Unity boycott begins as devs switch off ads to force a Runtime Fee reversal - Mobilegamer.biz
Unity boycott begins as devs switch off ads to force a Runtime Fee reversal - Mobilegamer.biz
Azur Games, Voodoo, Homa, Century Games, SayGames, CrazyLabs, Original Games, Playgendary and more are turning off all Unity ad monetisation to force a u-turn.
Mobile game developers are now boycotting Unity by switching off its ad products, mobilegamer.biz can reveal.
The group is trying to force Unity into cancelling its proposed Runtime Fee policy.
At the time of publication, 16 different studios have pulled their Unity and IronSource ads: Azur Games, Voodoo, Homa, Century Games, SayGames, CrazyLabs, Original Games, Ducky, Burny Games, Inspired Square, Geisha Tokyo, tatsumaki games, KAYAC, New Story, Playgendary and Supercent.
Collective letter from game development companies: Turning off all IronSource and Unity Ads monetization until new conditions are reviewed
We are the collective voice of the game development industry—developers, game designers, artists, and business minds. Passionate about our craft, we’ve invested years in shaping an industry that touches the lives of millions worldwide. As stakeholders, we cannot remain silent when a decision threatens to destabilize this ecosystem.
Unity has been an instrumental force in this industry. In many ways, it has inspired us to create new immersive worlds and empowered a plethora of dynamic and independent developers to bring their visions to life. We’ve played our part in this journey, moving the industry forward and creating specialists that use Unity as the primary game engine for their projects.
We’ve hosted Unity-centered events, shared our knowledge, and crafted educational content that’s inspired an international community. Thanks to this symbiosis, Unity has evolved into a cornerstone of game development and is now established as an indispensable asset in game creation.
That’s why the September 12 announcement hits us hard. Effective January 1, 2024, Unity plans to introduce installation-dependent fees, a decision that jeopardizes small and large game developers alike, made without any industry consultation. To claim, as Unity has, that this new ‘Runtime Fee’ will impact only 10% of the industry is not just misleading, it’s patently false.
We strongly oppose this move, which disregards the unique challenges and complexities of our industry.
While we’ve always viewed our work as a collaborative effort, this decision blindsided us. With one stroke of the pen, you’ve put hundreds of studios at risk, all without consultation or dialogue.
To put it in relatable terms—what if automakers suddenly decided to charge us for every mile driven on the car that you bought a year ago? The impact on consumers and the industry at large would be seismic.
This comes at a time when the industry is already grappling with tightening profit margins, heightened competition, and escalating costs in both development and marketing. This isn’t just about developers. This impacts artists, designers, marketers, and producers. It’s a cascade that could lead to the shuttering of companies that have given their all to this industry.
Unity, we’ve stood by and celebrated your every innovation. Why, then, were we left out of the conversation on a decision so monumental?
As a course of immediate action, our collective of game development companies is forced to turn off all IronSource and Unity Ads monetization across our projects until these changes are reconsidered.
We urge others who share this stance to do the same. The rules have changed, and the stakes are simply too high. The Runtime Fee is an unacceptable shift in our partnership with Unity that needs to be immediately canceled.
We entered this industry for the love of game development, but what makes it truly special is the community—a community built on openness, shared expertise, and collective progress.
If you share our sentiment, we call on you to join us. Turn off all IronSource and Unity Ads monetization until a fair and equitable resolution is found.
You can also back the movement by signing our open letter. Check out the link to add your voice to the cause.
Sincerely,
Azur Games, Voodoo, Homa, Century Games, SayGames, CrazyLabs, Original Games, Ducky, Burny Games, Inspired Square, Geisha Tokyo, tatsumaki games, KAYAC, New Story, Playgendary, Supercent
…and all who sign this letter, engage in other forms of protest, or simply stand in solidarity with the gaming industry
They turned off ads? Great. Can that be a standoff that lasts forever?
I bet it'll last less time then the reddit standoff. But I do wish them all of the luck. Fuck Unity and their bullshit fees.
