Unity acquired IronSource. Great.
Yeah, I’m not sure about this one to be honest. A few of my contacts commented about this merger and I felt like I should share my two cents.
Mobilegamer.biz has a great summary article on the Unity and IronSource subject located here. The Unity forum has a excellent post that pretty much sums up a lot of my thoughts.
There’s also this post on Barron’s, but I don’t have a subscription and I’m not registering either.
The merger doesn’t surprise me as the current CEO, John Riccitiello, who is ex-Electronic Arts wants to drive Unity Tech into the ground and leave the corpse with the biggest paycheck possible. He’s also known to be a major wanker.
John also said some things that didn’t go down well like “Developers not baking monetization early into development of their game are fucking idiots“.
I must be a “fucking idiot” for not wanting to bake monetization into my own project early in development, judging from his logic.
Unity Tech also made some pointless acquisitions in the last year – just check out the Game Makers’ Toolkit twitter thread that I’ll link here.
So about IronSource and that InstallCore…
Let’s quote Wikipedia:
In February 2011 the company released its first product InstallCore as an open-source SDK for a cross-platform installer creation tool and ad-delivery platform.
This was classified as a Potentially Unwanted Application by Sophos in 2014 and by Microsoft Essential in 2015 with MalwareBytes identifying the program as “a family of bundlers that installs more than one application on the user’s computer”.
The product has since been discontinued and is no longer supported by the company.
…That doesn’t change the fact the company specialized in a SDK that assisted in installing unwanted crap on your Windows (or Mac) machine, does it?
The “A closer look at InstallCore Installation Tactics” article on Ben Edelman’s website is a very good read of what InstallCore did back in the day when it was rampant on installing unwanted crap alongside the program you actually wanted to install.
My thoughts?
For the time being, I’m going to stick with Unity. I understand the shit storm that has brewed over the last few years of Unity acquiring random companies finally erupted and a large number of Unity developers are leaving in a mass exodus.
As someone who’s invested quite a bit of money into Unity assets and is currently working on an alpha of their own game, I don’t feel it’s a good idea for me to jump off the Unity ship just yet.
If I did though, I’d need to find a better engine. Unreal Engine’s workflow feels weird. I don’t like GoDot.
I could look into Xenko and a few other engines, but I honestly don’t want to be spending time learning C++ for Unreal. I’m a C# programmer after all.
I also need a network stack that works out of the box, and from what I’ve heard from networking experts, the one that Unreal comes with is very lacking.
I guess with that said, I’ll cover that bridge when the time comes.
See also: this GameDeveloper.com article.