I, for one, hate ads. I will do anything to avoid using ads, but I also need to put food on the table at some point.
Many many many kids have mobile devices now, along with tons of free time and a strong desire to play games. What they don't often have is access to a credit card to purchase games or do in-app purchases. I think that a big part of why so many games lean on ads is because it's essentially the main currency that kids have access to: their own time.
My ads are as unintrusive as I could implement (watching an ad via button press to unlock a level). So far I have seen mostly iOS users are willing to purchase the game while Android users will heavily lean towards watching an ad to unlock a level. From what I have read (and seen so far) it looks as though the way I'm implementing ads is going to be highly unprofitable
Additionally integrating ads in general was a huge pain in the ass. I initially looked to Unity, then Admob, and finally mediation of the two. Funnily enough at one point I looked at mediation via ironsource along the way as I had heard their Unity integration was pretty good.
If your curious as to the exact monetization mechanisms you can check them via my game below.
I don't think I've ever played a PC or console game that relied on ads for revenue (nor would I ever.)
Absolutely disgusting, I already doubt the value of yearly releases, as you basically pay for an updated roster, but this is just overreach.
Really hope they do something about making them easier to integrate and debug overall.
I don't develop games, but if I did, this would be a great addition, if I could 1-click this workflow to drive revenue.
This could also have quite the network effect on the ad network itself. You're now able to say 'All Unity apps ship with this network' yada yada.
The dark pattern will be "All games now ship with ads, and developers don't benefit from the ads" type stuff in order to drive premium subscriptions from developers. That or instead of the developer getting the 70% cut of the $5 'remove ads' purchase, they're instead going to get 40% and Unity gets the other 30%. I'm sure they'll figure out how to enforce monetization.