Unity Special no.2: Boycott - Developers Fight Back in the mediation war

UA ad ad mediation publishing and game economy so if you think about it this could potentially mean that if you're spending on Unity your ramtime fee could get reduced same thing if you use analytics which everybody is using right level play mediation cloud services and others other other services from Unity so this is no gaming podcast two and a half gamers sharing actionable insights dropping Knowledge from our day-to-day user acquisition game design and AD monetization jobs we are definitely not discussing the latest industry news but having so much fun let's not forget this is a 400 a.m. conference discussion Vibe so let's not take it too seriously out there and everybody's talking about so uh hello again I'm M Lich I'm Felix braber

and we are your hosts so we're back finally yeah uh so we're back to cover more of the unity pricing Saga uh that we covered on an emergency episode earlier this week uh since recording uh earlier in the week tensions have increased and according to Bloomberg Unity has even started to receive death threats which is very much not okay and uh yeah that's not deploring that in any way but yeah that's kind of the temperature of things right now uh however the biggest news so far uh is that today uh Neil long from mobile game gamer Biz reported that an alliance of mobile developers has formed to boycott and turn off all Iron source and unity ad monetization is the case until New conditions are reviewed from my understanding uh that the devs they're asking to remove the variable install fee and have some kind of flat fee instead uh so who's signed the petition so far and Switched Off iron source in

yundi today we're recording on Friday it's a list of some pretty Heavy Hitters uh and most of them are from the hyper casual genre which is no surprise so far it's azour games Voodoo H Century games SE Games Crazy Labs original games ducky Bernie Games inspired Square Gea Tokyo uh tsukami games kayak new storyy games man and our friends in uh from uh Soul superent uh yeah I mean some of these devs you know like um in short the devs are fighting back I mean some of these devs wouldn't be caught in a room together I know because they don't like each other very much but but you know this is exactly the same like yeah this is just the this is just the like recently I've seen people over linking pretty much saying that they're joining even though they're not included in me article yeah I mean it's a story that's just developing and like yeah flowing I mean we talked about this story few days

ago obviously because we have some inside information but we didn't want to go out with it just yet because we didn't we didn't know like if it's confirmed or not but anyway uh I saw the post other games posted on LinkedIn it's already like 50 reposts and like people saying hey we are definitely joining obviously we are not developers so you can't join that much uh but I would join if I have Unity or iron s SDK in the in the game uh but yeah look it's it's it's been a very tough week for what are the what are the impacts on UA uh for this move so if you think about it uh if you don't have enough inventory then uh well it's uh quite a lot of money that they can they can lose they meaning Unity right mean on the other hand if I if I think if I think about it this is only on the monetization side so what other people could do potentially in these companies as well they could

turn off Unity UA as well right which you know it's not a bad idea actually uh if you do that like uh a lot of other developers will have a little bit easier time because the competition just suddenly disappears but that's not why we are talking about this anyway but the funny fun fact was like during this week in like multiple calls that I had with the companies I work with this um kind of approach appeared like immediately when we started talking because obviously everybody's talking about Unity but they were like but you know we should we could just remove Unity from the waterfall immediately and uh just replace it with some other AD Network and then you know we we would be okay but they would lose a lot of money and it was like on multiple calls and then suddenly disappears it's like huh okay uh I still think unit didn't really think about this very much I mean the all the education ipated the scale of

the backlash yeah pretty much pretty much I mean look if if a lot like they have one well they said what 230,000 developers with uh build on Unity I'm not not not sure like how many of these still use uh Unity as an SDK for R network uh for ad monetization but let's say it's like what like 30% maybe 40% probably 100,000 at least I'd say okay okay it's a lot of money honestly until uh until well uh they kind of uh review the conditions which I'm not sure if they are going to do it honestly so from an ad monetization perspective uh this essentially means that developers correct will lose money uh as long as iron source and unity are switched off in monetization Unity is a top five Network always developers will lose money yeah developers will lose money okay so yeah developers will lose money because Unity is always a top five Network on video and losing them uh

