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Game developers turning off all IronSource and Unity Ads monetization

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Re: Game developers turning off all IronSource and Unity Ads monetization

#131

Post by johnnyanmac »

yazzku wrote: post #66
Dudester230602 wrote: post #14

If those companies would disappear overnight, it would be a positive outcome for humanity. I guess there are upsides to Unity's insanity after all.

I think it also affects legitimate gamedev studios. But yeah, I couldn't care less for the signees on this letter. Good riddance, boys; if your product can only run on ads because people won't pay for it, you know you have a shitty product. We need higher quality games in the market, not higher quantity of your chaff.

> if your product can only run on ads because people won't pay for it, you know you have a shitty product.

https://www.eurogamer.net/football-manager-dev-hopes-to-stic...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/appsblog/2012/jul/23/...

https://venturebeat.com/games/monument-valley-developer-only...

https://www.pocketgamer.biz/news/34191/gdc-online-11-android...

https://www.androidpolice.com/2010/08/26/android-piracy-by-c...

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2515893/android-softwa...

If anyone ever wonders why premium games on mobile died out, there's your answer.

But to give a TL;DR for those who don't click through: Piracy on Android in the 2010's was especially rampant, due to the nature of how you APKs are packaged and distributed (and how hard Google makes to add DRM). 70% piracy rates were common on Android compared to 30% on IOS, and it wasn't unusual to hear of 90+% in some games, to the point where a few games went f2p simply because they could not get users to pay a single dollar for their game.

in a particular instance, the hit game Monument Valley, a 2014 game that had 26m downloads on IOS alone in 2016, was reporting 95% piracy rates on Android. It is (or was, back in 2018) $3 on IOS, and now f2p on Android for that reason.

if you want a frame of reference for how absurd this is (not that you should to understand how 19/20 of your "customers" aren't buying your game): PC piracy has stayed around 33-40% throughout the decades. I cannnot blame developers for switching or abandoning the platform given those piracy rates. It would legitimately be better to offer a demo on Android (a properly isolated demo, not "part of the full game" demo) and point them to console/PC than it would to spend resources porting to Android.\

-----

Gabe Newell is oft-quoted saying "Piracy is a service problem". Well, this shows that services can simply get around this by turning the pirated content into a thin client and store all the value on the server. It simply took until "always online" was no longer a lofty assumption to perform.

Re: Game developers turning off all IronSource and Unity Ads monetization

#132

Post by johnnyanmac »

Tade0 wrote: post #31

Went to the website of one of the signers, clicked "reject" on their cookie popup, which just navigated me into this paragraph: > What can you do if you do not want storing cookies to be set or want them to be removed? > You are able to withdraw the consent to store cookies by changing the settings of your web browser. I'm warming up to the idea of there being some kind of barrier to entry to this industry. One that…

This just cuts out the indies. the big cashgrabs can afford to roll their engine. They are that profitable.

Re: Game developers turning off all IronSource and Unity Ads monetization

#133

Post by johnnyanmac »

nomel wrote: post #55
GaggiX wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starfield engine is pretty good: https://youtu.be/neO-Bl7g9-U

I would claim that’s the physics engine, more than the “game engine”. Physx did this sort of thing 15 years ago.

well, no one else is known for their "physics engine", so clearly Bethesda did something right, or cheaper than everyone else (doubtful).

Re: Game developers turning off all IronSource and Unity Ads monetization

#134

Post by hedora »

paulmd wrote: post #29
SeanAnderson wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that Unity does not issue a perpetual license. They change their license on Jan 1 and you auto-accept the new license by continuing to use the product. If you don't want to agree then you stop using it by then. Unreal is a perpetual license which isn't able to be affected the same.

their license was apparently perpetual until April of this year, so you can go back to last year’s build. > Unity may update these Unity Software Additional Terms at any time for any reason and without notice (the “Updated Terms”) and those Updated Terms will apply to the most recent current-year version of the Unity Software, provided that, if the Updated Terms adversely impact your rights, you may elect to continue…

April 2023 is in calendar year 2023, so that pretty clearly implies you can keep updating until Jan 1 2024 (unless they change their version numbering scheme).

(I am not a lawyer..)

