A fresh report into Unity’s hugely-controversial decision to start charging developers when their games are downloaded has thrown fresh light on the situation.

MobileGamer sources say Unity has already offered some studios a 100% fee waiver - if they switch over to Unity’s own LevelPlay ad platform.

The report quotes industry consultants that say this move is an “attempt to destroy” Unity’s main competitior in this field: AppLovin.

    • Buffalox@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The vast majority of “new” tech companies operate at a loss.

      This is a bullshit hypothetical that has no relevance for Unity. Unity is a well established company, that has been very successful after they revised their model to be more Indie friendly. This is a money grab attempt pure and simple. And it’s a money grab that is so bad it might actually kill Unity.

      • jaaval@sopuli.xyz
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        1 year ago

        Unity technologies has never made a profit since it was founded. It’s still a company aiming at growth by burning money. Their losses have only increased since they went public.

        • Buffalox@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I’m pretty sure that when Unity was headquartered in Denmark it made a profit. But I may be mistaken, because it was hyped as a danish enterprise success.

          When they changed the license to be more Indie friendly a few years back, that too was hyped as a huge success.

          But I can see on Wikipedia that Unity Software Inc. has a negative net income of $921 million on revenue of $1.4 billion.

          That’s an insane loss, meaning that they basically operate at 50% loss! How or Why they ended up that badly is beyond me. It’s so bad it smells like something is not quite right with those numbers.

          • jaaval@sopuli.xyz
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            1 year ago

            It was a private company back then so I don’t think there is financial info available. But at least it seems that the reports they filed for IPO indicated they had made loss for a few years prior.

    • MrCharles@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      My problem with it is not monetizing; it is the changing of your monetization to affect games that were sold under a different model. If this was just the new TOS, ok fine. It would suck, but it’s their right to make whatever shitty monetization they want. But retroactively inflicting this on games? Shocking the development world with only a few months warning when game development takes years? No, that is not ok.