🔥🔥🔥 GameOver: Unity's Vector Daydreams & Applovin's AI Exploitation
1. Unity’s Vector Daydreams vs. AppLovin’s Cash-Printing Reality and 2. AppLovin’s AI ‘Innovation’ is Just Exploitation
Well, folks, people from all relevant companies, including the SANs, hit my LinkedIn this past week, and add requests shot up quite a bit.
Looks like there was some fire behind our last post below!
Applovin vs. Unity: How Applovin Has Been Winning It All!
Pay attention, folks, this one is a banger and has critical implications for the games industry's future.
This week, two hot takes only:
Unity’s Vector Daydreams vs. AppLovin’s Cash-Printing Reality
AppLovin’s AI ‘Innovation’ is Just Exploitation
👇👇👇
Unity’s Vector Daydreams vs. AppLovin’s Cash-Printing Reality
Unity’s ‘Vector’ is vaporware. AppLovin's too busy dominating mediation to care about a few disgruntled devs. Your virtue-signaling doesn’t pay the bills, while they’re building monetization empires.
Spare me the tears. You think Royal Match’s $1B/year comes from ‘artistic integrity’? Nope. It’s AppLovin’s ruthless first-party data harvesting, which turns player psychology into a science. Sure, they may lock you into their ecosystem, but why wouldn’t you stay when their algorithms triple your LTV? Unity’s Vector is a Hail Mary from a company that lost the ad wars. AppLovin doesn’t need to ‘play fair’ – they’re too busy printing money while others starve on ‘ethical monetization.’
AppLovin’s AI ‘Innovation’ is Just Exploitation
AppLovin can spin all they want about ‘building the world’s best advertising AI model,’ but let’s call it what it is: a black box of shady practices. From clickjacking schemes to backdoor app installs, this isn’t innovation—it’s exploitation. Unity might be struggling, but at least they’re not serving sex ads to kids or stealing attribution credit from competitors.
If AppLovin’s AI is so great, why does it need to break every rule in the book to succeed? The games industry doesn’t need another Cheetah Mobile scandal—it needs transparency and ethics, two things AppLovin clearly lacks.
Unity might be late with Vector, but they’re building something sustainable while AppLovin risks de-platforming with every shady tactic they deploy.
* Pseudonyms in italics, no underline.
Do you have a weekly hot take you’d like to submit?
Top 5 Gaming News
The Hard Truth About Ubisoft (Naavik) – A critical analysis of Ubisoft's declining performance, Tencent's increasing financial backing despite major stock losses, and how a newly created Ubisoft subsidiary housing top franchises may entrench poor leadership while diluting shareholder value.
Investors Shift Focus from AAA to Leaner Teams Amid Market Volatility (The Game Business) - VCs like 1Up Ventures prioritize smaller studios with focused ideas, citing AAA’s high risk and declining ROI, while Roblox’s UGC potential faces skepticism.
Minecraft Movie Shatters Box Office (X - Geoff Keighley) - A Minecraft Movie shattered box office expectations this weekend and made 301 Million USD at the global box office. It is the biggest video game movie opening of all time.
Monster Hunter Wilds Sells 4M Copies in Days, Hits $150M on Steam (GameDevReports) - Capcom’s latest entry dominated sales, earning $69.1M on Steam’s launch day and peaking at 1.38M concurrent players, reinforcing the franchise’s dominance in action RPGs.
Last War: Survival Surpasses $2B in Gross Revenue (GameDevReports) - The mobile strategy game hit a record $212M in January 2025, showcasing the longevity of well-executed live-service titles.
Top 5 AI x Gaming News
Nintendo's Doug Bowser Addresses AI Concerns: "There Will Always Be A Human Touch" (GameSpot) – Nintendo of America president emphasized AI’s role as a productivity tool, not a replacement for developers stating Nintendo games will retain a "human touch" through developers’ artistic vision and player insights.
Microsoft's AI-Generated Quake 2 Demo Receives Mixed Reactions, Praise from John Carmack (PC Gamer) – Microsoft’s AI-generated Quake II demo, trained on 28TB of gameplay data, received mixed reactions due to performance issues but was praised by John Carmack as "impressive research work."
Latitude’s AI Dungeon 2 Hits 1M Players with Procedural Storytelling (TalentDesk) - The text-based adventure game uses AI to generate infinite narrative paths based on player prompts, showcasing the potential of LLMs in creating adaptive, player-driven experiences.
AI Playtesting Cuts Bug Detection Time by 70% in AAA Studios (TalentDesk) - Automated testing tools scan thousands of scenarios in days, identifying balance issues and glitches faster than human testers, accelerating development cycles.
The Rise of Generative AI in Video Games Reshaping Development (Cubix) – A 2025 industry analysis reveals 40% of game developers now use AI tools for procedural content generation, streamlining workflows and cutting development time by up to 30%.
Does LiveOps matter? Each new character update in Honkai: Star Rail helped push the game up the top charts, with each update driving the game to hit local revenue peaks.
Key Statistics:
Minimum % Increase = 100.3%
Maximum % Increase = 1,156.7%
Average % Increase = 300.0%
From DFC Intelligence:
For Core PC Gamers, their #2 platform is… Nintendo Switch?