[dcow]

Seriously curious to those in the gamedev community: how does Unity acquiring an ad company materially effect the feature set and platform that Unity currently provides? Is it one of those "Unity has been going downhill in slow-mo for years now and this investment is proof that they aren't interested in fixing real issues that indie devs have--writing's on the wall..." type of thing? From the outside, just seems like business as usual to me... I genuinely don't understand the pull people feel to entirely retool simply because Unity wants to do ads better. What am I missing?

[nitrixion]

As a dev that uses Unity on a daily basis, here is my perspective.

If this was simply a matter of "Unity wants to do ads better" and they purchased an adtech company, I doubt there would be much discussion about it. That is not what happened. ironSource is not just an adtech company but a company that has built and distributed software that has been classified as malware by Sophos and Microsoft Essentials[1].

While this may be an overdramatic take, once ironSource is fully integrated with Unity and we update to the latest LTS version that includes ironSource software, I expect that we will want to virus scan our own executables built through Unity. I do not trust ironSource nor do I trust any software that integrates with it.

Now, putting the malware concern aside, I also see this as a step in the wrong direction for Unity. There are MANY uses for Unity that are not games, that will never have ads, and that will never utilize anything from this acquisition. The concern here is that recent updates of Unity have made some of these features such that you cannot disable them.

To me, this is yet another poor decision by the Unity team. As an aside, I recently started looking into their freshly released new Analytics platform and it is an absolute mess of a release. There are massive oversights in the implementation and bugs that prevent workarounds to those oversights.

Unity is not looking like software worth betting your company's future on. At best, it is looking more like prototyping software before using a better engine.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IronSource#InstallCore

[dleslie]

As someone who has a mortgage and children to feed ... Unity acquiring an ad company is encouraging. For years now Unity seemed to be lost and directionless; having them merge with an ad company shows that they're serious about focusing on creating a product that will help developers turn a profit.

But you won't hear many "indie" developers say as much, because making money is uncool.

That said, IronSource is sketchy as hell. I'm more concerned about _who_ they merged with then that it was an ad company.