Mobile game developers are now boycotting Unity by switching off its ad products, mobilegamer.biz can reveal.
The group is trying to force Unity into cancelling its proposed Runtime Fee policy.
At the time of publication, 16 different studios have pulled their Unity and IronSource ads: Azur Games, Voodoo, Homa, Century Games, SayGames, CrazyLabs, Original Games, Ducky, Burny Games, Inspired Square, Geisha Tokyo, tatsumaki games, KAYAC, New Story, Playgendary and Supercent.
Collective letter from game development companies: Turning off all IronSource and Unity Ads monetization until new conditions are reviewed
We are the collective voice of the game development industry—developers, game designers, artists, and business minds. Passionate about our craft, we’ve invested years in shaping an industry that touches the lives of millions worldwide. As stakeholders, we cannot remain silent when a decision threatens to destabilize this ecosystem.
Unity has been an instrumental force in this industry. In many ways, it has inspired us to create new immersive worlds and empowered a plethora of dynamic and independent developers to bring their visions to life. We’ve played our part in this journey, moving the industry forward and creating specialists that use Unity as the primary game engine for their projects.
We’ve hosted Unity-centered events, shared our knowledge, and crafted educational content that’s inspired an international community. Thanks to this symbiosis, Unity has evolved into a cornerstone of game development and is now established as an indispensable asset in game creation.
That’s why the September 12 announcement hits us hard. Effective January 1, 2024, Unity plans to introduce installation-dependent fees, a decision that jeopardizes small and large game developers alike, made without any industry consultation. To claim, as Unity has, that this new ‘Runtime Fee’ will impact only 10% of the industry is not just misleading, it’s patently false.
We strongly oppose this move, which disregards the unique challenges and complexities of our industry.
While we’ve always viewed our work as a collaborative effort, this decision blindsided us. With one stroke of the pen, you’ve put hundreds of studios at risk, all without consultation or dialogue.
To put it in relatable terms—what if automakers suddenly decided to charge us for every mile driven on the car that you bought a year ago? The impact on consumers and the industry at large would be seismic.
This comes at a time when the industry is already grappling with tightening profit margins, heightened competition, and escalating costs in both development and marketing. This isn’t just about developers. This impacts artists, designers, marketers, and producers. It’s a cascade that could lead to the shuttering of companies that have given their all to this industry.
Unity, we’ve stood by and celebrated your every innovation. Why, then, were we left out of the conversation on a decision so monumental?
As a course of immediate action, our collective of game development companies is forced to turn off all IronSource and Unity Ads monetization across our projects until these changes are reconsidered.
We urge others who share this stance to do the same. The rules have changed, and the stakes are simply too high. The Runtime Fee is an unacceptable shift in our partnership with Unity that needs to be immediately canceled.
We entered this industry for the love of game development, but what makes it truly special is the community—a community built on openness, shared expertise, and collective progress.
If you share our sentiment, we call on you to join us. Turn off all IronSource and Unity Ads monetization until a fair and equitable resolution is found.
You can also back the movement by signing our open letter. Check out the link to add your voice to the cause.
Sincerely,
Azur Games, Voodoo, Homa, Century Games, SayGames, CrazyLabs, Original Games, Ducky, Burny Games, Inspired Square, Geisha Tokyo, tatsumaki games, KAYAC, New Story, Playgendary, Supercent
…and all who sign this letter, engage in other forms of protest, or simply stand in solidarity with the gaming industry
They turned off ads? Great. Can that be a standoff that lasts forever?
I bet it’ll last less time then the reddit standoff. But I do wish them all of the luck. Fuck Unity and their bullshit fees.
I think this one will work. Most of these games are already “multihomed” on different ad networks and display the one that is most profitable to them at any given time, or a semi-random mixture. The differences in profitably aren’t that huge, and it will get even worse if advertisers run away from Unity too. Unity is making an absolute killing from their ads division, and this is now being threatened.
And who are the advertisers? Other game devs. The whole mobile game advertising scene is one gigantic ouroboros with the ad platforms cutting off a huge portion in the middle. If you leave, you’re going to both stop showing ads and stop your advertising there.
ouroboros
Nice word for “circlejerk”…
cutting off a huge portion in the middle
…but this imagery is disturbing.
Yeah on second thought it’s maybe a bit more vivid than intended, but it fits what I think is going to happen. Below the top 1-2% of mobile games, it’s one big pile of endlessly recycled advertising money. Spend a million in ads, make $800k in ads and $500k in microtransactions, and the $300k is where you have to pay everything else from. Unity is about to bite into that hard and doesn’t care if it leaves behind some wounds.
Hence, ouroboros.
I haven’t play games with ads in years, but O remember getting a lot of Christian ads, like Bible verses and such. It was even worse that regular buy shit ads imo.
I wanted to add a scathing remark about “shoving your in our pious face!” but it practically writes itself.
