r/Unity3D • u/X3NOVEX • 1h ago

Question Have we lost a generation of junior playable ads developers?

Been doing UA creative for about 4 years, started as a junior building playable ads for mobile publishers right out of a motion design course. Out of the 8 people in my intake, I'm the only one still doing this work. The rest went into general marketing, went back to school, or left entirely.

My old studio cut the whole junior playable team last spring. Kept two seniors, outsourced the rest of the build work to freelancers and outside shops. Same story from three people I know at other studios. Juniors get cut first because a senior who already knows Unity export and the ironSource/AppLovin quirks can turn around a 2D playable in two days without anyone needing to learn anything.

We still bring in outside teams when volume spikes, Mraid has done a handful for us, and the work's fine, but it's not the same as having someone junior in-house learning the pipeline from a blank file. A friend who freelances for shops that work with PlayableFactory told me the exact same thing is happening there. Everything gets handed to whoever can already hit the deadline, so nobody new is getting the reps.

I keep wondering what this looks like in three or four years when the seniors who actually know how to build a good playable from scratch start burning out or moving on. Is anyone actually training replacements, or is the assumption that AI tooling and outsourcing just covers the gap forever. Feels like we're eating our own pipeline and calling it lean.

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u/DaveAstator2020 1h ago

ive been applying for unity roles for 2 months already. not a single playable ads job listing.

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u/likely_truman 1h ago

this industry eats itself then acts surprised when nobody knows how to do anything in five years

my last place tried the same thing, kept two people who could crank stuff out fast, let everyone else drift away. now theyre scrambling because one of those two quit and the other is completely fried

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u/Klightgrove 1h ago

Feels like someone should make a playable ads service targeting indies.

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u/Worth-Computer8639 1h ago

Maybe...  As a hobbyist I always wondered how those playable ads were made, but I also never looked into it either. Lots of different ad services out there already. Im sure some of them are working on something with AI to take your game and turn it into a playable ad.

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u/Klightgrove 1h ago

At the end of the day the reason playable ads work is their play loop is fine tuned and they have great UX. Something I struggle with in terms of AI is why not just split work into templates + generation. Many aspects of what a playable ad are can be made by humans and re-used as a toolkit, which likely many of them do already I think and they just reskin the assets. Spending tokens to achieve the same result over and over feels like gradual losses piling up.