AppLovin’s attempts to acquire Unity last year turned sour when Unity opted for a merger with rivals ironSource instead.
Now, in the ongoing shockwave of Unity's unpopular introduction of a Runtime Fee for users, it looks like AppLovin are seeking to have the last laugh. The company has helpfully announced a free tool which uses ChatGPT in order to migrate Unity projects away from Unity and move them to the Godot or Unreal engines instead. Should anyone be wanting to do such a thing round about now.
“Script migration is probably the biggest challenge for the developer,” wrote AppLovin CTO Basil Shikin. “Unity’s engine APIs can not be easily ported to other platforms. Moreover, porting scripts requires an understanding of the target engine’s equivalent APIs, which could be problematic given a steep learning curve when moving to a new technology.
“However, I believe that modern LLMs (Large Language Models such as ChatGPT) can greatly simplify the migration. LLMs excel at translating language and coding. We can leverage it to make our jobs easier.”
AppLovin's newfound intent to help Unity comes on the back of their CEO Adam Foroughi making public a letter to Unity CEO, John Riccitiello outlining what he would have done differently.
Waiting for Godot
“The current version of the tool is a proof of concept,” continues Shikin. “I wanted to demonstrate that we can utilize modern LLMs to ease the transition between Unity and other engines and I think early results are positive. It makes sense, because fundamental game engine structures are similar, but language and APIs can vary a lot. This is exactly what LLMs are good at: generalising and translating an idea.”
Shikin hopes that, after some further development, including the implementation of static asset migration and the improvement of LLM prompts, the tool can help hundreds of developers effectively migrate their projects from Unity to other engines. While larger projects more reliant on Unity’s technology may require additional work to effectively migrate, AppLovin are helpfully pointing the way to ChatGPT significantly streamlining the process.
While Unity is promising changes to the Unity Runtime Fee, at the time of writing it has yet to make clear what those changes will be. At a leaked company all-hands, CEO John Riccitiello noted that, while any changes to its business model would have led to criticism, the situation could have been handled better. Unity co-founder and Ex-CEO David Helgason, meanwhile, began his statement with a sentence which may well live on in infamy: “We fucked up on so many levels.”
We listed Unity as one of the top 50 mobile game makers of 2023.
