Mobile Developers Revolt As Unity Crisis Continues

Yesterday we spoke in an article about the recent changes to the popular Unity engine’s pricing structure and some of the revolt it caused in the game development community. Well.. the fire shows no sign of dying down.

In fact, recent developments have put the concerns of mobile developers into sharper focus particularly.

Mediation Platforms And What They Do

According to a report from mobilegamer.biz, Unity is allegedly planning to offer a waiver of its controversial Runtime Fee to developers that use its own ad mediation platform, LevelPlay.

What’s a mediation platform? It’s a means of managing ads within games, which automates a lot of the process for developers and forms a link between developers and ad networks.

These platforms can be pretty important in terms of how much money games with in-game ads are likely to make, so developers have every reason to be picky.

It appears this move may have had the opposite of its intended effect though.

Many Mobile Devs Voice Their Objections

An open letter signed by a number of developers and publishers, including Whiteout Survival devs Century Games, Azur Games, and hypercasual publisher Ducky, announced their intent to turn off Unity Ads on their work, and keep them off until Unity reconsiders the decisions.

The letter also encourages others to do the same.

This news came while some of Unity’s offices in the US sit closed due to potential threats to the safety of the employees. It’s always worth mentioning that most of the employees at Unity have no influence on the wider decisions by the company, and even if they did, threatening them isn’t a great move.

So where are things going from here? As of writing, Unity has yet to show any sign of changing the core of its stance. The official Twitter released a statement to deal with some potential questions about the policy.

The post included announcing that repeat installs would not cause repeat charges, and illegitimate installs would also not attract a fee, though how these would be determined is yet unclear.

So, the revolt shows little sign of slowing down. We’ll keep an eye on this one, and let you know of any major developments.