My org got blocked with no explanation, WHY? The way Unity treats us developers is UNACCEPTABLE

Unity Services
1

I’ve been using Unity for 2 years and have made a bunch of game with it. I have a card game that was generating ad revenue for the past 6 months.
Today Unity BLOCKED my cloud account with no clear explanation.

This is the most serious case but not the first case. Unity did weird things on my account before. Do not dismiss this post if you haven’t personally faced any issues with Unity so far. I got to where I am after two years of using Unity. You might face the same thing at some point. And the experience is not going to be pleasant.

For example after a spike in the number of ads that coincided with a long holiday, my ad revenue for those days went down AFTER A FEW DAYS. So the ads were shown and the revenue was added to my account, but later it was taken away! I communicated with Unity about the incident but got no replies from Unity. My only guess is that the spike caused a red flag and the fraud team decided to take away part of the money.

Another time the number of events had a 10x spike. Ad revenue stayed put but every other analytics event went 10x. After a few days things went back to 1x. I wrote to Unity about the incident. Again got no response. Unity didn’t mention anything in their forums or blogs about this. My guess is that this must have been a bug in their reporting pipeline. Oh well…

Such cases, specially the first one are COMMON. Searching on facebook groups, reddit threads, etc. people have had similar experiences OVER and OVER. The fact that Unity (ads team, fraud team, etc.) can make changes to our accounts without notice, without any communication and without any consequence IS JUST WRONG. Taking money out of developers ads accounts without any explanation or communication IS FRAUDULENT. We the developers are real people working hard and putting our lives into games we make with Unity. To see Unity treat us like frauds is painful and despairing.

I for one am not going to use any of the online services from Unity for a long time. Until Unity learns to respect their developers, listens to them and treats them fairly. I was a big Unity advocate in the indie community in the Bay Area but not anymore.

AdMob and Firebase provide a much better alternative to Unity’s online stack for the time being. Their SDK is much more reliable and they have clearer policies on how to treat fraud. Enough is enough.

2

hk1ll3r,

This was due to a mistake on our end which we are still currently investigating. Please note that your account has since been unlocked. We sincerely apologize for the error, and would like to note that ad requests in your games have already resumed.

3

This happened again. I’m tired of the way Unity treats us. Made a separate thread with my two cents there. If you are in the same boat as me check it out.

4

same issue for me, my game ads stopped running!

5

since unity merger with Ironsource, the system and fraud detection is kinda joke.
after 2 years with unity they disabled my ad delivery