18 ms·

John Riccitiello steps down as CEO of Unity

926 points by AndrewKemendo 3y ago

sylware 3y ago
How can we know if John Riccitiello was not basically told what did by major share holders? "Ok, we are going try to push the envelope, if it does not work don't worry, you'll get a nice bonus while endorsing our despicable behaviour on you departure."
CoastalCoder 3y ago
I'll be curious if they can unring this bell. If nothing else, this reminded small developers how vulnerable they are in terms of negotiating power.
- eps 3y ago
  If they bring back Unity's original co-founder and CEO (David Helgason) and restructure/debloat the company, they might have a chance of reacquiring some of the goodwill. People still want the "old", pre-IPO and pre-Riccitiello Unity back.
  - catothedev 3y ago
    It would really turn the energy around to cut the bloat, bring in Helgason as CEO w $1 salary but boatload of call options, have him explain a model that encourages indie devs while milking cash from gaming giants, and works towards a sustainable income statement for Unity.
  - jjoonathan 3y ago
    They can restructure the company, but they can't restructure their incentives.
pjmlp 3y ago
Finally!
deleted 3y ago
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foobiekr 3y ago
Amazing to see a CEO paying the price. I wonder if he got some kind of golden parachute.
- wslh 3y ago
  May be he doesn't know how to increase revenue without changing the terms and conditions and leave the position to someone else?
- gofixurcode 3y ago
  If I were on the board I’d vote he gets a golden cannonball to the nuts.
  - Exuma 3y ago
    Or a golden parachute that’s been slashed with a knife
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    The board are just covering their own asses. I'm sure they were aligned on all the plans because the board represent the shareholders and those have super short term vision these days. It's a problem that plagues the whole industry.
- BackBlast 3y ago
  Probably an unpleasant conversation with the board. Resign, or be fired. This is very likely covered in the contract to begin with so there isn't much room for negotiation unless the board feels he's breached some significant contract term. Nice to see a company really try to make it right.
  - ncr100 3y ago
    All conversations with a board are possibly unpleasant, even successful moments, "why aren't you more successful." Market economy. Bleh.
- boeingUH60 3y ago
throwawayunity 3y ago
Unironically the best thing that could have happened to Unity. The dude is the definition of short-sighted management that caters to short-term shareholder gains at the expense of long-term value. Now if only they could undo their acquisition of IronSource...
wkat4242 3y ago
This is not bad news for once. A new CEO could really bring back some goodwill. He was going about it the wrong way and with a poor attitude (referring to the idiots incident), the malware company acquisition etc.
- yownie 3y ago
  I'm not familiar to the idiots incident could you summarize?
  - kevingadd 3y ago
    https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/18/23269218/unity-ceo-john-riccitiello-apology-game-developers-fucking-idiots-ironsource-merger https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/18/23269218/unity-ceo-john-r...
    - wkat4242 3y ago
      Yeah I know the overall context was not as negative as indicated. But someone who thoughtlessly refers to their customers as "the biggest fucking idiots" really has an attitude problem that goes deeper than he claims.
Ajay-p 3y ago
What ...encouraged the initial decision to increase the price? Because I can think of a few examples of discouragement, such as the backlash against Reddit, that should have given the executives an idea of what could happen as a result. Yet they went through with it which makes me think: a) the company truly believed people would pay; b) They believed that the fallout would not be that bad; or c) Worst case, they did not consider fallout at all and just said raise it.
- bagels 3y ago
  Or, the alternative was somehow worse? Run out of cash and fail to get more investment?
  - basisword 3y ago
    Companies can't just continue raising and burning money forever. At some point they have to charge an amount that's worth the value they provide. We're weirdly not used to that concept after a decade or more of low interest rates, but it's something we're going to need to get familiar with - paying for things we use that save us or make us money.
    - bagels 3y ago
      I agree. People seem to imagine there's some evil cartoon character twirling a moustache figuring out how to comically oppress them, when the reality is usually a lot more mundane.
