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)
It seems Unreal that unity is in the red. They create a software platform and asset store, right? That should effectively print money; it's not like there's a manufacturing cost and profit margin to selling more copies.
If you assume the average employee makes $100,000, which is almost certainly an undershot given that they're a tech company with a lot of very talented engineers, then their labor costs in salary alone are around $770,000,000, without factoring in things like infrastructure costs, land, health care, etc etc. Sure, they don't have direct manufacturing costs after engineering, but that's a lot of revenue needed just to cover direct labor costs.
From just a little perusing, it seems like they're investing heavily into R&D, and they also have quite a lot of debt. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, or at least not misaligned with their goals. Especially in tech, the aim often isn't to become directly profitable as quickly as possible, but rather to invest every last penny you can get your hands on in order to grow as much as you can, and then when you hit ceiling, pivot to stable profitability, which will be at a much higher level than if you'd been forced to instead focus on slower growth and immediate profit.
That's not to say that this is a good thing or that it doesn't have negative consequences, only that Unity probably doesn't care about being in the red; they care about lots and lots of people using their engine.
How in the name of fuck does Unity have 7700 employees?!
That would be 7k developers.
How can that many developers work on a single product? AFAIK, they can't.
Why shouldn't it? It's not only a game engine, Unity is also trying to place their technology in the movie industry and in the manufacturing industry. And they are also operating an ad service, which is also requiring sales people.
The same person who made the decision to charge for installs or force an ad service into games is running the company. Sound decisions have never been their strong suit.