Re: Game developers turning off all IronSource and Unity Ads monetization

#135

Post by fennecfoxy »

adamrezich wrote: post #90
lionkor wrote: post #85

Id recommend anyone who can to move to https://godotengine.org/ and give it an honest try

I'd recommend trying to make a game "from scratch", using only libraries, instead of an "engine", if you haven't done it before, and have only used fully-featured game engines. it's good to learn how to solve problems using structs and pointers and memory, instead of thinking only in high-level primitives like Entities and Components and Prefabs and Scenes and Nodes. not only will you level up your knowledge of how c…

Just more gatekeeping and elitism. Same reason that "C" devs sneeze on Javascript devs and for some reason act like JS devs "aren't smart enough to write C" as if that's the real reason.

Bruh, write a game from scratch including engine? Why don't you write your own network stack and display drivers from scratch while you're at it? Hell, you won't truly know how the graphics are rendered until you build your own DirectX/OGL clone.

There's a reason we do the work; so that other people can use it and build upon it. Everyone starting from scratch again is only a learning exercise _if that's what they trying to learn_.

Re: Game developers turning off all IronSource and Unity Ads monetization

#136

Post by fennecfoxy »

adamrezich wrote: post #123
vunderba wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"this is all assuming, of course, that your goal is, at least in part, to be able to honestly call yourself a "game developer" in general" This is some Wagnerian level of gatekeeping snobbery right here. A game developer.... develops games by definition. They don't develop engines, they don't develop rigid body collision systems, they don't develop 3D renderers, they develop (aka make) games. If you find a suitable t…

> They don't develop engines, they don't develop rigid body collision systems, they don't develop 3D renderers, note how I never suggested doing any of those things in the post-Unity pre-Godot weekend project I suggested—except for the "engine". if you call yourself a "game developer" in general—as opposed to an expert user of a specific piece of game development software—then you should intuitively understand the le…

Ah damn bruh, I guess my artist friends aren't really artists since they don't know how to program photoshop from scratch. I'll let 'em know that they're just "expert users of certain software".

Re: Game developers turning off all IronSource and Unity Ads monetization

#137

Post by fennecfoxy »

wheelerof4te wrote: post #69
GaggiX wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starfield engine is pretty good: https://youtu.be/neO-Bl7g9-U

I've checked some gameplay footage and it's atrocious. Bethesda is making the same game in a different package ever since Oblivion.

Which is Nintendo's whole business, to be fair.

Re: Game developers turning off all IronSource and Unity Ads monetization

#138

Post by lifechoseme123 »

jarsin wrote: post #97
lifechoseme123 wrote: post #50

TLDR: Don't bet on Unity's success. Bet on their collapse. The place has zero integrity in management. I've never worked at a worse managed place, and I hope I never do again. (Disclaimer: two of my three engineering managers were actually very good skilled engineers and managers (the one bad one was the "people manager", who "always knew he wanted to be a manager" and was put in charge of an engineering team... he h…

What does unity do with nodejs?

Various things. I am sure it is used by dozens if not hundreds of teams of engineers there for relevant projects, such as data integrations with REST or XML API systems.

Re: Game developers turning off all IronSource and Unity Ads monetization

#139

Post by saladprince »

copx wrote: post #86
paxo wrote: post #2

some of those companies that are at the bottom of this letter, are one of the worst i've ever seen. many of them are known to just copy other indie games, and just heavily monetize them.

The interesting part is who is not on the list e.g. HoYoverse. It has been speculated by many that this is all about Unity Technologies wanting a much larger share of the billion dollar profits of the gatcha games based on Unity. If all indie devs quit Unity, but HoYoverse (the company behind the money printing press "Genshin Impact") does not, it would still massively increase the profits of Unity Technologies. Of c…

Why are people so misinformed and spreading misinfo around?

Genshin is using a highly customized Unity Engine bound under Unity China and the developer hoyoverse is a major shareholder in Unity China as well.

Unity China is a separate entity from Unity Technologies.

https://blog.unity.com/news/unity-forms-new-venture-to-manag...

Re: Game developers turning off all IronSource and Unity Ads monetization

#140

Post by rhtgrg »

holoduke wrote: post #92

Why is it not possible for a company to keep doing what they were doing when they became successful. In case of Unity a cross platform game toolkit. But no. They wanted to add all kinds of shitty functionality. I dont really get it. It must be all the non gaming people taking over the company looking at Excel sheets and other graphs to find new income streams by implementing the crappiest features ever. They need to…

Unity never became successful in terms of profit. It isn’t FOSS but people treat it as such. I mean look at this:

https://discord.com/channels/428803852351963146/428803852351...

Unity has bottom of the barrel users for the most part, it will be good for the company if these demanding yet unprofitable people go elsewhere.

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