      - johnnyanmac 3y ago
        Ehh threes a bit of mustache twirling. Unity isn't profitable becsuse it didn't charge enough. It's not profitable because it was focused on growth and promising big profits later. A strategy that worked for some of the largest sites out there. This generates bad pr with customers becsuse customers just want their (very long standing) issues fixed and instead they announce a billion dollar acquisition-merge with ad tech and a bunch of other new products for different industries. So when the pricing changes hit these already frustrated customers, the backlash was severe. You don't fix the core issues and charge more for the engine you broke in some places? If we had shareholders happy with steady profits we wouldn't be in this mess to begin with. They'd focus on the core product and have much leaner teams that do R&D for maybe 1-2 new products. But that's now how the stock market works. .
endisneigh 3y ago
I have to give it to them - who knows what they’re thinking - but the fact that they adjusted the pricing scheme and that the leader is leaving at least suggests they’re taking (and have took) the feedback seriously. That being said, even before the drama, unity was a sinking ship that was not profitable. Something will have to give eventually.
- basisword 3y ago
  >> That being said, even before the drama, unity was a sinking ship that was not profitable. Surely the new pricing is the solution to that? The fact that we have these massive companies, creating complex software, used by tens of thousands of people to build their own companies, and they are unprofitable is insane. Their original pricing scheme was a mess, but charging more generally and becoming profitable is good for them and therefore good for the tens of thousands of companies building their businesses using Unity software (given that Unity doesn't die and they don't have to retool their entire dev stack).
  - KaoruAoiShiho 3y ago
    I mean John fucked up the delivery of the message, somehow the cheapest pricing scheme I've ever seen was interpreted by the customers as an example of dastardly extreme greed, and the fix was to roll out a much more expensive pricing scheme. Something was lost in the sauce and that was all John's fault.
    - wkat4242 3y ago
      The biggest problem was applying it to already released products. You have to give the developers the chance to pivot their business model to meet the new reality. They can't do that for already sold products that they would still be charged for under the new scheme.
      - Root_Denied 3y ago
        If they tried to enforce that on previous version they'd get sued from all directions for contract violations. It was never going to work like that, there's no way Unity could have even afforded to defend themselves against such a barrage of lawsuits. So the only question remaining is this: Did they announce these changes with the intent to walk them back to something else, or are they really that stupid? My bet is on the latter, honestly.
Pulcinella 3y ago
Direct link to the Unity press release: https://investors.unity.com/news/news-details/2023/Unity-Announces-Leadership-Transition/default.aspx https://investors.unity.com/news/news-details/2023/Unity-Ann...
justinclift 3y ago
That's unexpected. The new CEO is a guy who led Red Hat (successfully) for many years. Not sure how he'll turn the Unity ship around, but his outlook is likely to be 100% in the opposite direction to the previous (dodgy) CEO.
andrewedstrom 3y ago
It makes sense the CEO would either step down or be forcibly removed by the board. Unity's mishandling of the Runtime Fee policy announcement has caused permanent damage to their reputation. It was a perfect case study in how to undo decades of trust-building in one day. I follow a lot of game developers online. Every single one that uses Unity today is planning to switch engines for their future games.
- lofaszvanitt 3y ago
  Nah, this was mass hysteria.
  - starburst 3y ago
    Nah, people in position of picking the engine for the next project are not going to pick Unity.
    - sbarre 3y ago
      At least one publisher jokingly (but not jokingly) said "developers: make sure you include which engine you're using next time you pitch us a game!"...
      - teamonkey 3y ago
        That's normal and has been for years. Your choice of engine affects your business model.
        sbarre 3y ago
        Yes but a very public tweet about it in the middle of this Unity debacle was not accidental timing or just a random reminder of this fact.
  - readyplayernull 3y ago
    When they tell you that you have to report your installs and sales each month just like you do your taxes, that's when you notice there are other free engines.
paxys 3y ago
Remember that executives are never fired for bad decisions, they are fired for bad press. The Unity business model & strategy changes/price hike were most definitely approved by the board. The CEO's job was to make it digestible to the general public, and he failed at that. Don't expect the new one to pull a 180. He will simply hire better PR firms and do better sugar coating.