basically in the stack changes the equilibrium and that means you're getting a lower Adar though uh iron Source tends on iOS to be quite strong so it's usually a top five Network on iOS and on an ad AR out basis I've been testing this already with a bunch of clients uh since Wednesday because people have been angry and Adar that decreases are anywhere between 5 to 15% uh on inter staals and rewarded Banner is a bit less because Unity is not really that strong on banners it's mainly a video Network so yeah developers are losing about that much that might not sound like that much but keep in mind that some of the pubs that I just read out on the list these are the pubs that are earning anywhere between 700 to a million dollar A Day In AD R like Revenue so losing a bit of that percentage is going to hurt from a Unity perspective uh losing Supply will hurt your demand side yeah uh margins on ad monetization tends to be around 30% but on UA I guess it can go a lot higher

what do you think I guess as well be way more than for us for us not admon people just plain and simple can people live without unity and mediation in a way that they would like survive the storm here you can um it sucks but it depends on your margins right like if you're running tight margins losing 10% might like put you out of business but if you're running a bit like heavier margins then you'll be fine it just will suck a bit we not talking we not talking forever you know you're fighting Extinction event and what like you're losing 10 10% margin up until January or you know when this thing goes over or you well you lose 10% or you lose the whole company afterwards because yeah you lose the whole company jary this calculation I think they didn't think about right because yeah like Unity also losing both revenue on both ad monetization and UA spend it's like also a chicken and egg problem that can quickly spiral so if you don't have enough Supply you'll get less demand spent which means you lose

positions in the waterfall and then you know that can quickly spiral and it's two weeks to the end of the quarter uh Unity being public like yeah it can really go nasty quite quickly of course that's not good but also like look because sorry sorry just one one quick comment like there must be a way how you can replace a Unity with different sources and AD networks to just mitigate the decrease on the ad to don't you don't tell me that like no no no so from the test I've been running uh the major winners from this uh from at least the test I've been running is that meta seems to take up a lot of the share uh also like meta and AD mob they take up quite a lot of the share you can also fill out quite a lot with gam uh but you still always do get some kind of bad ared out like loss because you're losing it how about Amazon how about Amazon Amazon is stronger on bannner so that's not really unity's Forte so it's not where they're strong so banners you don't really lose out that much by removing Unity because it's not what they do it's video inventory

well okay but that doesn't mean that they have quite a big inventory still so yeah they still do but the thing is until more Publishers join this right you know we can get that's that's I wanted to say like if you look at the list it's pretty much like primary the big guys there are the hyper casual Publishers so we have Voodoo hom State games which I think is the biggest three the West as well Cra Crazy and like the list would go if I yeah I just have it right in front of me because I have station as well by the way station they're already there okay because the guys that we missing what like Ric lion Super Sonic ketchup well Super Sonic come on like how can Super Sonic be sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry coffee today you had a coffee today do Dr coffee doesn't drink coffee so what's that Mo jum games and green panda and and catchup and then

then then we are pretty much like that's the list that I'm expecting to join this except Super Sonic of course Super Sonic that would be interesting but look there's Century games as well which is uh definitely yeah that was my point like if Century games do you think even like habby could join this list o that would be I have them on the list yeah they would be nailing the Cofe nailing the the unity Cofe oh my god wow that that would be great actually oh anyway I mean look uh if this happens which is already happening and like people jumping on this uh uh Unity coffin and then removing the SDK uh honestly like it's not the coffing like people are pretty much you know demanding the voice to be hurt like I I I think it's straight and fair nothing to it it's just you know if you read the open letter it's just like pretty consign terms in a way that they don't just like this and you know they would like

L yeah yeah we'll put the link into show notes uh thank you Neil as well for putting pretty long by also pages also uh the form because there is the form you can join uh the boycott you can can do whatever you want and well turn off the the unity ad monetization uh but I wanted to talk a little bit uh more about like what would be the re reason uh because we touched that a little bit in the last emergency episode but I don't think like too much because like Unity what have you done I license fee based on number of instas is just like not very cool um and I thought like okay so is this oh well there is also one more uh information where they said this is not going to affect majority of the of the developers out there which is like what the are you talking about they said ever yeah

like they said it's not going to affect 90% like how how this okay never mind that was like that was really funny uh but like I I can't help but I'm thinking like this is an attempt uh to take over some market share from uh applin because look if if we if we look back to October 2021 when uh APPL acquired mop up uh the same month that actually Unity announced its mediation platform which well I guess it never took off right no nobody cared at that point it was just like yeah okay great but nobody moved but app actually after acquiring mup spent like like more than 200 million in bonuses to move mop up customers over to its mediation Max obviously so so right now when we well right now we we um went to soul and we end of this amplify event and appline

