Question Upgrading from Unity Legacy Ads

Hi All,

I am running Unity 2021 LTS, and our apps are running
Unity Advertisement Legacy Version 4.4.1 - October 12, 2022 which will be deprecated soon and un supported.

I want to switch to the new mediation, even though we will be using only Unity Ads at first,
and we may ad mediation later. But now I see there is also Level Play.

1. Do I need level play?
2. If not, what are the steps to switch to mediation from legacy? If there is a guide online that would be appreciated. All I can find is upgrading from mediation to level play, or from legacy to level play.

I need to know what packages to remove and what to replace it with, I can handle the code changes.

Thanks in advance.

 

Maybr I was unclear. I am only upgrading in the event Legacy Ads are deprecated and will only be using Unity Ads atm.

What is the difference between level play and unity mediated ads system? I would like to minimize sdks that are not needed.

 

From what I've read and if I understand it correctly, the legacy Unity Ads service itself won't be turned off because they're still serving Unity Ads through their new mediation system, but the standalone Unity Ads SDK isn't going to receive future updates (which gives it a finite lifetime, but no rush right now AFAIK). I'm guessing Unity just don't want to support both it and the new LevelPlay solution which contains the same functionality plus more, and gently prodding users into the mediation as a default solution also lets them sell IronSource ad inventory.

On the other hand, LevelPlay is replacing Unity Mediation which as a service (not just as an SDK) will literally be shut off at the end of this month so whatever you do do NOT start integrating Unity Mediation. I've just made the switch from Unity Mediation to LevelPlay myself so that my live app doesn't have all its ads turned off.

Since you will probably need to move to LevelPlay at some point, here's a quick answer to your question about moving over:
You'd completely remove your existing legacy Unity Ads package altogether and then install the new "Ads Mediation" package. At this point you're basically following instructions linked by yunanhou above. A new Ads Mediation menu appears up top in the editor and you can use that UI to easily install the adapter for Unity Ads in your case, and any other ad networks you want to mediate. Having gone from Unity Ads -> Unity Mediation -> LevelPlay myself, I can say your ad code probably won't change much. Pretty similar design patterns; just add a few event handlers and call the init method on the IronSource client. The rest of the work is setting up the ads in your IronSource account which is straight forward (you add Unity as an "SDK Network", shove in your API key and Organisation ID, then tell it which Ad Unit IDs from Unity you want to use in your mediation). Of course, there are always little hiccups and things that don't work at first

Probably haven't covered everything super clearly but hope that helps a bit!