But hey, at least they didn’t give it a set end date; from the very start of their “strike” the reddit mods admitted at the very start that they couldn’t stay away from their unpaid powertrips and leave their octogenerian mothers’ basements for more than 2 days, and instantly folded at a single empty threat to take away the only thing in their lives that gives them purpose and makes them feel like they wield power over others.
Don’t shove us all under the same rug. I packed my bags, shred my old comments and posts and went into the Fediverse.
Don’t shove us all under the same rug. I packed my bags, shred my old comments and posts and went into the Fediverse.
There’s dozens of us. DOZENS!
You were the exception not the rule unfortunately
Nope. Content creators, the ones doing all the talking on reddit, definitely left. Check out this graph of posts per day on r/askreddit
From what I’ve heard, a lot of it is bot posts now. So if you subtract out the bots I wonder if that delta gets even bigger.
Sorry for the triple post, lag got me (I accidentally just posted the same comment 3 times within mere milliseconds of each other)
Hey some of us said we’d go on indefinately and after being told to open decided to maliously comply only. /r/baduibattles a sub I started is now only letting posts be of New reddit or the Reddit app. User involvement has plummeted, there are fewer posts, each with votes and comments. Automod also posts telling people to join us at !bad_ui_battles@programming.dev
eh? do people still use reddit even? last i heard they have employees actively create threads now to try and keep engagement going.
Reddit employees searching TikTok for memes to repost to Reddit be like:
Now it’s down to just the low-effort memes, ”religious people bad”/“reddit good everywhere else bad” circlejerks, unhelpful advice, and edgy 14 year olds who just discovered politics, thinking homophobia and fragile masculinity are “based” and that they’re communist because they hate their home country because something something pronouns, know 2 russian words (both obscenities), have been playing too many WW2-themed games and say comrade every 4 seconds all despite coming from money themselves and supporting a war being waged by a far-right regime.
Don’t forget the 4+ “rate me” subs that started hitting the front page every day.
Ah yes, the horny college kids/50-yo divorcees with a camera and way too much free time
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Don’t forget that same 14 year old will call you a tankie if you disagree with them in the slightest bit and then you’ll get downvote bombed because you went against the hive-mind of “coddle everyone!”
Despite usually being one himself
There are some special interest subreddits still running almost like before. Subs with a population of a few thousand, with the active members using names that pertain to the sub
Those haven’t moved, at least the non-techie ones haven’t
I’m confused about what you want.
Mods literally got replaced by reddit because they refused to capitulate.
I’m not a fan of reddits choices, but if I was deeply involved in a community I’d consider staying to be part of that community still.
Written like someone who wasn’t actually paying attention to the subreddits during that time
That’s true. Although, having that limit probably got more of them to participate. So while the impact was short, it was more noticeable.
With the difference there are money on the table this time
And they know precisely what’s at stake, and that in any case continuing to use an engine now run by dangerous morons intent on destroying it for a quick buck will not be an option, as we all know Unity will strive for its stated goal of screwing them over like this, be it suddenly and shamelessly like they’re hoping to do or by slowly boiling the frog over many years. And then those devs would lose everything.
The devs can’t afford to fold. The other forum’s powermods folded because they not only could’ve afforded to, but also because upon realizing just how expendable they were, they didn’t want to risk losing the source of their god complex. That, and given that site’s users’ history of bringing feathers to knife fights their failure to enact the change they wanted was hardly surprising.
I hope unity’s shareholders are happy with what they hoped for. This is the result of driving a company too far. Let’s makes this a guideline to follow for other companies not to make such shady decisions.
It becomes more appearent with every new instance of protest that there’s something equally valuable for a company as money, and that is community trust. Because losing it can stop growth. I love the new layer of accountability we obtained with the internet.
I hope unity’s shareholders are happy with what they hoped for. This is the result of driving a company too far. Let’s makes this a guideline to follow for other companies not to make such shady decisions.
I don’t think that’s going to happen as long as the ownership structures surrounding shareholders remains the same. It’s not the average person who invests in Unity that’s doing this, it’s the wealthy equity firms with significant holdings that are pushing for this unsustainable behaviour. After the 2008 crash, the EU, the US, Canada, and the UK all did studies on the economic stability of coops (1-person-1-vote democratically owned businesses) versus traditional companies and found that the coops were considerably more sustainable:
The cooperative banking sector had 20% market share of the European banking sector, but accounted for only 7 percent of all the write-downs and losses between the third quarter of 2007 and the first quarter of 2011.
(UK) A further study found that after ten years 44 percent of cooperatives were still in operation, compared with only 20 percent for all enterprises.
(US) Credit unions, a type of cooperative bank, had five times lower failure rate than other banks during the financial crisis and more than doubled lending to small businesses between 2008 and 2016, from $30 billion to $60 billion, while lending to small businesses overall during the same period declined by around $100 billion.