I think this one will work. Most of these games are already "multihomed" on different ad networks and display the one that is most profitable to them at any given time, or a semi-random mixture. The differences in profitably aren't that huge, and it will get even worse if advertisers run away from Unity too. Unity is making an absolute killing from their ads division, and this is now being threatened.
And who are the advertisers? Other game devs. The whole mobile game advertising scene is one gigantic ouroboros with the ad platforms cutting off a huge portion in the middle. If you leave, you're going to both stop showing ads and stop your advertising there.
But hey, at least they didn’t give it a set end date; from the very start of their “strike” the reddit mods straight up admitted that they couldn’t stay away from their unpaid powertrips and leave their octogenerian mothers’ basements for more than 2 days, and instantly folded at a single empty threat to take away the only thing in their lives that’ll ever give them purpose and make them feel like they wield power over others.
I hope unity's shareholders are happy with what they hoped for. This is the result of driving a company too far. Let's makes this a guideline to follow for other companies not to make such shady decisions.
It becomes more appearent with every new instance of protest that there's something equally valuable for a company as money, and that is community trust. Because losing it can stop growth. I love the new layer of accountability we obtained with the internet.
The problem is a lot of executive compensation packages are based on short term growth rather than long term growth. So CEOs are incentivized to maximize profits today at the expense of tomorrow so they can get that sweet sweet bonus money. It’s a fundamental flaw with our entire economic system that I don’t think is likely to fix itself.
Well looks like even short term profits are being threatened. Good.
I think they believe that they can use the increased profit of today to fix the losses of tomorrow.
But trust in general comes by foot and goed on horseback, and that is especially true with communities.
I hope unity’s shareholders are happy with what they hoped for. This is the result of driving a company too far. Let’s makes this a guideline to follow for other companies not to make such shady decisions.
I don't think that's going to happen as long as the ownership structures surrounding shareholders remains the same. It's not the average person who invests in Unity that's doing this, it's the wealthy equity firms with significant holdings that are pushing for this unsustainable behaviour. After the 2008 crash, the EU, the US, Canada, and the UK all did studies on the economic stability of coops (1-person-1-vote democratically owned businesses) versus traditional companies and found that the coops were considerably more sustainable:
The cooperative banking sector had 20% market share of the European banking sector, but accounted for only 7 percent of all the write-downs and losses between the third quarter of 2007 and the first quarter of 2011.
(UK) A further study found that after ten years 44 percent of cooperatives were still in operation, compared with only 20 percent for all enterprises.
(US) Credit unions, a type of cooperative bank, had five times lower failure rate than other banks during the financial crisis and more than doubled lending to small businesses between 2008 and 2016, from $30 billion to $60 billion, while lending to small businesses overall during the same period declined by around $100 billion.
A 2010 report by the Ministry of Economic Development, Innovation and Export in Québec found the five-year survival rate and ten-year survival rate of cooperatives in Québec to be 62% and 44% respectively compared to 35% and 20% for conventional firms.
There's also a study using 100 years of data on French wine coops vs non-coop wine companies showing similar results: not only do coops survive longer, the survival rate gap widens over time as more and more non-coops collapse [Cooperatives versus Corporations: Survival in the French Wine Industry. Journal of Wine Economics, 13(3), 328-354. doi:10.1017/jwe.2017.1]
Shareholders aren't humans with ethics or a conscience. Remember when bby koty was in the news for sex harass? Bliz stuck went down. War Bufet bought bliz stucks and then when the new cycle moved on bliz stuck rebound and war buf MADE FUCKING MONEY OFF OF A SEX HARASS.
And then there was a news cycle about how smet war buf is.
There is no accountability. There is only money.
Better off just cutting ties and moving on, true colors don’t really change
'cutting ties and moving on' would require a total rebuild of their games in a new engine. it doesn't really work that way.
And that's why tools to migrate to another engine are now a must, like this one! https://github.com/barcoderdev/unitypackage_godot
You can't just cut ties in this scenario. These games are already built on the unity engine, it's not feasible to rebuild it again on a totally different engine, and now unity is going to apply new fees to all these already existing games.
