SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Unity (NYSE: U) (the “Company”), the world’s leading platform for creating and growing real-time 3D (RT3D) content, today announced that John Riccitiello will retire as President, Chief Executive Officer, Chairman and a member of the Company’s Board of Directors, effective immediately. James M. Whitehurst has been appointed Interim Chief Executive Officer, President and a member of the Board. Roelof Botha, Lead Independent Director of the Unity Board, has been appointed Chairman. Mr. Riccitiello will continue to advise Unity to ensure a smooth transition.
My only complaint is such maneuvers tend to come with golden parachutes - his mismanagement of Unity leading to the whole fee debacle and erosion of trust deserves no such soft landing.
Yeah I can almost guarantee that the original plan was always for him to leave. He was going to be the scapegoat with a golden parachute, allowing the company to keep the unpopular changes while disbursing the bad publicity. It’s exactly what he did with EA too.
Basically reddit’s Ellen Pao plan. Bring in someone unpopular to make the unpopular changes, then let them go with a massive payout while keeping the unpopular changes.
But then Unity realized that the companies weren’t going to forget about the unpopular changes and it wasn’t going to blow over. Companies started bailing left and right and switching to other engines. At that point Unity realized that the smoke was actually a full blown fire, and started doing whatever they could to try and regain some trust. But by that point it was too late, because companies had already seen the potential for abuse. And as the saying goes, when someone tells you who you are, believe them. So now companies are unwilling to go back to Unity, and Unity is grasping at straws.
He’s been there for 9 years, not like he was just recently hired.
And he was at EA for several years before it was voted Worst Company in the World two years in a row.
They were winning somewhere I suppose
I haven’t followed the topic beyond the initial backlash - has Unity totally / partially gone back on the changes?
Yes, they retracted the original policy changes with one of those boilerplate “we’re listening to the community” apologies. But the fact still remains that they have done it once and could just as easily decide to do it again in the future. One of the biggest reasons people shifted to Godot is because it’s free and open source. Godot (like many other free open-source softwares) had struggled with adoption until now. But now that Godot has exploded in popularity and game devs have begun learning it, the hardest hurdle is already passed and there isn’t much incentive to switch back to Unity.
It’d be like if there was a mass exodus from Windows to Linux. And then Microsoft apologized for whatever caused the exodus, but everyone had already installed and learned the basics for Linux. There would be very little incentive for everyone to change back to Windows, because as Linux gets more popular and development progresses, it gets easier to use and more robust.
The biggest hurdle for switching to a new platform is overcoming user apathy. After all, users will choose to use what they already know, even if it’s slightly inconvenient. That’s why the first phase of pretty much any software launch is making it look similar to something that already exists. If you can greet users with a familiar UI, they’ll be more likely to consider adoption. But Unity managed to actively drive users away from their platform (and into the arms of an open-source competitor) so the biggest hurdle has already been jumped.
Mostly. The runtime fee now only kicks in after $1 mil, and you are limited to a 4% cap, and they are honoring the old EULAs, so if you want to avoid the fee, you just stay on the current version of Unity. They can still eat my farts, but this is much better and won’t kill a bunch of games the way it would have before.
Somewhat… Not completely but most of the really bad parts were changed https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/09/unity-makes-major-changes-to-controversial-install-fee-program/
I don’t think so, mostly because of how long it took for him to be “retired” after the whole fiasco, almost a full month. Had it taken only a week, I’d find that more plausible, as that’d actually make it look like it was his fault and that Unity as a company “saw the error in their way”
Or it could be that they suck even harder at saving face than we thought.
I hadn’t considered that… fair point. Pay someone handsomely to take the immense PR hit and move on.
Typically written into the contract, it’s not like they are doing it out of love
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Yeah he’s definetely not innocent, but this is 100% the board at Unity throwing the CEO under the bus to try and control the damage
You’re not wrong; I suppose my criticism is as much of that practice as it is of this individual specifically.
You’re looking for blood you’ll never get unfortunately