- alexpetralia 3y ago
  But who proposed those changes? Ultimately the CEO is accountable.
  - dboreham 3y ago
    The board
    - AlexandrB 3y ago
      I'm not an expert on corporate governance, but does a board of directors get into the nitty gritty of pricing models? I can totally believe they told the CEO to "bring in more revenue, or get replaced", but I have a hard time imagining they got too involved in the details how that would happen. Many board members sit on multiple boards or are CEOs of other companies. Do they really have time to do the kind of market research you'd need to propose such a change?
      - hiatus 3y ago
        Having been in board meetings where members went in on the nitty gritty of our _salesperson_ compensation structure, I would say yes.
        airstrike 3y ago
        Public company boards?
        jojobas 3y ago
theogravity 3y ago
Stock price is down 22% in the past month: https://www.google.com/finance/quote/U:NYSE?sa=X&sqi=2&ved=2ahUKEwjip9yH8emBAxUSGjQIHUfUAYAQ3ecFegQIbxAX&window=1M https://www.google.com/finance/quote/U:NYSE?sa=X&sqi=2&ved=2...
- chx 3y ago
  This is it. Bad press? Developer feedback? These, by themselves, are no concern to the board. But my man here lost three billion dollars of investor money and for that he needs to go.
  - j_maffe 3y ago
    what else would someone expect board members to care about? It's naïve to expect otherwise, really.
    - kibwen 3y ago
      It's not that we're surprised, but rather that we're angry about how unsurprised we are.
beigeoak 3y ago
I doubt this will end the scummy money grabbing thinking. https://old.reddit.com/r/unity/comments/16j23ci/i_know_people_dont_want_to_hear_this_you_shouldnt/ https://old.reddit.com/r/unity/comments/16j23ci/i_know_peopl... The actual people who should be removed is probably the incompetent board of directors who signed on in 2020.
cojo 3y ago
I have to say, the only thing more surprising to me than seeing the board actually hold Riccitiello responsible for this (with consequences) is seeing that their interim replacement / transitional CEO is someone with a pedigree that, on the surface, seems even more management consulting / investor / revenue focused than Riccitiello was himself. To be clear, I know essentially nothing about James M. Whitehurst other than what is readily publicly available (IBM / Red Hat, advisory roles, etc.). But my read on a lot of the Unity crisis, as a long-time game industry veteran myself, was that one of the increasingly common "management consulting" / investor- & revenue-focused type of gaming executives (e.g. Riccitiello, Don Mattrick [Zynga replacement CEO when Pincus stepped down], Kotick [Activision-Blizzard]) had finally overstepped their bounds and let revenue goals drive decision-making just a bit too far without customer consideration. So, I had assumed that if Unity did make a leadership change here, it would be in a direction away from that - i.e. a more industry-seasoned executive with less of a pure revenue / "business" focus. I think I clearly misjudged the situation here in light the Whitehurst pick; while it's possible that is truly just an interim role and they will still pivot to this in the final hire, or that I simply misjudge "the label on the tin" and Whitehurst is very culture / customer focused, I don't think I would bet on it. This seems like the board actually "doubling down" on driving revenue results - and fast.
- Willish42 3y ago
  "doubling down" indeed... One possible interpretation of events is that he was ousted not for the initial proposal and backlash but precisely for how he backtracked after the fact -- perhaps the board gave a clear mandate and Riccitiello was unable to successfully change pricing structure to match financial expectations. That would explain the replacement. Things aren't looking great for Unity right now...
