New Unity CEO Matt Bromberg on games, ads, AI

Unity is a critically important company in the mobile space, especially mobile gaming where 80% of the top 100 titles are powered by the Unity engine. That’s why the massive revolt at the company’s proposed runtime fee for volumes beyond 200,000 installs was such a big deal, ultimately resulting in former CEO John Riccitiello departing. We’ve chatted with Riccitiello multiple times at Singular, so I wanted to talk to Unity’s new CEO Matt Bromberg to learn about his new vision for Unity in game development, ad-based monetization, AI, and more.

Bromberg is a super-qualified person to run Unity, with an impeccable resume:

• CEO of Major League Gaming, an early eSports venture acquired by Activision
• GM and SVP of different components of Electronic Arts
• CEO of Zynga 

Now he’s looking to rebuild developer trust in Unity while also growing the company profitably without the use of the controversial runtime fee.

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Unity, ads, and monetization

Under Bromberg, Unity clearly has a renewed focus on ads and monetization. Recent hires like Jim Payne, the co-founder of both MoPub (acquired by Twitter, then sold to AppLovin) and MAX, AppLovin’s mediation platform, show Unity is serious here.

“[Unity’s ad network] is an enormous asset,” Bromberg told me. “We’re delivering 65 billion impressions a month … and we’re reaching a billion and a half gamers just on the ad side.”

But there’s something more important than scale for scale’s sake, Bromberg says. And that’s building monetization deeply into the core of games.

Unity has the privileged position of owning 3 pillars required for modern mobile games: game development tools, game runtime engines, and game monetization mechanisms. One key strategic advantage that Bromberg sees in that level of integration is that Unity can build bridges between them all. 

As a former game maker himself, he’s planning to increase that integration.

“Especially in mobile, this idea that somehow ad monetization and user acquisition is some separate thing from game development and what we do on the engine side … that is the fundamental misconception that we’ve had even internally,” Bromberg says.

“We think about prototyping and designing systems inside mobile games to engage customers, and then figure out how to create systems that support monetization that is a natural outgrowth of that engagement … that’s how you build mobile games.”

Monetization and user acquisition aren’t separate activities: they’re core to the process of making a game, Bromberg says.

Unity’s focus: squarely on gaming

Unity does and has done a lot of things, including providing 3D environment building software for industries far from mobile and gaming. Part of what Bromberg is doing is ensuring the company has a specific and clear focus.

Some of that was already happening: Capgemini bought Unity’s digital twin professional services division in February of this year, 2 months before Bromberg officially joined.

Hiring Bromberg, a gaming OG, was a pretty clear signal of the Unity’s board’s vision for the future, and he’s pretty clear on what he wants Unity to tackle.

“One of the greatest strengths of Unity is that we’re sitting at the intersection of all these incredibly powerful forces,” Bromberg says. “However, if you are not careful, you can become distracted by some of those because you can’t do everything right. So our strategy going forward is very much to focus our activities on delivering for our core gaming customer, in a unified ecosystem from prototyping through user acquisition, monetization.”

That’s more than enough TAM, says Bromberg, with mobile adtech alone being a $150 billion opportunity.

“The single most important thing in any business, and really in any activity in the world is focus and making choices,” Bromberg says. “And if you can do that, it’s incredibly powerful.”

Unity and AI: accelerating game development

AI is increasingly important in the gaming industry for almost everything:

• Making games and game components, as we saw with Roblox’ chief scientist
• Making ads, as we recently saw from Amazon
• Accelerating user acquisition, as discussed with AppSamurai
• Making gameplay and game characters smarter, as I talked about with Bromberg’s predecessor at Unity
• And probably much more …

So I asked Bromberg about AI in games: where does he see the biggest opportunities for Unity? The core focus: making the process of developing games faster and cheaper.

“Our view of AI going forward is that we want to principally use it to help our customers make games more quickly, less expensively, more efficiently,” Bromberg says. “That’s gonna be our sole primary focus.”

In other words: the core customer here is game makers. And the primary goal is helping them make great games quicker and easier.

And that will make games better for players, too, Bromberg says.

“The time and cost of game making is the single biggest challenge that game makers have. If you can meaningfully impact that equation, you will get more and better games, you’ll get more innovation … it’s just better for everyone.”

Also part of that focus: making Unity’s tools easier to use for new developers, including things like “just telling the shader what you want it to do,” rather than having to program it.

AI and monetization

Unity will also invest in AI to aid with monetization. Given Bromberg’s comments highlighted above, it probably won’t be a primary focus, but it will at least be a secondary focus.

The goal: using the data from the 65 billion ad impressions a month — and likely the data from what players are doing games — to make ads smarter, better targeted, and better performing.

Making games better and making ads better are essentially connected, says Bromberg.

“The primary thing that connects both of those activities is how you leverage data,” he told me. “How do you ingest and then take insights from the data that help you understand players better so that you can make better experiences … that fundamental process is the same on the ad side, right?”

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Recent episodes include the top 8 mistakes in paid user acquisition, how to use OEMs to run cheaper UA at scale, how to leverage player motivations to grow games, and how to know if your North Star metric actually sucks.