<story><title>Game Development Post-Unity</title><url>https://www.computerenhance.com/p/game-development-post-unity</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>CobrastanJorji</author><text>This blog post points out something really interesting:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Less than half their revenue comes from game engines. Over half comes from advertising.&lt;p&gt;That is to say, Unity makes most of its money from people PLAYING games made with Unity. The sales to the developers are secondary. Unity had to change their model, and that meant either making the engine cheaper to acquire more games to get more ads, or it meant raising the price of the engine at the likely cost of ads, and for some reason they chose option 2, which seems like a dumb idea.&lt;p&gt;The best explanation for that I can think of is that almost all of the advertising money should be coming from smaller mobile games, and so this is a move to try and make more money from the desktop games and the mobile games that don&amp;#x27;t use Unity&amp;#x27;s ad networks, which probably look like big, untapped sources of income to dumber product managers.&lt;p&gt;But now imagine that they did the opposite: they raise the maximum revenue requirements and &amp;quot;must show splash screen&amp;quot; requirements and generally make Unity more available for less. Engine revenue goes down a bit, but ad revenue goes up, which probably works out even better in the long run, but also solidifies the user base, garners good will, and generally leaves everybody feeling great about Unity.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>qiqitori</author><text>Inconvenient opinion in the adware-fueled tech world, but ad income isn&amp;#x27;t a stable or safe source of income, and it&amp;#x27;s likely they&amp;#x27;re feeling that, and therefore jacking up the price for the engine. The big tech companies themselves feel it and spend a lot of money on &amp;quot;Other Bets&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Noob consumers may click ads, but after a while they program their brain to filter them out automatically. Or occasionally filter them out using technological measures. I bet that most ad clicks are by mistake or similar (especially ads in Unity games (which AFAIK are interstitial video ads)), or the user wasn&amp;#x27;t realizing what they were clicking on was an ad (noob users, or e.g. ads at the top of Google results, which used to be much easier to distinguish from actual results).&lt;p&gt;Most of my ad clicks are by mistake (due to bad page layout, or there just happened to be an ad where I happened to click), some (a handful of times per year at best) are to satisfy curiosity. And maybe a single one in my lifetime actually led to a purchase.&lt;p&gt;Google ads started out text-only, now they&amp;#x27;re pretty jarring on average. Guess why. However, there&amp;#x27;s a limit to how jarring you can make ads before consumers say bye-bye. Unity ads are probably way over the limit, Google are sort of tip-toeing along the line (or let&amp;#x27;s say they&amp;#x27;re over the line for a minority, and not quite for the rest).</text></comment>
<story><title>Game Development Post-Unity</title><url>https://www.computerenhance.com/p/game-development-post-unity</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>CobrastanJorji</author><text>This blog post points out something really interesting:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Less than half their revenue comes from game engines. Over half comes from advertising.&lt;p&gt;That is to say, Unity makes most of its money from people PLAYING games made with Unity. The sales to the developers are secondary. Unity had to change their model, and that meant either making the engine cheaper to acquire more games to get more ads, or it meant raising the price of the engine at the likely cost of ads, and for some reason they chose option 2, which seems like a dumb idea.&lt;p&gt;The best explanation for that I can think of is that almost all of the advertising money should be coming from smaller mobile games, and so this is a move to try and make more money from the desktop games and the mobile games that don&amp;#x27;t use Unity&amp;#x27;s ad networks, which probably look like big, untapped sources of income to dumber product managers.&lt;p&gt;But now imagine that they did the opposite: they raise the maximum revenue requirements and &amp;quot;must show splash screen&amp;quot; requirements and generally make Unity more available for less. Engine revenue goes down a bit, but ad revenue goes up, which probably works out even better in the long run, but also solidifies the user base, garners good will, and generally leaves everybody feeling great about Unity.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>edgyquant</author><text>If their decision was made at the expense of advertisers&amp;#x2F;advertising it’s one we should all wholly support.</text></comment>