A 2010 report by the Ministry of Economic Development, Innovation and Export in Québec found the five-year survival rate and ten-year survival rate of cooperatives in Québec to be 62% and 44% respectively compared to 35% and 20% for conventional firms.
There’s also a study using 100 years of data on French wine coops vs non-coop wine companies showing similar results: not only do coops survive longer, the survival rate gap widens over time as more and more non-coops collapse [Cooperatives versus Corporations: Survival in the French Wine Industry. Journal of Wine Economics, 13(3), 328-354. doi:10.1017/jwe.2017.1]
Shareholders aren’t humans with ethics or a conscience. Remember when bby koty was in the news for sex harass? Bliz stuck went down. War Bufet bought bliz stucks and then when the new cycle moved on bliz stuck rebound and war buf MADE FUCKING MONEY OFF OF A SEX HARASS.
And then there was a news cycle about how smet war buf is.
There is no accountability. There is only money.
This was a tough read for me. Is this what it feels like to be dyslexic?
War Bufet.
Dude, this isn’t Twitter, I mean xitter (pronounce x as sh); use your big boy words.
Better off just cutting ties and moving on, true colors don’t really change
‘cutting ties and moving on’ would require a total rebuild of their games in a new engine. it doesn’t really work that way.
They’re going to try this bullshit again, or in another manner. Maybe having everything centralized onto a proprietary single point of failure isn’t a great idea.
Cutting ties and moving on is the right answer.
“Oops, we ratcheted up the heat too fast. We’ll need to do it again slower so the frogs don’t notice.”
Every company I worked in always had a plan B.
Being fully under the whims of a service is how companies die. And unity is going to put a financial stranglehold on so many businesses. So really if they aren’t planning to cut ties, they won’t survive in a few years.
And that’s why tools to migrate to another engine are now a must, like this one! https://github.com/barcoderdev/unitypackage_godot
Rip the band aid now. Stop all development in unity. Unity has shown that it’s obsolete.
Who’s going to pay salary for the year plus of retooling and retraining? You?
Who’s going to pay the new fees imposed by unity?
The companies will if they choose to, it’ll be a massive hit it’ll stop them coming to subscription services, it’ll stop them coming to cloud services, it’ll stop demos and free weekends, it’ll probably hinder experimentation and early access. But the companies can eak out a way of surviving.
Which they can’t without revenue because they downed tools for a few years to retool on something entirely new
The company making enough money to trigger said fees?
I dont support this new structure, but its not like these fees are attacking game companies which have no profits
You can’t just cut ties in this scenario. These games are already built on the unity engine, it’s not feasible to rebuild it again on a totally different engine, and now unity is going to apply new fees to all these already existing games.
Can’t just pay these ridiculous fees either, I have no belief that Unity will back track in any way here unfortunately
Seriously this.
Once the heat dies down, they’ll ramp up again.
2023 truly is the year of unfathomably bad business decisions.
2023 is the year the free money stopped flowing. Without limitless 0% interest money, tech companies that have been losing money for their entire existence have to start making a profit or go bankrupt.
We entered this industry for the love of game development, but what makes it truly special is the community—a community built on openness, shared expertise, and collective progress.
And also in app purchases, subscriptions, pay to win, etc.
I hear you but that’s also the kind of games that overpopulates the market and brings money. Some shitty exploitative timekillers for smartphones are bigger than top ten AAA games combined. Idk any of these companies, but if abusive apps’ devs come to discussing that, it means a lot.
Yeah, I gotta admit that the impact this will have on the F2P P2W market is kinda a silver lining to this whole thing.
An explainer in case you weren’t already in the know about Unity’s misdeeds like I wasn’t until now:
https://gameworldobserver.com/2023/09/12/unity-runtime-fee-explained-game-installs-changes-plans
Nope. At any point in the future, Unity could simply stop the runtime fee waiver, and the developers would be screwed.
All the more reason to pour into a Free and Open Source alternative like Godot.
I don’t fully understand why they need to do this. What is the cost of their service? Using the tool is already a subscription service, what else do they want? It’s not like they have cloud services. They just want free money I guess?
They don’t need to do this. It’s rent seeking behavior.
How did you conclude that? How else are they supposed to not make 193 million in losses?
So, here’s my understanding:
Unity has an in-house advertising/monetization system called LevelPlay. It’s their system for putting ads/analytics/etc. in games. But not a lot of people use it; a lot of people use a direct competitor called AppLovin, which is just outright better.
Several developers have reported Unity quietly reaching out to them and saying “Hey, we see you’re using AppLovin…if you switch over to our LevelPlay service instead, we might just waive some or all of our new Fuck You Fee.”
So apparently this is being done to kill a competitor.
They need something to become sustainable. They’ve been making losses for years. But thata definetly not the way. Other ways would be to lock some future features behind paywalls, and / or to increase their cut of the sales price per unit sold in the future.
What a power move. It’s inspiring to see the community come together.
