[abbabon]

I, for one, am happy for this merger / acquisition.

As a mobile games developer, I feel that Unity as a game engine has lost its way in the last few years, and the recent acquisitions reflect that. Instead of capitalizing on its merits and strengths - an easy-to-bootstrap multi-platform engine which is perfect for mobile development - Unity has opted to try and compete in the AAA/AAA-like market against Unreal. The recent announcments and the features actually being delivered from Unity support that strategic transition, and this leaves the engine in a state of constant conflict with itself.

Ask anyone who tried to integrate a 3rd party advertisment engine into their game and you'll understand why including a 'default' or an easy-to-bootstrap advertising and user-acquisition tool is a good move. This will hopefully streamline what is nowadays a less than ideal process. That is, if the merger will be capitalized upon instead of just serving the stock owners.

[psyc]

If it had been an acquisition, I wouldn’t have given it much thought. Maybe a pause, if I read some of the comments here about IronSource’s reputation.

A MERGER sends an entirely different message. Two messages. One, that unity is in dire straights, and two, that they’ve lost their sense of direction completely, given who they merged with.

[hesdeadjim]

Absolutely. A merger is terrifying. Who makes the calls now on what teams get resources, what features get prioritized, etc?

[Rapzid]

There is no such thing as a merger.

[psyc]

And TIL ‘dire straits’ is the correct usage, not a stylization by the band like I always thought. Like waterways.

[bdefore]

It's confounding to me. AAA/AA has always been an unhelpful designation. Much of PC gaming's recent hallmarks have used Unity to great success, for example Hollow Knight. Developers used to proclaim their games were based on Unity almost akin to a badge of honor. That honor is diluted by Unity's pursuit of the indie mobile gaming space which is tarnished with microtransactions and ads.

Blockbuster titles may pull in more revenue. But they also can fail spectacularly. Is there a financial window for a tightly focused indie-game engine like Unity? I don't know. But it's hard not to see Unity's arc rhyming with the story of other VC-soaked growth-chasing operations.

[techdragon]

Unity was never that great of an engine and tooling. I’ve only come across one extremely specific circumstance where it was technically the superior choice. Where it gained mindshare was its licensing deals before Unreal changed theirs. It grew with the mobile gaming boom and in order to keep growing they tried to grow to compete with the AAA/AA engines (most of which are either Unreal, in house and studio exclusive, or completely custom) and barely made it… I say barely because based on my experience and the conversations I’ve had, anyone who built a technically impressive game with Unity has probably built 80% of it themselves because the stuff that shipped with unity wasn’t up to the job. Unity survived because after a boom in developer mindshare courtesy of mobile games, lots of familiar developers were available to recruit for larger Unity projects where they got to spend their time reimplementing more and more of the entire game engine themselves on top of Unity because it didn’t really give anyone enough to build more than the simplest of games.

I’m not saying it’s broken or shit, it did deliver a working engine. Just that the entire marketing hype and ecosystem built on top of it was a technical house of cards held together by the suffering of the developers using it.

It’s the MongoDB of game engines, “worse is better” … because we spent most of the money on marketing, because marketing gets sales via our content marketplace before people can really discover how bad it is, and by then they’re fighting the sunk cost fallacy of the money they spent in the content store… just good old classic MBA “apathetic evil” … nothing special.

[yomkippur]

A big reason why I stopped buying/playing mobile games was due to the ads. I would be happy to just pay for a game and that'd be the end of it but its driven a lot of people away from mobile and towards PC gaming.

You may be celebrating this but you are just going to end up with less people watching your ads or downloading your game.

[Ace777]

Unity dev here. I loathe mobile ad-driven games as well, but unfortunately Mobile dev is a numbers game. There is a gargantuan pool of regular joe-type people to whom ad-driven games are normality. Power users like you or I rarely play these things.

It's all about optimizing the (user) funnel rather than the fun. If you don't you're at odds with google/apple, the platform operator, who usually promotes based on market performance.

So even if I were to make a fun mobile game where you have no advertisement or a t least a way to nuke the adverts, there's no customer base specifically looking for that, and if there was my game would be buried under a mountain of shit and i'd have to manually buy users ... so that 95% of them never buy the ad-free option...

Really the only option that prioritizes fun for mobile is bringing in an external audience.

[bitwize]

Maybe it's different now, but in the past I associated Unity mobile games with my phone running very hot.

[porcc]

Funny to think that the developers who haven't paid for the ability to remove the splash screen are also the ones likely to have optimized their games poorly

[surmoi]

That's because very often mobile games are not developed with performances in mind or when they are, they'll use everything the device can give, often pushing it into throttling mode, because mobiles are not made to be run at sustain load for a long time.

Mobile is the most constrained platform to develop on if you want to actually have an optimized game, especially when supporting most Android devices.

[tomc1985]

Unity games run horribly on desktop.... how they think its legit a good mobile engine is beyond me

Like, Valheim runs like ass, all things considered. Battletech takes up like 50gb for a game without more than a couple of cutscenes and a camera that sits in the sky, and takes forever to load. Graveyard Keeper -- a PIXEL ART 2d game -- is for some reason made in Unity, and it takes way too long to load a couple of megabytes worth of textures

[Ace777]

By that same metric, you've got hollow knight, ori, hearthstone and many more that are very good though.

[tomc1985]

The games I mentioned are fantastic, but I feel like they are hobbled by overweight tech.

[kensai]

The future is also AR/VR applications, not only mobile games. But I wonder how they will monetise those.