Per the CEO in today's meeting:
"This is a ploy to gather more people to use Level Play [advertising network]. The mediation provider [advertising network] makes a cut off every ad, and right now a lot of people are on AppLovin Max [not Unity's], so a big part of this is they want people to switch to Level Play, and by doing that they'll make way more than the install pricing they're suggesting. It's too early to panic, but it is a big change"
If that sounds like a ramble, it's because it was, but the tl;dr is it seems Unity is giving a secret pass to companies that switch to use Unity's advertising solution.
Also some quick fun facts:
- Unity was never profitable
- Unity gave up competing with Unreal over a year ago
- Godot is a free and open source engine that competes with Unity professionally
- The trash App Store/Play Store games spy on you extensively, although Apple and Google have significantly limited their spying ability over the last couple years (i.e we used to open your camera in the background, can't do that anymore)
Update:
CEO is in talks with some Unity folks. The impression is "this decision came from very high up in Unity" from an exec who "had no idea how bad of an idea it was". We're expecting a public revision shortly (next couple days)
Not to simp for the corpos, but this is usually a bad bet. I crunched some numbers in a recent discussion about Lowe's, and if you simply eliminated the CEO's compensation, each employee could get a raise of $0.02 per hour, or about $50 a year. Exec compensation, while obviously extremely high compared to individual rank-and-file employees, is still generally a pretty small portion of expenses, even just labor expenses, because there as so many more standard employees.
Even if your calculations are correct (did you include bonuses?), one CEO that may or may not have been cherry picked, doesn't represent all CEOs. If you spend all your money on CEO salaries, bonuses, buildings, etc., it looks like you're not making any money to the tax man.
Lowe's was being discussed as a company that was particularly bad for paying its workers poor wages. I don't think the math really changes much no matter where you go. Feel free to name whatever company you want though and I'll gladly crunch the numbers. I did McDonald's a while back, and while I don't remember the exact figures, you could eliminate most of the exec team without materially affecting worker pay.
I don't think it materially affects things, but you're moving the goal posts here. Buildings are a legitimate business expense. Lots of employees get paid bonuses.
To throw another company at you, the CEO of Ford had a total comp of $20,996,146 in 2022. Ford has somewhere around 170,000 employees. Liquidating him (which is a bit questionable, given that a lot of CEO compensation is in company stock, and part of that stocks' value comes from the fact that the CEO holds it) and distributing that value evenly to all employees gives every employee a grand raise of $123 a year, or about $10 a month. So, in exchange for losing the CEO, everyone gets to go to Starbucks twice a month.
Sure, there are more execs than the CEO, but there aren't that many, and they'll naturally be paid less as well. The fact of the matter is that exec pay really isn't a huge portion of the company's overall labor costs.