Unity is merging with a company who made a malware installer

The Unity logo on a phone in front of the Unity logo on a wall.
(Image credit: SOPA Images / Getty)

Unity, the company behind the multiplatform game engine of the same name, announced it has entered into an agreement to merge with IronSource. "If you don't know ironSource," Unity's statement reads, "they bring a proven record of helping creators focus on what creators do best – bringing great apps and user experiences to life – while enabling business expansion in the app economy."

IronSource is also well-known for another reason. It developed InstallCore, a wrapper for bundling software installations. If you've searched for a popular program and seen a link to a third-party site with a URL that ended in something like "downloadb.net" or "hdownload.net" it may well have been InstallCore. If you made the mistake of downloading it, you'd be offered the kind of extras with generic names like RegClean Pro and DriverSupport an unsophisticated user might click OK on, which is how you end up with a PC full of toolbars and junk that's as slow as your parents' is. InstallCore was obnoxious enough Windows Defender will stop it running, and Malwarebytes too.

As documented by Microsoft's chief economist for web experience, strategy, and policy Ben Edelman, InstallCore was also behind a fake installer for a Windows version of Snapchat, a program that's only ever been available on mobile. It would instead install Android emulator BlueStacks, as well as the usual injection of adware.

Game developers who use Unity are less than thrilled about the merger. Andreia Gaita, who runs game porting studio Spoiled Cat, tweeted that, "A game engine is the thing that you use to build and distribute games to devices. The vendors of those devices, like Apple, need to trust that the engine is not bundling bad things along with the game. Merging with a company that specializes in bundling malware is… WTF". Or as Maddy Thorson of Celeste fame succinctly put it, "Man, fuck Unity".

In 2015 IronSource merged with Supersonic, developer of an in-app purchase platform, and pivoted from InstallCore to in-game ads. At the start of 2022, it acquired Tapjoy, another specialist in mobile advertising and monetizing apps. This is the area Unity's looking to expand its stake in, as it plans on "harnessing the company's tools, platform, technology, and talent to form an end-to-end platform that enables creators to more easily create, publish, run, monetize, and grow live games and [real-time 3D] content seamlessly."

Unity already has Unity Ads, "our monetization solution for mobile games that enables game developers to monetize their entire player base", but obviously there are benefits to combining that with IronSource: "Unity and ironSource's complementary data and product capabilities will give creators access to better funding for user acquisition (UA) and monetization to successfully scale their games and accelerate their economic performance."

The Wall Street Journal reports Unity has agreed to pay $4.4 billion for IronSource. It's the latest in a string of partnerships and acquisitions for Unity that include buying VFX studio Weta Digital for $1.6 billion. And yet, just two weeks ago, it laid off hundreds of employees to, as a Unity spokesperson told us, "realign some of our resources". 

Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.