[helsinkiandrew]

AppLovin Market cap is roughly ~$14B and Unity is ~$15B.

This sounds more like a merger - AppLoving is offering shares which would be worth 49% of the combined company.

Unity provides the Game Engine, AppLoving provides the ad/payment side - it could work.

[nacs]

This is basically the same as their previously announced deal with IronSource, a malware/adware company.

Both are terrible for consumers/developers.

[helsinkiandrew]

> Both are terrible for consumers/developers.

Unfortunately they don't get to vote on it.

[mrDmrTmrJ]

But they do: 1. Consumers vote with every dollar they spend (or add they click). 2. Developers vote with both with every dollar they spend on software, and every monetization strategy they select to earn dollars from customers.

There's a ton of industry structures I don't like. (I won't list various companies I don't like, b/c that would distract from my core point that they do have healthy economics from customers who do like their products.) Existing market structures are usually the result of some form of consistent action on the part of market participants.

So what would a better industry structure be, for customers, that would consistently make money for developers?

[anonymousab]

The amount of developers that either 1) don't care about their users having to deal with ads or spyware or 2) actively want the monetization and grubby data features offered by these companies or 3) are too overinvested and simply can't switch to another engine, likely far exceeds the amount of developers who both could and would reject Unity for this. Especially when considering a lot of the types of products that Unity is used to pump out; the type of passion projects which would be likely to have a developer who would take a moral stand are likely an insignificant minority overall.

I'd like to be proven wrong on this in the future.

[sparky_]

Well, except that AppLovin is a (non-malware) ad tech company. So I mean, at least there's that.

But the play is more consolidation that anything. A large swath of mobile games use Unity, and a large swath of free games monetise using AppLovin. The Venn Diagram of these two is nearly a single circle.

[Mikushi]

I'm not related to IronSource but this is some serious mischaracterisation of them...

They made an SDK to create installers for Windows that was used by 3rd parties with nefarious means. Said SDK/toolkit has been discontinued for years as well.

Hardly makes them a malware/adware company...