Can’t just pay these ridiculous fees either, I have no belief that Unity will back track in any way here unfortunately
Seriously this.
Once the heat dies down, they'll ramp up again.
If the heat dies down then devs will have time to finish their current projects and switch to new engines for the next ones. Even a temporary walk-back would be enough to prevent disaster for a lot of studios.
2023 truly is the year of unfathomably bad business decisions.
2023 is the year the free money stopped flowing. Without limitless 0% interest money, tech companies that have been losing money for their entire existence have to start making a profit or go bankrupt.
We entered this industry for the love of game development, but what makes it truly special is the community—a community built on openness, shared expertise, and collective progress.
And also in app purchases, subscriptions, pay to win, etc.
Yeah, I gotta admit that the impact this will have on the F2P P2W market is kinda a silver lining to this whole thing.
I hear you but that's also the kind of games that overpopulates the market and brings money. Some shitty exploitative timekillers for smartphones are bigger than top ten AAA games combined. Idk any of these companies, but if abusive apps' devs come to discussing that, it means a lot.
Fuck a reversal. Boycott unity.
An explainer in case you weren't already in the know about Unity's misdeeds like I wasn't until now:
https://gameworldobserver.com/2023/09/12/unity-runtime-fee-explained-game-installs-changes-plans
Perhaps it is time for big companies to start funding Godot?
Permanently Deleted
Hopefully we see this with more FOSS going forward.
Nope. At any point in the future, Unity could simply stop the runtime fee waiver, and the developers would be screwed.
Something I think people miss is, at any point in the future anyone can make any inane pricing decision, and people are screwed in lieu of response.
The one apple seller in a town that sells all kinds of baked goods jacks up prices of apples to $100 each. There will be an outcry, people will scramble to get another apple supplier, and in the meantime they will have a hard time putting out products.
This is basically what we’re seeing now: Inane pricing hurts everyone, we just need to make sure overall it hurts Unity more. I can only imagine we ever see this type of thing from crazed MBAs that are increasingly out of touch with reality and consequence.
The one apple seller in a town that sells all kinds of baked goods jacks up prices of apples to $100 each.
No, it's more like one apple seller who arbitrarily decides that the people who already bought apples from them at a lower price now need to pay extra.
All the more reason to pour into a Free and Open Source alternative like Godot.
I don't fully understand why they need to do this. What is the cost of their service? Using the tool is already a subscription service, what else do they want? It's not like they have cloud services. They just want free money I guess?
So, here's my understanding:
Unity has an in-house advertising/monetization system called LevelPlay. It's their system for putting ads/analytics/etc. in games. But not a lot of people use it; a lot of people use a direct competitor called AppLovin, which is just outright better.
Several developers have reported Unity quietly reaching out to them and saying "Hey, we see you're using AppLovin...if you switch over to our LevelPlay service instead, we might just waive some or all of our new Fuck You Fee."
So apparently this is being done to kill a competitor.
They need something to become sustainable. They've been making losses for years. But thata definetly not the way. Other ways would be to lock some future features behind paywalls, and / or to increase their cut of the sales price per unit sold in the future.
I wonder though why they've been making losses for years - probably because of all the acquisitions? Looks like they were just another "grow now, revenue later" company that is now too big to be able to afford itself
This was a long time coming. In every instance so far, the "little" people (devals, programmers, studios and so on) have been cast aside for more everything be it exposure or money or other companies. They all see ti get far too big for their britches and at the same time forget where they came from and who helped make them who they are. It's about time this standing up to Big Corp happens. They have FA far too long its time those "little" people teach Big Corp a lesson and make Big Corp FO. Business is about (or at least should be)far more than money and making obscene abouts of profits year over year. When people have nothing left to lose and people feel pushed into a corner for too long they're gonna fight back. It's happened all through history. Let this be the chage that needs to happen.
What a power move. It’s inspiring to see the community come together.