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I'm relatively new to Unity and almost done with my first serious project.

After successfully implementing ads into the game I realised that it would be pretty easy to make a "game" that farms runs ads on a loop. Then adding such "game" on the play store and using that "game" for some passive money generation.

Of course I'm aware that a single phone playing a couple ads every now and then wont generate much, but if this "game" is downloaded on a couple of burner phones (for this example lets say 20) that are constantly running this "game" and plugged on a socket (for battery) couldn't a profit be made?.

And here is my question. How much would such farm produce? does such farm go against any user licence agreement? Has anyone ever tried/done it and why am I here asking this question instead of fixing the path-finding of the AI's in my game?

DudeThatAsks
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  • This doesn't really sound like very legal thoughts .. everyone can decide to answer such a question but for me as a member of a clean and legal coding community this seems off-topic ... Maybe ask Google/Unity supports directly how they like the idea ;) So yeah I'ld pretty much go with your last question ^^ – derHugo Jun 15 '20 at 15:44

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Unity and Google devs have thought about that when they published the "ads" plugin.

I have read about the ad generation some time ago. If I find the specific link I will edit the post. But unity said in their forum that unity-ads only generates a specific amout of ads per phone. IE 5 per day. After you have watched these ads I'm not sure if new ads are generated or unity stops providing you with ads. Also there is a calculation behind the ad system which takes the amout of devices ads are played on into account. Also the payout decreases the more ads you play to your users.

I'm also pretty sure that such an app is against unitys or at least googles ula.

But thinking about it. I'm not sure if you could turn out a profit with using this method. If you run an app your display must be active the whole time. Also to get the ads you have to connect to wifi or mobile internet for at least some time to recieve the ads and confirm that they were watched completly. So your energy need with 20 phone will be considerable. Also if you get good ads they get you around 8-12$ per 1000 clicks. I'm not sure how unity spreads the ad quality but consider them rare in a "real life idle farmer". So if you can watch 100 ads per day and have to run you phones for about 15min to not get punished to hard (just spittballing here. I don't know how the revenue calculation works in detail) that will be about 80ct -> 1.2$ per day. I don't know how much you pay for electricity but profits will be thin and I think you need to pay for 20 phones first.

TL;DR: Time invested in screwing with google will be wasted. Invest your time in developing a real game or application users will stick with and have a look at the calculations behind google ads.

EDIT: after looking around in the unity forums it seems that achiving constant 8-12$ per 1000 clicks is utopian. So my guess for such an app would be around 1ct per day.

flyingchris
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  • Yeah I think it also takes into account howany active Users you have -> more different users more revenue so 20 is nothing compared to apps with let's say 100.000 users until they really create some profit .. not even speaking about the money you have to invest in order to publish your spam app on GooglePlay or something ^^ – derHugo Jun 15 '20 at 17:19
  • yeah didn't fully think this trough. All the "don't" heavily outweigh the "do", also explaining why I couldn't find examples of this online. Thanks to all of you for taking your time and replying. – DudeThatAsks Jun 15 '20 at 17:28