  - cojo 3y ago
    Yeah, I think this could definitely be one explanation. Other commenters in the thread have also given good thoughts / potential scenarios in similar veins - essentially that this was actually a failure of messaging, sticking to the plan, and / or both, plus some other combination of "no, seriously, we need to make money and become profitable, nothing else matters as long as the boat still floats, make it happen and keep this ship going." And I do suspect that Whitehurst will likely be a better fit for that. A seasons gaming industry executive (regardless of investor / revenue focus) may actually be a negative if that's the goal right now... I'll be very interested to see how this all turns out.
doomlaser 3y ago
James M. Whitehurst is new CEO, previously at IBM, but originally CEO of Red Hat. He joined IBM after they acquired it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Whitehurst https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Whitehurst He wrote a book about open source software while running Red Hat, The Open Organization: https://www.redhat.com/en/explore/the-open-organization-book https://www.redhat.com/en/explore/the-open-organization-book He is an MBA, but he got his undergraduate degree in CS from Rice.
- justinclift 3y ago
  > ... originally CEO of Red Hat. When he joined Red Hat, he was widely known as having turned around Delta Air Lines fortunes.
- leviathan303 3y ago
  His wikipedia article says he got his BS in CS from Rice.
  - Thorrez 3y ago
    Has the comment been edited? That's exactly what doomlaser said.
    - monsieurbanana 3y ago
      It said Harvard
      - doomlaser 3y ago
        His MBA is from Harvard Business School. Undergrad CS at Rice.
  - badRNG 3y ago
    Whitehurst went to Rice University for Computer Science
    - 3y ago
riscy 3y ago
> 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. I thought they only slightly adjusted the new pricing scheme due to uproar, rather than retract it.
orliesaurus 3y ago
Well, what did you think was gonna happen...the stock tanked hard!!!
GoofballJones 3y ago
I'm just amazed it took this long.
eskatonic 3y ago
"Unity would not be where it is today without the impact of his contributions." something something damning with faint praise...
dev_tty01 3y ago
Anyone else wondering if this was all planned? Maybe Riccitiello was planning to retire and the board asked him to play bad cop and announce the new fee structure. After he is gone they will announce something slightly more agreeable that will look good in comparison. Maybe I'm just too cynical...
- j_maffe 3y ago
  I think you are, in fact, too cynical. They've already announced the new fee structure which is a lot more sensible. And before you go "that's how they wanted people to react to the final structure", there's no way how this thing unfolded came to the benefit of the company and they'd have been idiots if this was in any way the plan.
- octygen 3y ago
  This is not cynical - it's a common/smart play with little downside taking advantage of a bad situation (e.g., like the CEO being hated in general by the community).
amitmathew 3y ago
Wow...I wrote up a whimsical account of what could happen after the price increases. I got the timing wrong (I thought it would take several months for the CEO to step down), but some of it is starting to come true: https://quiver.dev/blog/stepping-into-the-unity-ceos-calfskin-loafers/ https://quiver.dev/blog/stepping-into-the-unity-ceos-calfski....
fyrn_ 3y ago
Didn't they only give some minor concessions, not actually roll back the pricing changes?
accrual 3y ago
Is this one of those things where the previous leadership does something awful (retroactively change pricing schema), then they quickly enact new leadership to distance themselves from their actions?
- muppetman 3y ago
  Oh no I'm sure this is 100% unrelated!
- ptcrash 3y ago
  Well, the transition in leadership is uncommon but they don’t officially give us a reason, so we’re left to speculate until someone inside gives us more info. But from a purely speculative standpoint, it seems very possible that they were ousted because of the pricing debacle. I could see a world where the stakeholders aren’t thrilled with the damage the pricing changes did to their brand and took action.
crunkykd 3y ago
spending $4B for ironsource ads and $1B for weta authoring stuff was expensive and took lots of their more indie-friendly choices off the table. maybe the ipo path they took made these things inevitable. anyways, their choices are behind them now. godot and elsewhere are where the parade will move on to
xyst 3y ago
No mention of his “exit package” or “golden parachute”. Dude is going to be sitting pretty and then fuck over the next company. I’m surprised the board actually did something and held him accountable. It’s a small step but this is a stain that won’t be washed off.
