What the heck is ironSource?

He didn’t say anything controversial here, lmao. If you intend to make money from your game you need to think about your business model from the start and not just before release.

 

No one would complain if we'd see any of those billions spent reflect positively on the core engine. Development has been a complete mess for a long time now and Unity throw around billions at everything except engineering.

 

This was disappointing for me. The unknowns are enough for me to at least put my Unity dev on hold and start getting better at UE5. I'll keep my eyes on Unity but... I have had to deal with Iron Source security issues before with other things. I don't want this bundled into my games and want to know that

A) funding is going to help push the game engine technology, particularly in non-mobile areas
B) that I will not be forced to have Iron Source adware / malware in my code or deployments

 

I wouldn't expect this to get bundled despite what some people want to believe. GDPR and other protection acts would destroy them.

 

Please understand that we're talking about this in the context of Unity merging with a malware company.

 

NO: as long as you inform the consumer making it click on "I CONSENT TO SELL MY SOUL" it's alright.

 

Care to provide a source for that?

 

They just MERGED with them. It's going to happen, just accept it and let's find a new engine.

 

You first.

 

https://www.tessian.com/blog/biggest-gdpr-fines-2020/

 

1. IronSource's own software (aka what their devs wrote) was never malware. It was an installer that was used by customers to deploy malware. They should have checked their customers better of course, but that lies in the past.
2. Company mergers are luckily not software merges, lol

 

Again: as long as you inform your customer and make they accept to sell their data for profit, that's it.

 

Again, IronSource was literally deploying their own adware to MacOS. Malware was even distributed through their adware, not just their installers. They have a history of compromising user security through both action and inaction. If you had any experience with they at all you'd know this. They are, for all intents and purposes, a company that has a history steeped in malware.

 

for game developers, is the major concern the ethics of ironsource, or just that it is now painfully clear the focus of unity is not on the engine?

 

See a pattern here?
In the future, any build of Unity will boot with a (very long) scrollable wall of legal text to accept, otherwise you won't be able to play. And that's it.

For most, the second. For me, BOTH.

 

Both.

Also, after already having somewhat of a hard time making our mobile game to not gather any data at all (a couple of years ago, it wasn't trivial), I'm picturing it becoming impossible pretty soon.

 

Both, but also more.

From an ethical perspective, merging with IronSource is pretty awful. They're a company that has a historical problem both on their end and through the use of their software and services, but those are problems that their software and services inherently facilitated.

However, another problem is that (despite how some people are acting) IronSource immediately changes the perception of Unity in the eyes of a lot of people because of those malware ties. It's one thing for people to go "man a bunch of Unity games suck ass!" because that's a minority of people you can just kind of ignore, the kind of people who likely wouldn't have bought the game anyway. They're making a judgement from a standpoint where they're more looking for an excuse to not buy something.

Malware and adware is different. Malware and adware change the perception of a company in such a way that it becomes less about a game's quality and more about whether or not a game is safe. While this is still a minority of potential customers, it's one that carries with it a whole other set of problems. "Unity games might F*** up your computer somehow," even if it isn't actually the case, is extremely difficult to overcome.

But, yeah, the focus not being on the engine, or at least not on the capabilities of the engine from a game dev perspective, is pretty damning. With the news of GIGAYA being cancelled, it sends a clear message: Unity Technologies isn't about the games you can make with their software, it's about about the monetization stack of various different products you can make with it.

The reason I was never a fan of GIGAYA in the first place was because, as I openly stated, it showed how user feedback was constantly being ignored, especially considering how many of the things GIGAYA was showing to them were things many people had complained about on the forums for years, often in conversations with people working at Unity. Now that they've cancelled GIGAYA hot on the heels of this merger, itself hot on the heels of them laying off 4.5% of their workforce (in engineering and AI), it paints a pretty bleak picture.

It's not just how this is a morally dubious merger, but how it's a morally dubious merger that can affect the public perception of games made with Unity, and how Unity's focus is less and less on its tools and more and more on its services.

 

That is a wonderful question. For me its a bit of both.

I'd say 25% of my issues are that Iron Source is a known malware company and 75% of my issues are that the features I need in Unity need developed, but they laid off a bunch of people and it would appear that their focus is not on improving on the engine, at least from a non-mobile perspective.

I dev for pc games and consoles primarily. While I can still do this in Unity just fine, these two issues dovetail into something that I am not entirely comfortable with given what all we currently know.

