Want to Use Unity Ads in Your Game? Think Again…
In this post I share my experience with Unity Ads in an online mobile game I made in 2019. This was my first successful game, reaching 1000 daily active users (DAUs). It was at this point that I decided to make money from my game. Since I was making the game in Unity, Unity Ads was the natural choice.
During the initial development and as I incrementally released new versions, the SDK was changing a lot. A bad sign that the APIs weren’t that stable… but hey, Unity was starting out on its online services stack and going through growth pains as a company.
From a technical standpoint Unity Ads SDK worked just fine. At times it had its quirks but for the most part the implementation was straightforward. Today in 2022 I bet the SDK is more stable and reliable.
But the thing that caught me off guard was Unity’s fraud team! They too, similar to their engineering team are new and figuring out the online space. They did weird things on my account which hindered my confidence in them. In a long holiday I made $20 in a day from Unity ads. A few days later the money vanished from my account. There was no communication of any kind from Unity. It wasn’t the end of the world but worse was yet to come.
In mid 2020, Unity blocked my org with a template message saying I was in violation of Unity’s terms and services. In theory they block you if you try to cheat by clicking your own ads or have fake users or bots click the ads. I wasn’t doing any of those. I was lucky enough that it was a known widespread bug in the fraud detection system and so Unity unblocked my org and low key apologized on the forums. Here is the forum post where I voiced my concerns over Unity’s fraud team’s activities:
In early 2021, Unity blocked my org again. Telling me the same thing, that I was in violation of their terms of service. I tried opening multiple tickets but this time they kept sending me the same useless template message. I don’t think anyone from the actual fraud team viewed my ticket. I asked them politely to provide the evidence they have of my violations but I kept receiving the same template message. My forum posts on the matter also go on unanswered. Below is the link to my more recent forum post on the matter.
I understand that fraud detection is critical and a hard problem to tackle and there is bound to be mistakes, but to not communicate a thing with your loyal developers and treat them like frauds is unacceptable. I have at this point given up on Unity Ads and the rest of Unity online services.
I looked around the Unity forums and the internet and it seems to be a repeated pattern for Unity’s fraud team to not communicate anything back to the developers. As such I don’t recommend using it.
Here are a few more examples of indie developers being abandoned, mistreated and screwed over by Unity:
https://forum.unity.com/threads/fraud-deduction.1180543/
So What Now If Not Unity Ads?
I moved on the Google’s Ad mob and I couldn’t be happier. From my research the stacks are very similar so it would take you the same amount of time to add ads to your game using either solution. I’d recommend Google’s Ad Mob and Firebase suite for other online services like remote config and analytics. They have been around way longer than Unity and do a better job with cloud services. Their fraud and customer support teams are also way better than Unity. I haven’t been blocked there but had both technical and organizational issues with them and the support team was at least human and responsive.
Last Words
I hope that no developer goes through the same experience as I did. But as the forum posts suggest, many are! As an indie developer you make little money to begin with. The last thing you need is for Unity, the entity that is supposed to support game developers, to pull the rug from under you.
If you have had a similar experience I’d love to hear it. Feel free to leave a comment or dm me.
As always, happy developing!
