Why Unity felt the need to “rush out” its controversial install-fee program
Why Unity felt the need to “rush out” its controversial install-fee program
New report details internal divisions, intense push for mobile ad money.
So...greed.
Yeah, I'm not seeing any new information here.
People were initially confused and angry, three days later when word of the fee wavers for using their own ad network started circulating you could practically hear the collective "Oh!" from space.
"Sadly, it wasn’t delivered well, but the need to make more money is still there."
It's even more entertaining: even though they made over $1 billion they're losing money because of going into an aquisition spree.
In other words, greed and incompetence at the highest levels.
No wonder the genial idea of high level management (against the advice of other senior people) was imposition of a new crazy fee on something nobody charges for (installs) applicable to apps made and release with previous versions of the engine all so that they could then "waive" that very same fee that never existed before and was likely contractually invalid anyways for apps made under older ToS.
I wouldn't at all be surprised if this little stunt has pretty much condemned Unity to second-league game engine status (if they're lucky) at least for the next decade.
So, "CEO stock value pump and dump scam". Again. As is tradition for CEOs in 2023.
I love how they blame Unity's shortfall on acquisitions, but make no argument whatsoever that perhaps acquisitions should be more carefully considered with regard to the bottom line.
"Let the plebs pay for it!"
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Business-focused site MobileGamer.biz cites multiple "sources from inside Unity and across the mobile games business" in reporting that Unity received some significant pushback from senior-level managers before rolling out its initial fee-restructuring plans.
The final policy knocked that cap down to 2.5 percent only after the extent of the backlash became clear.
While much of the industry furor was focused on the business impact Unity would have on mid-sized indie game publishers, MobileGamer's reporting suggests Unity's moves were actually more focused on extracting a larger share of the lucrative mobile ad mediation market.
Unity made a massive investment in that market about a year ago when it acquired IronSource, one of many major tools that mobile game devs use to maximize revenue by managing inventory from multiple ad networks at once.
"AppLovin is dominating, and Unity tried to use this policy as a forcing agent to try and get back some market share," one source told the site.
Inside Unity, that kind of hardball push for more ad mediation customers may have been seen as necessary to make up for a huge hole in the company's balance sheet.
The original article contains 528 words, the summary contains 188 words. Saved 64%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
This reminds me, I hope a replacement to Parsec can happen, it's been sitting stagnant since Unity bought it up.
Unity bought Parsec? Shit that's not good
Yeah, I recently went to the Pasec website to change some account info and their frontpage is now all corpo bullshit
Ah shit, time to keep on the lookout for an alternative I like, even though I was happy with what I had.
That explains so much
Sunshine and moonlights not bad, but it leaves some things to be missed about parsec, though comes with more tweakabke configs
(mainly miss keyboard on the android app, easy login, untrusted device connecting, and stylus streaming)