what Unity is doing. But they are clearly trying to be a $$$$ business in a $ market, and are willing to sell their souls to get the extra $$$.

yolo123 4y ago

For those who are considering other engines, try Godot Engine. It's open source and free to use. https://godotengine.org/ https://godotengine.org/

radiKal07 4y ago
No consoles support
- klaussilveira 4y ago
  It does support consoles: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/latest/tutorials/platform/consoles.html https://docs.godotengine.org/en/latest/tutorials/platform/co... > In other words, there is no engine that is legally allowed to distribute console export templates without requiring the user to prove that they are a licensed console developer. Doing so would violate the console manufacturer's NDA. Just not out in the public.
  - WillPostForFood 4y ago
    From the page you linked: Console ports of Godot are offered by third-party companies (which have ported Godot on their own). Maybe it is semantics but it Sounds more like no console support. You pay a third party to port your game to consoles. Perhaps those third parties have built support into Godot, but as you said, it is not public, and not accessible to you other than as a paid service.
    - techdragon 4y ago
      It’s about commercial contracts and NDAs and that sort of thing. You can’t share the console SDKs, so you can’t ship the features with the rest of the code due to contract reasons, so after your done, you share for a nominal fee (because contract/business reasons) the bindings between Godot and the console SDk, and then the studio who wants their game on console still has to get all the console SDk contract stuff done before they can actually build and test a console version. I’ve looked into it with both Unreal, Unity, and a couple random engines that advertised their explicit support for various consoles… there is always some business contract stuff with the console owner company before you’ll ever be able to compile for the console, and then depending on the engine there is sometimes a deal you’ll have to cut with the company that built the console specific code/middleware/port/shim/adapter/etc … no game engine ships out of the box with a “build for XBox/Switch/PlayStation button” even in Unreal you’ll need the platform SDK installed and wired up which is documented from the Unreal side, but not provided, you have to get all the other half from the console vendor.

shadowgovt 4y ago

Unity is the most popular game engine on Steam and has majority share of the mobile game market. The fact that they can't survive two years of a pandemic without losing hundreds of employees and accepting a merger is indicative of the relative illness of the entire game tool service industry. This is a decades-old company that didn't have enough war-chest to float a few bad years. Given these market realities, one should not expect quality of life in the games industry to improve without unionization or government intervention.

thaumasiotes 4y ago
> The fact that they can't survive two years of a pandemic without losing hundreds of employees and accepting a merger is indicative of the relative illness of the entire game tool service industry. This is a decades-old company that didn't have enough war-chest to float a few bad years. Bad years? I thought the pandemic was unusually good for at-home entertainment.
- adoga 4y ago
  Worked for a mobile game company in 2020 and 2021. Can confirm that 2020 was a very good year revenue wise, if not dying off a little bit towards the end of 2021
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    Meanwhile, Unity's stock is trading lower than its open 18 months ago. If revenue's up in the industry, they're not capturing it.
    - thaumasiotes 4y ago
      That makes no sense. 18 months ago was January 2021. For Unity to be down now compared to then is fully compatible with the idea that (1) 2020 and 2021 were high points for the industry, and (2) things have started to die off since the end of 2021. That's exactly what you'd expect. But the fact that 2020 and 2021 were historic boom years means that the description of Unity as just lacking the war chest to weather a couple of bad years is nonsense. These were great years, not bad years.

nurblieh 4y ago

Press release tried so hard to not say "ads" that it's conspicuous.

mathverse 4y ago

There's so many israeli software companies I have never heard of. It is truly a startup nation.

capableweb 4y ago
Do you know particularly few Israeli companies compared to lets say South African or Polish companies? Wouldn't that just mean it's not a "startup nation" as if it was, you would have heard about those companies? Your reasoning here seems backwards.
- mathverse 4y ago
  Bad wording on my part but there's a lot of israeli companies i have never heard of on top of THAT MANY i have. There's prominent israeli startups and unicorns you usually know about like Wix or some old ones like (ICQ/Mirabilis) and then there's a myriad of small ones you stumble upon because they are in your domain area like logz.io. But then you hear about a company with like 1k employees and you are like...wth.
- CharlesW 4y ago
  > Do you know particularly few Israeli companies compared to lets say South African or Polish companies? "Startup nation" has been a well-known nickname for Israel for some time. On a per-capita basis, Israel excels at both the number of startups created and the amount of capital that they attract. "A striking conclusion is that on a per capita basis, capital flows into Israel were a whopping 28 times more than those in the U.S." — https://www.inc.com/peter-cohan/why-israel-drew-28-times-more-venture-capital-per-capita-than-us.html https://www.inc.com/peter-cohan/why-israel-drew-28-times-mor...
keewee7 4y ago
They also have many hardware companies. It's almost an annual thing that some megacorp buys an Israeli hardware or semiconductor company. We used to have a good hardware startup ecosystem in Denmark because former Giga employees had more money than they knew what to do with after Intel bought Giga in 2000. However it slowly burned out for some reason. Maybe the 2008 crisis had something to do with it.

numlock86 4y ago

So this is the nail on the coffin?

sempron64 4y ago

Some folks in this thread are characterizing this as a one-sided acquisition but what I did not realize was that ironSource is a public company ironSource ltd: mkt cap ~3bn Unity ltd: mkt cap 10bn This is an all-stock deal https://seekingalpha.com/news/3856307-ironsource-surges-after-unity-agrees-to-acquire-in-44b-all-stock-deal https://seekingalpha.com/news/3856307-ironsource-surges-afte... Ironsource also has 30-50% the number of employees as Unity: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/ironsource https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/ironsource https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/unity-technologies https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/unity-technologies So this definitely can be characterized as a merger.

