Unity game engine "competitive advantage" for AI ads platform Vector

Unity has unveiled new details about its plans for its AI-powered ads platform Vector, which the company hopes can help revive its fortunes and compete with rival AppLovin.

In the the firm's Q2 financials, it said Vector helped deliver 15% revenue growth in its ads business from Q1. However, year-over-year sales in the division were still down 4%.

In an earnings call, CEO Matt Bromberg shared optimism about the platform but was keen to note that it’s still early days.

“We anticipate that Vector will move from strength-to-strength in the years ahead as the quality and efficiency of the AI that powers our performance engine continues to improve,” he noted.

Unique advantage?

Bromberg said Unity had yet to tap into the biggest competitive advantage it has over its rivals: the Unity engine itself and the billions of players that engage with the games built on it. The company has previously claimed 70% of the top 1,000 mobile game studios use the company’s tech.

"The increasing confidence we have in the future of our business is actually partially derived from the fact that we've not yet tapped into our biggest competitive advantage - the deep consumer understanding we possess by virtue of Unity’s position as the operating system for games globally," said Bromberg.

"Unity is the leading provider of the software used to build, distribute and run gaming applications used by billions of consumers worldwide."

He added: “This unique vantage point will provide our Vector AI engine access to new and highly differentiated behavioural data that will provide a significant potential future for enhanced performance and growth.

“We anticipate seeing the impact of our work in this area beginning in 2026 and extending well into the future. As excited as we are today, we're equally sure that this is just the beginning.”

Rival AppLovin has fought off criticism from short-seller reports this year that alleged violations of Apple and Google’s terms of service, while also making allegations about how it collects data. The firm’s CEO Adam Foroughi has disputed these claims, stating the reports were “littered with inaccuracies and false assertions”.

Scaling AI investments

Bromberg said that with Vector now live in the market, Unity will “substantially” ramp up its ambitions of the role AI will play in the core Unity content creation experience.

“You can expect me talking about it much more in the quarters ahead,” he said, adding: “Data from applications developed in Unity will enable our AI to transform the content creation experience.”

Bromberg said the team is “excited about how quickly AI has moved to the centre of our future”. He called the opportunity for its engine business “enormous”.

“We're going to be the platform, the orchestration layer for AI-led interactive content creation going forward,” he said.

Bromberg continued: “It's going to give us unique insights that will allow our customers both to make games more quickly and efficiently, and to be able to apply much more innovation and have much more time to to create because we're going to take away, over time, some of the drudgery and complexity of content creation.

“At the same time, when it comes time for customers to then reach out and grow those games and to find new customers, the fact that the game is being distributed on our Runtime is going to give us a unique capability to power our AI to enable folks to acquire new users more efficiently and more effectively. So we're extraordinarily excited about how the world is developing around us.”

Data privacy

As part of its AI plans, Unity is rolling out the developer data framework in the 6.2 engine beta. This will let developers control how their data is collected and used across Unity’s ecosystem.

“Whether data comes from the Unity engine, Unity services, or customer-owned sources, it's considered Developer Data – data you own and control,” read a blog post.

“Unity uses it only as directed and never repurposes it without your explicit permission. You define the rules, so you can rest easy knowing exactly what is shared and how it is used every step of the way.”

It added: “Until you customise settings, the use of your data is limited to only what’s required to provide to you the products and services you already use.”