Additionally there is the ick factor that Unity will now hold. Even if they do not bundle malware/adware in their core software, gamers who find out your game is done in Unity will for sure keep that in mind and wonder what your game is putting on their machine, even if you have not intentionally done anything of the sort to include mal/adware.

 

Mostly 2nd for me. I don't think any big corp is particularly ethical, Unity included. And IronSource while steeped in bad history, right now look like one of the big players in ads. Unity had ads AI team that F***ed up recently and they also recently sacked a lot of AI engineers. I wouldn't be surprised if there's an overlap since it was never clarified what kind of AI engineers were sacked. Perhaps this merger was a lifeboat they needed in a crisis and I can't fault them for that exactly. It doesn't matter much to me.

At the end of the day, none of the billions spent have reflected positively on the core engine or package development. And that's my problem with the engine - packages that never reach feature parity after 4+ years of development. Bugs that are known but don't get fixed between minor LTS releases such as having a completely broken list inspector for custom types in 2021.3.3LTS and 2021.3.4LTS. That S*** shouldn't happen in LTS, not to mention remain a problem for more than one minor release.

And core rendering tech is still developed by skeleton crews, 2D URP renderer is one or two engineers. Popularly requested features like soft shadows from more than 3 years ago are forever in R&D with no implementation in sight. Might happen in a couple or years or maybe never. Meanwhile, a solo developer forked 2D URP and single-handedly implemented that and much more but can't share/sell the code because it's Unity's.

The merger is not the problem. The problem is Unity's leadership that doesn't prioritize the core engine.

 

Almost entirely the second for me. I don't care about mobile nor do I have any intention of developing for it. It's like developing for the consoles with all of the nonsense you have to go through but none of the fun. I try to steer new developers away from it as they come in with this odd belief that it's the easiest to develop for.

That said while some people are concerned that some packages have taken years to come to fruition the reality is developing the features of a game engine is not a short term process. People are constantly pointing to it saying that it has features Unity has yet to achieve but they forget one thing.

Unreal Engine 4 was released in 2014 but Mark Rein revealed in 2005 that it had already been in development for two years. Just think about that for a moment. By the time it was released it had been in development for 11 years or about the time between Unity's first release and Unity 5.

Unreal isn't alone in this either. Godot started in 2007 and it's only just now starting to have modern features with a release that is still in alpha. Amazon had an existing base to start with in the form of CryEngine 3 and it's been the same number of years for them too.

I'll start worrying once I start seeing signs that Unity's merger is leading down the wrong path, or we pass a decade and the existing features are not production ready. Until then I'm not that concerned and I'm definitely not going to stop using Unity.

 

Let's be confident nothing will intentionally or unintentionally ever sneak through ever

 

Wasn't that a good thing? Because of that now we have blender.

It is not. Open source STRICTLY means foss-compatible license. Meaning MIT, BSD, Apache, or, cthulhu forbid, GPL.

Unreal is not opensource, it is a proprietary engine, and if you go sharing source code without permission, UNreal legal team is definitely going to end you. Their history with Silicon Knights indicates that Epic is not the company to mess with.

That comment is "citation needed".

For overwhelming disgust we'd need a hundred thousands people complaining. There are always some threads criticising unity, but people participating in them are tiny part of all unity users.

Frankly, even if unity is truly heading towards its doom, it'll still remain available and usable for about a decade. Plenty of time to migrate elsewhere.

 

Unity is different than Unreal. Unity was built from the ground up to be a game engine for others to use. Unreal was built to make their games and then they made it accessible to others. There have been thousand, probably tens of thousands fairly popular games released with unity from real game devs. They have a decade of feedback, a handful of internal people building a skeleton of a game is not going to turn on any lightbulbs that they don't already know about..

But on the other side, going public on the stock exchange is going to kill Unity pretty quickly. The driving force behind Unity is no longer ' Democratize game development'... instead you now have a public company owned by non-gamers who care about nothing except quarterly earnings and they put in place a CEO who they want to achieve quarterly numbers above the woo-woo stuff about letting small developers make games. From a business perspective, Unity makes almost all of it's revenue from placing ads on cheap, fast mobile games. It does for mobile games what google adsence/adwords does for the web. My own guess is that the 3D PC part of Unity is going to die off soon. The whole SRP stuff probably requires a ton of engineers and the payoff is that almost none of the games produced with it will make Unity any actual money. On the other hand, I could probably launch a mobile garbage game in a week that brings in income for Unity. As a business, they want a million mobile games bringing in a few dollars a day rather than hope that some PC 3D game breaks the barrier and has to start paying. I really believe that 2021 LTS is going to be the last major release and those of us building for PCs are going to be stuck in this SRP mud for ears. The tools are already solid to build mobile games easily, Unity can basically do nothing with the engine except promote it and make it easier to put ads in your game.. and that is it. happy investors because you have layoffs and nothing really gets hurt revenue wise.

