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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    10 months 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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      10 months 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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        10 months 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.

          • Buffalox@lemmy.world
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            10 months ago

            They work with you to make your code more performant

            I wasn’t talking about whether they have expenses, If I recall correctly they have about 7000+ employees.

            Generally that kind of company only collaborate on huge projects, smaller projects don’t get that level of service, bust are generally referred to a developer forum, where their questions may be answered by in-house personel. This is as I understand it common, but I’m not a pro gaming programmer, although I used to know a few decades ago.

            Fun fact, the story now is that it was a Unity employee who made the death threat!?

        • jaaval@sopuli.xyz
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          10 months 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.