said they have more than 150,000 developers in their Max platform as of q1 2023 so let's connect this um number so it's 150k um we can connect it to the last latest statement from from Unity when they said they have about 230,000 developers uh that created games in unity engine so 150k let's let's say from all of these I I guess some some developers didn't create the the games in unity but still you get the point it's 150k developers which is quite like lot of developers so this in mind uh let's look at the the FAQ section again where we we discussed this that uh you know you can get some credits um on the unity runtime fee if you move to Unity level play mediation

and there are also like these Unity gaming Services which we didn't talk about last time but I will talk about it a little bit more so like this sentence is amazing like this program enables deeper partnership with unity to succeed across the entire game of life cycle okay thank you very much which is interesting right but this puts the whole runtime fee announcement in the mediation War Spotlight so M migrate to level play or you will need to pay ton of money so sometimes you win sometimes you need to pay Unity quite a lot of money like these guys because i' I've been getting these messages as well Felix uh like you mentioned last time like 8 8,000 percentage increase uh in terms of the fee but these guys like assuming no growth on instal based we would go from paying 25k per year to 720 okay for year is 30 30X increase of cost like seriously

and guess what they don't have any ads in their in their game or app so they can't play this yeah they can't play mandatory exactly they can't play this level play card at all so you know for the the smaller developers I guess there is no other option like you said Felix they just have to migrate to level play mediation to serve their companies the hard thing is like I'm sure that they will put on some limits that you have to earn over a certain level a month before you like get it eliminated like it won't be earn $2 a month it's going to be a lot more it's got rid of 700k cost outstanding move and also and also I think uh um so I really I wanted to say something now I know I I don't know what I want to say never mind maybe it will get back to me uh but then again uh the rest of the of the companies already thinking about uh changing to

God or or Cocos you mentioned the Aon the last last episode uh but yeah Unity like this is not this is not very cool this is not very cool what's the what's the sentiment no no no no I know it just came back to me so uh regarding the credits so nobody actually said like they're going to wave uh like the whole runtime fee maybe it's going to be 10% if you use level play or maybe it's going to be 20% deduction of the cost so nobody knows if it's going to be 100% so that's that's the like that's the biggest problem because nobody was able to um to say like hey this is definitely happening we have these rumors like Unity reps is saying this on on the calls but nobody knows if it's if it's going to happen actually like that's in the other news article that it's like platform Studios currently using Lev play mediation have already been offered 100% around time Fe VOR that's what sources told him currently yeah

yeah currently Remo what's the what's the consense you're at a conference right now what's uh what's the majority of the dev saying um there's not much like deaths for like product people here but uh what I read yesterday and like day after even um yeah the god the god founder is kind of scared currently to be honest because of all that expectation of people and the engine is not really not really able to supplement Unity or you know even compete with it at the like feuture scale of the engine it's of course a different story like one two years down the line if like this whole thing would shift there but if every anybody expects to say get the same level of comfort even if they start you know working now in January to switch to Godot or Cocos or I even heard default the engine that King used for mobile games or or some mythical you unreal light version that unreal will suddenly create out of nothing you know hoping on this

bandwagon I also heard that so no it will be painful like I'm sorry like there's no like really the best at alternative it will be like you know cutting your left hand in order for your right hand to survive that's like that that's the analogy but uh I know yeah I've talked to few that was they said go is fine they even have their own uh um asset store which is obviously not like it's advanced Unity story not as populated as but think about think about it in this way so you have this uh petition or Coalition whatever fromers and boycott what if and I think that's going to happen because it's it's open source right so I think like a lot of developers can help build this quite quickly if they get pissed because they they already like look so we have three months let's move to God and let's make our lives easier and let's try to build something together and if if this this Bo happens like is

happening then this can happen as well easily that's one of the scenarios where you know what of kind of big companies get behind the any way you share their companies man big companies that they don't give a they have enough money no no no we're talking about hyper casual Studios man EV for them they need to do this otherwise they're dead yeah okay okay fair enough trust me bro they'll do it they will yeah of course but I I thought you mean like big companies like king or no we're not talking about like guys like I don't know you know super I think they uses their own engine but all these other people their own yeah yeah they won't like it won't match like I I think it's possible but it still will be very very rough if like if it goes this way you know my way or Highway that like everybody stays on the boycott side and just migrates to God default or whatever other engine it will be rough very rough so and think about also about like all the developers and their kind of you know knowledge invested in unity

