Opco sees ‘substantial reputational damage’ to Unity from pricing changes

Oppenheimer keeps a Perform rating on Unity (U) after a collective of mobile game studios issued an open world’s largest hyper-casual game publishers such as Azur Games, Voodoo, Homa, Century Games, SayGames, CrazyLabs that have driven tens of billions of accumulative game downloads. The collective of 17 publishers and developers are immediately turning off all ironSource and Unity Ads monetization across their projects until these changes are reconsidered, the analyst tells investors in a research note. Oppenheimer sees AppLovin (APP) benefiting as publishers turn off ironSource and Unity Ads monetization. If Unity does not take immediate actions to alleviate the concern of its mobile customer base, AppLovin could gain incremental mediation customers as some publishers further distance themselves from Unity, says the analyst. It says Unity’s pricing change has already “caused substantial reputational damage to the company.” With an immediate boycott by some mobile publishers, it seems likely the changes will lead to negative revenue in the near term, Opco contends.