 

The CEO was put in place before they went public.

Their quarterly numbers have been terrible, and their stock price has really gone to S***, investors aren't happy with Unity at all.

In short, don't blame investors, they are just doing a poor job overall, no matter what aspect you look at it from, and it all has been their decisions all along.

The only ones possibly satisfied are the CEO and other highly ranked insiders that sold off their S***ty Unity shares before the stock value went in the gutters and probably made a killing, at the expense of shareholders and users.

 

So very 100% supportive, in every single post. Also doesn't respond to the odd rise. I understand, then.

 

Frozen foods

 

This is not correct. Unity was a toolset for creating GooBall, the only game OTEE (Over The Edge Entertainment, Unity's original name) ever released. After that, they decided it would be a much better idea to commercialize their toolset and sell it to others. I still have a copy of that game, it must have sold poorly even though it was popular on the Mac, because David Helgason was very surprised to meet someone who actually bought the game when I talked to him about it in 2013, at a super small Unity user meeting with about 10 people and a lot of beer at the Berlin office. He also said that the game was a failure and this flop was the main reason why Unity came out.
Because Unity came out of the development of a game for the Mac, there was support for building for Windows standalone players missing until Unity version 1.1. and the Windows editor came out even 4 years later with Unity 2.5. Accordingly, the range of functions of Unity was also small at the beginning. Unity 2.0 was a very powerful update.

 

Thanks @VIC20, that's interesting! I was using Unity in 2009 and it was really fun. Unity genuinely seemed to care about the developers and making stuff with it was exciting!
I can't imagine waking up to David Helgason calling me a f#@king idiot
I've been using Unity Pro for 13 years and and now I'm thinking, is this something I want to spend any more time on?

 

Is there any info on how much revenue Unity Ads earns Unity (or earned in before Apples change)?

 

I think longterm this is a very risky move to focus on ads as a business because conceivably the whole ecosystem could be heavily impacted by new legislation, like for example prohibiting to advertise games with lootboxes etc.. If the core business was selling the most robust toolset on the market that supports the most plattforms, that position would be much easier to defend because even if a competitor had the better toolset, the first mover advantage and innertia would likely have been enough to secure the majority marketshare for a long while, like they have done so far.

 

Wonder what their next move is, what/who is Unity they going to buy next...

Also, I've tried Godot 3. Holy cow, that thing is fast! I press play and boom, the game is running in less than 1s. I've tried varous large projects and it still is pretty fast. Their built-in editor sucks, and tile editor is weird. I've heard Godot 4 is going to fix some stuff. I think Godot is perfect for prototyping some stuff, especially on mac since on my M1 Unity is unusable.

 

Source: https://investors.unity.com/news/default.aspx

No idea about the apple changes. I'm just pasting the general results from the official page. AFAIK 'Operate Solutions' include ads while 'Create Solutions' include engine licenses. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

 

Thanks @sqallpl - I guess I can see why this is their focus.

Doesn't benefit me as a PC game developer wanting to create a game and sell it on a store (you know, how traditional game transactions work) but then I'm not the target audience anymore.

 

What do you think Unity DOTS was created for if not to take full advantage of platforms like the PC?

 

Do you know about the "Enter playmode options"?
Enable that (while keeping reloads off) like described here: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/ConfigurableEnterPlayMode.html
And Unity starts playmode very rapidly too! The only downside (and the reason why this is not the default): Static variables do not reset between reloads.

A sub-article in the linked docs describes the universal ways to mitigate that, but in many cases you can simply initialize your static variables in an awake, start or custom static Init method (called by some manager) and it's generally not recommend to litter your game with statics anyways. Singletons with getters that check for "self==null" are not affected since the object references do correctly compare with null after the restart.
I switched to this mid project and got to fix the few issues quickly.

 

i think it's like somebody else said earlier, these "money-changer" types who run the corporations aren't trying to build a thing that last and serves people for generations to come. they are trying to extract as much money as they can as quickly as possible. when the thing dies then they just take the ill-gotten gains to their next adventure. Unrestricted capatalism favors the parasite.