thsbrown 4y ago
Given that Unity and ironSource stock prices have both dropped fairly substantially I wonder how that factors in to the deal going through at this time. Does that make this a better deal for one vs the other? It says ironSource share will trade for ~10% of a Unity share. Given that Unity is at around ~$33 a share and ironSource is ~$3 a share was the attempt to just combine forces for the benefit of both parties? Sorry if this is coming off as a dumb question, trying to understand how this works to the benefit of disadvantage of them both.
- telchior 4y ago
  To me this looks like typical ad industry consolidation. It's part of the eternal circle of advertising: when a new ad format shows up (radio, TV, web, mobile, etc) a zillion little companies pop up. Twenty years later there are just a handful of big players. Unity made the choice to get into ads quite a few years ago when they acquired a company called Applifier. They ended up doing really well in mobile ads. IronSource, similarly, has done pretty well. But they're now competing with companies like Google, Facebook and Apple who have way more weight to throw around. At the least, if Unity had not done this acquisition, it leaves IronSource to be acquired or merged with someone else. You could say, why is Unity in the ad business at all? But they're in way too deep to back out now. Ads are a huge chunk of their revenue. Trying to gobble up smaller competitors just makes sense in terms of trying to be one of the eventual survivors.

yomkippur 4y ago

Unreal Engine having a field day with this one. Honestly I'm super disappointed in Unity and I regret having purchased so many plugins on their store that I never even used. Soon we will only have Unreal Engine dominating the scene as Unity essentially just signed their own demise.

honkycat 4y ago

So glad I ditched unity for unreal a year ago. Instead of chasing the ecs waterfalls they should have been iterating on their product... Or actually shipped one of their next gen features within a reasonable timeline.

zomglings 4y ago

Guys relax, check the date, it's April... oh :(

Devasta 4y ago

It'll be very interesting to see the impact on the games market 5 years from now on this, no competant business is going to use Unity for new projects after this.

Animats 4y ago

"This tighter integration between Unity’s Create and Operate means a more powerful flywheel and data feedback loop that further supports creators’ success and understanding of what’s working between gameplay, design and their monetization efforts." Aargh. Now what, built-in NFTs? Ads in games have mostly been failures. You can sell items to your users, but ads in games are a bad fit. Either they interrupt gameplay, or they're ignored in-game product placement. This is also true for "metaverse" systems. It's not clear there's any role for "brands" in the metaverse. The systems which are profitable don't have them.

w-j-w 4y ago
otabdeveloper4 4y ago
> but ads in games are a bad fit Au contraire. Casual mobile games is the new television, and ads on television is a huge market. Or was a huge market; that spend will now eventually flow towards personal devices, a.k.a. mobile games.
mrguyorama 4y ago
They're being more honest than you realize. In that quote they are basically saying they want this to make it easier for you to better target and milk the whales who play your stupid free-to-play mobile game. "Gameplay" here is being used the same as the gambling industry

lencastre 4y ago

So no more updating of Unity’s base platform right?

Kye 4y ago

This is going to be like what happened to SourceForge.

drusepth 4y ago

Been using Unity for almost 2 years. Had no wavering when Unreal demoed lumen, metahumans, etc, nor when Unity doubled down on mobile games (even though it's not my market). I've always liked how Unity doesn't respond to what other engines are doing and instead has just forged forward with what they've always worked toward; it's always been ol' reliable in terms of functionality and future. However, I don't know how to interpret this in any other way than an exit plan for Unity. It's not an aquisition of ironSource, but a merger; this alone is a big change, but the release itself paints a clear picture of a complete reversal for unity: rather than being a capable dev tool for all platforms + non-games, it looks like they're now going to focus entirely on mobile and non-game applications? That's finally enough for me to consider a new engine (probably Unreal, maybe Godot). I'm not inherently against whatever this hand-wavy solution to "first create; then monetize" is they're proposing, even though it'll 100% result in more low-effort, highly-monetized games that already plague the industry. I still have a lot of faith in Unity as a company and a paradigm pivot like this could result in something new if they play their cards right but... this being a merger puts a big question mark on what cards they'll have left to play when merging their deck with ironSource. In short: there's a small chance this news will be very good long-term, but a high chance this news will turn out very bad for the future of Unity and unity devs that don't want to work with the kind of scammy monetization ironSource is known for.

jakearmitage 4y ago

If anyone is looking for a Unity alternative, the guys at rbfx are doing a great job revamping the old Urho3D codebase: https://github.com/rbfx/rbfx https://github.com/rbfx/rbfx It has good C# scripting support, a nice editor and modern rendering pipeline.

japhib 4y ago

This, right after laying off HUNDREDS of staff ... Source: https://kotaku.com/unity-ironsource-merger-ad-tech-layoffs-1849173304 https://kotaku.com/unity-ironsource-merger-ad-tech-layoffs-1...

duped 4y ago
It's an all-stock deal. Companies do this when they're in trouble.

madrox 4y ago

Unity must be in more trouble than I thought. There's no way a game engine company that's doing well would merge with a company like this. They're reporting earnings in a month, so it must be pretty bad.

ricardobeat 4y ago

> ironSource’s 3B+ monthly active users Why am I having trouble believing this...?

Rapzid 4y ago

There is no such thing as a "merger". Always a top and bottom. Who is the top here?

duxup 4y ago

I was thinking of trying my hand at making some games…. so what are the alternatives to Unity?