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.
Just to add to my last point a bit:
This is actually very common in software development. Nobody is dumb enough to write ALL of their own software (okay… there are a few orgs…). So you are going to be dependent on third party libraries. Some are free and open source with licenses that aren’t GPL. Others are licensed for a small fee from other companies. And many are in the middle somewhere where you pay for support, but can use the software regardless.
And… companies change licenses over time. Open source projects change licenses over time. And sometimes, that means you can’t use it anymore. Or you don’t want to use it because the team really dropped the ball and it is a piece of shit. And that is when you get an all hands on deck to replace it.
One of our major partners recently dicked us over REAL hard by changing the terms of a license we were discussing with them to a MUCH worse one. And we are being pretty public about how unprofessional that was and “accidentally” talking about it when other partners ask us what tech we are using to do X. Mostly in the context of “Well, we were previously dependent on using Y but they actively misled us before changing their license. So we are in the process of migrating everything to Z”.
But… regardless of how salty we are and how much we and others are doing to poison the reputation of that company to those who hadn’t interacted with them before: We need to finish the port to use Z.