 

Its the optics and he should know that, from his consumers point of view here is what most see

1) Unity claims all is well as reported by games media ... which yes we all know is a joke never the less its part of the picture

2) Unity lays off a bunch of staff ... this was already iritating as the "view" was that Unity lied to them then fired them ... not true but that was the image many had

3) Unity pays 4.4b for a malware company ... say what you want this is the optics and the CEO calls small passionate developers "F***ing Idiots"

CEOs known for their time at the beloved and respected EA who do not carefully consider the timing and optics of their words and their overall company strategy are "F***ing Idiots". Regardless of intent, details or even reality the optics are clearly negative on Unity right now and getting worse rather rapidly. I'm sure Epic and Godot Engine appreciate your sacrifice Unity

O an I forgot the back story of Apple making a ad rev mess, Unity claiming it wasn't effected ... and wait for it ... yes Unity is effected and stonks tank

Now is not the ideal time for Unity to be choosing an edgy "F***ing Idiots" image nor is it a very good time to be "right sizing" or merging with controversial companies. But we are where we are.

PS this CEO has gone for the edgy no no words in interviews before and it worked for him so perhaps he really is a "F***ing idiot" and thought it would land well here as opposed to just be divisive and fuel to the Unity feels going around.

 

It's clear to me who is the "F***ing idiot" here.

 

Guuuys, that expression was very jokingly meant and he praises the people in the same sentence!
That he said that actually makes the CEO more humane and it's a better thing than the pure marketing speech we read in the blogpost about the topic.
So please stop stirring up manipulative media here. We are software devs and not Twitter's SJW army

 

Exactly! And that's a big problem...

 

In the end, that's how economy works... And except for occasional hiccups, it does work.
This is definitely not a case where government regulations could do anything without turning the system into a (bound to fail) "planned economy".

 

the cycle is like this:

power is accumulated until the point that people revolt, then power is dispersed, then it eventually gets accumulated again.

a natural part of that cycle is all the regular chimps realizing that a few psychopath chimps took too many bananas, and eventually they form coalition to get back the bananas. And of course there is a few meek chimps who dont like all the commotion and try to calm things down. but that's just part of the cycle too.

 

The game industry has gone beyond stupid with predatory monetization practices (no its not new ... old stupid is still stupid) to the point to cause real harm, regulation no matter what you think of it is coming and its the sort of behaviour described in the quoted post you have their that has caused it. I would have much preferred a self regulation approach but we clearly screwed that up.

Returning to the "F***ing idiots" remark, I know he was just trying to act like a real boy, he has used that structure in other talks and interviews before and it landed well. In this case though and he should have known better the optics are horrible and that edgy pseudo "normal human" speak pattern has done nothing but piss people off more.

 

That's quite different. The API for interacting with Unity loaded like that is basically the C++ version of the HTML page communicating with the Unity WebGL player it hosts.

I'm pretty sure a lot of people said the same thing about feudalistic monarchies back in the middle ages.

 

Of course it’s not being created by a team dedicated to pushing mobile ads, DOTS will benefit all platforms Unity targets eventually. But from the beginning they’ve communicated (fairly) what that means for mobile performance and battery life.

 

Uhm, no, because the move on from monarchies was towards more freedom and allowing people to cater their needs better themselves. Significantly stronger regulations that would disallow a CEO from determining the direction of their company, would lead to reduced freedom.

 

Wasn't their first demo that "10 000 objects sci fy city" video? That's clearly for PC and strong consoles even with DOTS.
Edit: https://unity.com/megacity

Naturly a side effect of a more efficient system is lower CPU load and thus lower battery consumption. You can definitely have both.

Also since DOTS is a tougher way of programming, you won't see that used much for those "small ads-games that come out every two weeks".

 

Unity from 4 years ago is not the Unity of today. At the time Megacity came about, full DOTS runtime was on the table. It's not anymore. The company also wasn't public then so the direction has changed a lot.

 

Yeah and you have actual Unity staff saying they're underfunded and shorthanded week after week.

No idea what effing planet @DragonCoder is from but the kool aid must taste beautiful.

 

Yep. Gigaya ended up being too hard for them to finish with their own tools and "too expensive" but then within that same week they buy a malware company for billions. It's not so much that this move itself is horrible, but it just once again shows where Unity's priorities are now.