Though I’m sure the weaselly prick will be walking away from Unity with a massive severance package after destroying not just the reputation but future of the company as a whole.
The Unity Saga continues, after having imposed a cancerous runtime fee that retroactively affects all Unity based games, doubling down on their greed, having removed the Unity Plus subscription and moved all subscriptions to the much more expensive Unity Pro license, Unity then backtracked on their runtime bullshit to a marginal degree instead imposing a new runtime fee basis on LTS 2024 Unity and beyond.
Unity CEO, John Riccitiello, was formally the CEO of Electronic Arts as he had drove that company through the mud under his leadership, sold 2,00 Unity shares before all of this ordeal began. Suspicious.
What’s even more suspicious is how high ranking executives at Unity were being handsomely paid, as the company continually reports itself being in the red financially by the tune of $200 Million dollars they seemingly can afford to pay but a handful of people upwards of $150 Million over the last couple years.
And finally there has been some recent developments regarding the future of the Unity engine, effective immediately it has been announced that John Riccitiello will be stepping down from his position as chief executive officer, not only that but John will also be leaving behind his role as president, chairman and a member of Unity’s board of directors.
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231009494331/en/Unity-Announces-Leadership-Transition
Riccitiello will remain as an advisor to Unity for a period of time to ensure a “seamless transition”, as he makes his swift exit from the company having given Godot and Unreal Engine unnecessary advocacy with the introduction of Unity’s Runtime Fee.
On announcement of his resignation, John had mentioned that it has been “a privilege” to lead Unity to its untimely demise after nearly an entire decade sitting on the throne where Riccitiello claims to have “served his employees, customers, developers and partners” by simply foregoing continued development and innovation of the Unity engine with the engine seemingly transitioning from industry leading to mobile focused around 2019.
Under John’s control Unity has fallen to the wayside drastically, with Epic Games abusing Tencent’s generosity with continued advancements of the Unreal Engine, Unity simply cannot compete anymore, their engine is better suited for mobile devices of which the proposed runtime fee was bound to target the most out of any singular developer given how the criteria is both install based and profit based.
While the board of directors will commence a thorough search process to find a permanent CEO, James M. “Jim” Whitehurst, who previously served as president of IBM in early 2020 before swiftly resigning in July 2021, has been appointed as the new chairman.
I am honored to join Unity as Interim CEO and President at this important time in its evolution. With the Company’s experienced leadership and passionate employees, I am confident that Unity is well-positioned to continue enhancing its platform, strengthening its community of customers, developers and partners, and focusing on its growth and profitability goals.
A comment from Roelof Botha
“Working with Unity under John’s leadership has been one of the highlights of my career. John joined the Unity Board in 2013 and stepped in to lead the Company in 2014, at a time when we faced significant challenges,”.
“John has led Unity through incredible growth over the last nearly 10 years, helping us transition from a perpetual license to a subscription model, enabling developers to monetize, building other game services to serve our creator community, leading us through an IPO and positioning us as a pioneer in the developer community. Unity would not be where it is today without the impact of his contributions. I remain excited for the future of Unity.”
Bullshit corporate PR speech.
Riccitiello’s departure might come as a surprise to absolutely nobody but it’s highly unlikely that simply ousting the figurehead for their own corporate greed will suddenly win over favor with developers worldwide.
Given how desperate Unity is from a financial point of view and how detestable their retroactive runtime fee would have been, in but a few short years time I highly doubt that many high profile games if any at all will be developed on an updated rendition of Unity, instead such projects will more than likely be built using Epic’s Unreal Engine with indie / standalone developers looking to make a 2D game, there is quite literally no better alternative than the Godot engine.
Where does John Riccitiello go from here is anyone’s guess, Ubisoft don’t need someone of his stature to destroy their company as they’re quite competent enough in doing so themselves.
However John Riccitiello is guaranteed to walk away from this ordeal with a golden parachute, he will forever be remembered as the guy who demolished public perception of two massive gaming corporations under his leadership, he’ll be laughing manically as he drifts away inside his luxury yacht while Unity will never manage to recover from this complete and utter blunder.
He has a very punchable face, I sure hope that nothing dangerous or life threatening were to ever befall upon him.