it's not really that kind of a one one shift like but honestly giant value value lost yeah literally exactly exactly because like everybody was uh was kind of trying to master unity and uh to be I'm reading all the all the Twitter posts from people like they're you know even teaching Unity to like starting game deaths or like in kids to school and stuff University in University okay you un you're going to teach something else like to to to play the to play The Devil's Advocate a little bit like I also heard this other angle that yeah of course Unity needs to do something because they're just not profitable for 10 years you know they St crashed after the market crash they're like half of their IPO price after 2020 IPO currently uh this thing didn't also help them that much it seems because the stock tanked again and they are just probably pushed into profitability by shareholders and I guess this is the best idea they could

spin I don't know nobody understands why it's install based if we live in this ref share industry that everything R share based how can you track these things you know like tracking things is much since we last talked they they updated the FAQs they use the they they also has has this like uh install bombing and and destroying competitors they said they're not going to count with it but like how can you even like identify these inst it's going to be messy anyway they said they said they're going to use their propriatary system for like identifying inst like what the mistake Ru your company uh but uh you know uh what we didn't actually talk about was um like the pricing of the packages because uh in these conversations that I had with others uh one of my friends said look whoever doesn't upgrade to un un PR reaching 200k inst is a idiot

which is not my words but I kind of agree because if in fact you should really be paying uh I mean Unity license fee if you're developing a game seriously right so I was looking into the this like different tiers which is personal Pro Enterprise and Industry which is going to change and then you will need to pay $400 per seat in the Pro but now it's like one 1,800 dollars per year on the pro package and then you know with the pro license the fee install fee is getting significantly lower and it's not like 20 cents anymore on like all the all of the thresholds so you know like if you don't know these numbers guys like definitely check out our latest video on the unity case where we the in Infamous table Yeah the infamous table but look this is the thing uh so I guess uh they need to earn some money finally and get to profit which is fair

it's fair but like uh if you're then again think about it in a different way um almost nobody was paying anything from these like 230,000 developers so but but think about it the other way around Unity is not currently the engine company engines really you know aren't the big of a source of revenue for anyone even not for epic like epic's making m fortnite not engine yeah and unity Unity actually is currently an based comp if you like it or not like they're making most of their like overall Revenue ads so course I I guess like this backfire spectacularly if those names we read just about like a few minutes ago all those hyper casual Studios turns off Unity from their mediation and it tanks them like their actual Revenue you know like I know it's raised to the base in a way that everybody's losing now it's like I'm going to lose less than you are going to lose or stuff like that but if you're fighting Extinction event like if we're not going to do it we're going to die by

January then so what you know yeah yeah fck they well that's the thing and also uh again we are talking about H hyper casual developers which uh usually elow have been out for years yes yeah yeah so they been dead for a lot of multiple years yeah multiple yeah multiple multiple years they're again found like every year a loophole or anything work around that uh you know that's how that's that's how they do that's how they work and I'm I'm not surprised yeah one thing is for sure though this develop like situation is going to develop more and more uh we'll see what happens uh which Publishers will actually join the boycott but it's it's not going to be over this is going to be messy for a month at least but like yeah like since this happened on Tuesday like everybody's talking about it like literally no one's working everyone's gossiping baby I mean uh kudos to who who became the the meme King memes are great that was amazing but U I wanted to talk about one more

thing uh before we start laughing and making jokes because I I still think that this is a little bit confusing um if we get back to this like in famous paragraph where um they say you can get credits for Unity runtime fee based on adoption of the unity Services beyond the the editor which this is the this is the the interesting part because then when I open up the the unity Ser gaming Services um it's on their website which is basically everything uh connected to accounts multiplayer content management devops analytics player engagement Community reporting of crashes and then we have this like special section which is grow your game obviously connected to UA and AD monetization so you you have monetization which is um again admon UA ad ad mediation publishing and game economy so if you think about it this could potentially mean that if you're

spending on Unity your R time fee could get reduced same thing if you use analytics which everybody's using right level play mediation cloud services and others other other services from Unity so I still see some kind of back door uh in in this you mean like the ads are mandatory should wouldn't be the case here that you would use other services to put the waiver there ly the ads are mandatory is like one of like one piece of the puzzle so let's say you have level play or if you yeah the fact that we're speculating on this though it just shows how the delivery of this bombshell news was just bungled completely because there are so many hk's like they didn't even think about didn't even think about and like they just updated the FAQs again because of all of these like cases like because they're just sitting in their bigger problem is the form of this whole like if it would be to clear

