2y ago

John Riccitiello steps down as CEO of Unity after pricing battle

venturebeat.com John Riccitiello steps down as CEO of Unity after pricing battle

John Riccitiello, CEO of Unity, has resigned from the company in the wake of the pricing controversy.

The news isn’t a surprise as Unity angered a lot of its loyal game developers a few weeks ago after pushing through a price increase based on numbers of downloads — and then retracted it after an uproar.

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John Riccitiello steps down as CEO of Unity after pricing battle

venturebeat.com /games/john-riccitiello-steps-down-as-ceo-of-unity-after-pricing-battle/

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Hacker News @derp.foo

John Riccitiello steps down as CEO of Unity after pricing battle

venturebeat.com /games/john-riccitiello-steps-down-as-ceo-of-unity-after-pricing-battle/

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TechNews @radiation.party

John Riccitiello steps down as CEO of Unity after pricing battle

venturebeat.com /games/john-riccitiello-steps-down-as-ceo-of-unity-after-pricing-battle/

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34 comments

Nice postering, but CEOs are not ideas guys, this likely wasn't even his brain child. The people responsible are still likely there and will continue to push the company in the wrong direction.
- Whether or not it was his idea is irrelevant, he's the one who approved it.
  
  I mean, realistically these days nothing gets done without the investment boards decision. Investors control fucking everything, and IMO are directly the root cause of the enshitification of everything.

As a consumer I will not buy newly made Unity games anymore. Whatever they might do now does not matter, because with the new TOS they can walk back on this at any time. Asking fees for installs on games that were made with a recent enough version of Unity that will prompt the developers to remove them from the stores.
If they wanted to regain trust, they would rectify the TOS that allows for garbage like this, but I don't see that happening..
- The problem is that this hurts developers more than it hurts Unity. And many developers just can't afford switching engines mid-development.
  
  While unfortunate, as a consumer it's the only recourse we have. We don't buy unity, we buy games. I won't buy a game that might just suddenly disappear from a store where I bought it, cause the developer can't or won't carry install fees that may or may not come at any point.
  Yes, it hurts developers. Yes, he shouldn't have to suddenly have to pay that fee, but that is out of my control. But I'm still not taking the risk with my money. Unity clearly wants to do this, eventually they probably will.
  Let's stop buying games with unity so they have no customers left that can slam with install fees after-the-fact. All we can do.
  
  They can finish up those projects and then move on to another engine. We shouldn't encourage a hostage situation where we have to stay with an untrustworthy platform just because they have a metaphorical gun to some developers' heads.
- Don't do this, it absolutely hurts Devs more than big bad Unity. Devs should make the choice to move away from Unity if they can, but as a consumer it's not your call.
  
  It will be easier for devs to justify moving away from Unity if there's more consumer demand for non-unity games.
  And presumably @Sina isn't going to stop buying games entirely - they can still buy the same number of games and continue to support indie developers as much as they otherwise would.
  Proprietary game engines like Unity are a dead end. The company behind them is always going to extract as much revenue as they possibly can from the industry and that hurts indie developers. A lot. The sooner devs rip off the bandaid and switch to Godot/etc the better.
  If Godot is missing a feature you need... it's open source and you're a developer. Simply add that feature to the engine.
- You're hurting indie devs more than Unity.
  Lots of indie devs have been working on their games for years and have no choice but to release on their current version of Unity. If everybody did what you're doing, they would all fail and go out of business.
- But they reinstated it

So long, ya greedy dumb bastard.

If they wrote his exit arc into a movie I’d be like “Hollywood rolls eyes”, but here it is IRL

So the Unity stakeholders were less willing to let John do the "if you want something no one's gonna accept, announce something even more horrible and then release a 'we heard you' statement where you announce the thing you wanted in the first place as comprise " bullcrap?
- If they had initially introduced a normal revenue share system like they're offering now, very few people would have complained. I find the notion that this was all a deliberate move from Unity rather silly. The only thing it achieved was serious damage to their reputation (which wasn't great in the first place).
  
  Oh, it is silly and it is stupid. Yet, it's how EA acted under Johnny here. That's the time they were regularly voted as the worst US company. They pulled this with so many things ("Fun surprise mechanics")
  
  It can be both. It can be a deliberate, albiet stupid move. I think that they always intended to walk back the initial offer, they just bit off more than they could chew.

I can't beleive they got Jim Whitehurst as the next ceo

Excellent, this makes me happy as a Unity dev.
- This wasn't just one man's incentive. Plenty of people behind the last move, still a part of the management/directorial team
  
  It's an indication that they realized that the direction they were attempting to take wasn't working. It's a step in the right direction.

I've worked in software development for over 20 years, and I stand by what I said. If you're that tied to a specific implementation, you've fucked yourself and you deserve to fail. You can copy most of your resources over, the rest is just a matter of porting your logic.

34 comments