[cnity]

Unity actually started doing this while I was working there[0], and then eventually axed it[1] as part of a broader shift towards low quality high revenue mobile development (acquiring ironSource, for example). This shift was highly demoralising for the entire organisation, as it included laying off huge swathes of creative staff from Gigaya development (and other teams) and hiring in areas of monetisation (read: advertising and tracking).

Unity is no longer a games engine company, it is an ad company. It is taking surprisingly long for people to see it this way.

It was really sad to me, because (possibly naively) I saw joining Unity as a potential opportunity to pivot more closely to game engine programming (from web), but that was an uphill battle given that the resource allocation was massively in the opposite direction.

0: https://blog.unity.com/games/introducing-unitys-latest-sampl...

1: https://80.lv/articles/unity-stopped-the-production-of-its-s...

[johnnyanmac]

Yup, real shame. There were also a number of teams working on internal projects specifically for dogfood-ing as well. To my knowledge those teams all dissolved as well (but that was nearly 2 years ago now, maybe things changed for the better).

>Unity is no longer a games engine company, it is an ad company. It is taking surprisingly long for people to see it this way.

to be honest, I wasn't aware half of unity's revenues were ads until I worked there. Online gaming discourse has such tunnel vision for AAA console games that it is very easy to miss how over half of gaming revenue is mobile, which is where Unity rules in terms of market share.

[saint_angels]

thanks for sharing this, I guess Gigaya was announced and axed in such a short timeframe, that I've completely missed it