we wouldn't be having this conversation like yeah and I feel bad for all my friends at Unity I have a lot of friends at Unity that I like I know that I have great people and it's just like wow it can't be easy working at Unity right now that's probably it's not but uh it's that's the thing like if but there are like so many ifs I guess if this was communicated better if this was a revenue share model if I don't know they didn't push a lot of people to level play mediation also the question is like is the level play mediation actually good or like good it's good mediation like it's not a bad mediation yeah but it's just like moving mediation is a hassle uh like from my understanding there's no real guarantees that you're going to get the same levels of adarp that you're currently getting so it's just it's a gamble right and also you got to keep in mind right that like we're going into Q4 which is traditionally the highest ecpm month right so moving mediation traditionally you never doing Q4 because like it's a

high-risk move because you don't want to lose out on the most profitable quarter like the last like month in this in Q4 literally you earn usually two months worth a revenue so moving anything then it's uh yeah yeah if if you want to have stable arbs you would need to move the mediation like mid year like June July right to get some levels of stability until hit you can move Med whenever but usually you don't usually move in Q4 like yeah makes sense to me yeah but then look if you if you think about the level play mediation and when we compare that to Max so why Max is just crushing everybody at this point is if you are if you have Max if you have at least 30% of ads Revenue in in the split iip versus ads you can use Blended Ras campaigns if you don't use if you don't have Max mediation you can't use H Blended R campaign so that's like BL campaigns for not second third U manager yeah yeah so

uh Blended R campaigns or hybrid r or whatever you want to call it these uh campaigns take into consideration I Ina purchases revenue and adds revenue and then you combine them into one Ras goal so let's say this is day Zero Ras so you want to get 20% day Zero Ras and then if you hit that eventually you will get your money back in 30 60 day 90 days whatever your LTV curve is if and this is like super powerful it's it's working really good on multiple accounts I see uh and it's really like you can scale quite heavily with this type of Campa so it's pretty much hybrid casual mandatory exactly exactly it's just like if you have 5050 split de like we discussed on the previous podcast that's like the vet dream of the UA manager because then you can you can use both you can use both and I was always talking about Adas but now it's both and this is perfect like now I have it on in beta you know on Google for some some accounts

chevis but the thing is with level play I was talking to some some people close to iron so like nobody even knew that the H the Blended rods or hybrid rods are so powerful like I like oh really it's working well like yes what are you talking about of course it's working well so and this is what what we discussed last time if you move here you get all this um all these developers uh on level play do you do you know like how many years it took appin to actually get where they are now two and a half years basically so right now the app is just like a top one or top two channel on on the UA it wasn't the case like few years ago but then yeah mop up happened now they changed the algorithm and like everything is working quite well so if this happens on on iron swords like it's still like very far from the the ideal scenario which you know in two and a half years nobody knows what's going to happen in in case

of unity going to happen in four months man in four days even should we uh should we wrap on that note we don't have an hour uh we can we can uh but yeah I think uh everybody who's listening to this um obviously please share feedback please share this uh with everybody you know everybody you know in the gaming industry if you want to join the uh the boycott uh and then um yeah well see you see you next time yeah guess yeah not not yet join the slack Channel that's where all the fun is and where everybody talking about wanted to say that this was already our second episode of like uh developer strikes back and I guess uh next week we get another one called like return not Return of the Jedi but probably something in the similar manner hopefully of the St regular

programming yeah of course all right thank you very much guys see you next time cheers you let's see let's see if we can stop recording it's stopping maybe we won't be able to stop this Madness recing forever yeah was not as good as the last one it was okay actually it was pretty okay man because there's a lot of imp like just hear what people say about don't go because compar to us exactly yeah because last time I was like ah yeah this is happening half of people don't even know about this Edward thing with app yeah and I can't stop this yeah I want to tell you guys some more stuff but I have to stop recording yeah I need to I guess I need to yeah I guess I need to leave does that stop the recording now yeah it's I can't let's see I you if I can rejoin can stop the recording like

terrible MTI doesn't want to leave because he loves us so much yeah yeah I need to we need to have like coherent strategy for the Cypress thing because my guess is it's like but who can it be by the way private company inside [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] yeah okay oh my God it's great okay amazing all right all right all right okay we can start we can start now I wasn't sure I wasn't sure all right hello everybody uh this is

again special Unity episode [Music]