- kibwen 3y ago
  Like a caterpillar becoming a butterfly, an executive cannot graduate to an oligarch without failing upward into fabulous wealth. This is but another step on his beautiful journey.
benjismith 3y ago
I find myself wondering if Apple applied some kind of back-channel pressure to oust Riccitiello. With Unity at such a privileged position in the developer ecosystem of the upcoming Apple Vision Pro, I can imagine that Apple execs were pissed off that Unity would do something so stupid and shortsighted to jeopardize their developer ecosystem. I haven't heard anyone float that idea yet, and the term "Apple" doesn't appear anywhere (yet!) in the comments of this post, so it doesn't seem to be on most people's minds. But still, I wonder...
- ocdtrekkie 3y ago
  I mean FWIW, they also probably really aren't thrilled with any game engines likely handing market share back to Epic, who is trying to put them in front of the Supreme Court for antitrust.
- valyagolev 3y ago
  an important theory is that Unity's initial actions were prompted by Apple's App Tracking Transparency changing the gamedev market and jeopardizing Unity's recent ad-driven monetization strategy, and that's how Apple's on everyone's mind around those news
japhib 3y ago
a LOT of the comments I saw rejecting the new Unity pricing format (which was walked back and is now not so bad) blamed John Riccitiello … I have to wonder, was he forced out by other Unity peeps who were unhappy with the surprise pricing update (and how bad it was)?
deleted 3y ago
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tuckerpo 3y ago
I was hoping to see Mike Acton become Dictator of Unity. Shame.
- tmccrary55 3y ago
  You can't have someone with passion in charge, they'd create great products that change the industry. You need MBAs who eek out profit margins at the expense of the overall product and business.
- rudedogg 3y ago
  You might already know, but he no longer works there: https://twitter.com/mike_acton/status/1654169432598478848 https://twitter.com/mike_acton/status/1654169432598478848
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  Johacim coming back would also offer a vote of confidence.
feelandcoffee 3y ago
I'm so grateful to John Riccitiello, without his pricing changes, not as many indie devs would have jumped on Godot.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- TillE 3y ago
  The extra funding alone is fantastic for Godot. The next year is going to be really exciting, with console support via W4 Games, ironing out some rough edges and missing pieces in C# support, renderer improvements, etc. It's already a great engine for a lot of games, but very soon it's going to be a really serious alternative for most small teams. It was already on a strong trajectory since Godot 4, but yeah John helped.
sacnoradhq 3y ago
Even if nothing actually changes, this is what happens if you try to turn your customers into the product by unfair gotcha capitalism. The problem is that most customers, especially Americans, rarely push back, so product managers incorrectly assumed their customers wouldn't complain.
stuaxo 3y ago
Will he go back to EA, just like Satya Nadella did to Microsoft after he burnt Nokia's platform?
- moogly 3y ago
  That was Stephen Elop. Nadella was against[1] acquiring Nokia. Elop was let go about a year after going back to Microsoft. [1]: https://www.windowscentral.com/satya-nadella-confirms-he-wasnt-favor-microsofts-nokia-acquisition https://www.windowscentral.com/satya-nadella-confirms-he-was...
- upupupandaway 3y ago
  That was Elop. I used to for Nokia and (fun fact) have been in meetings with Stephen in person. He made no impression on me other than his amazing memory.
chocoboaus 3y ago
He's going immediately so its possible he was pushed by the board to resign or be sacked. The only way Unity was going to be able to begin to recover from their recent PR snafu was for him to go. They needed a fresh start.
- starttoaster 3y ago
  Given the transparency of the gesture of removing a person in power after a controversial change being an obvious and common scape goat mechanism, I'm not convinced this is Unity recovering right here. Pretty sure this is just Unity acknowledging they fumbled the ball and they're desperately trying to spin this as, "no, no, we're the good guys, that _one_ person in power was the one you had beef with." I say, why let them create that spin?
  - ptcrash 3y ago
    Both situations seem possible. I guess time will tell how Unity wants to move forward. Others mentioned it earlier but it looks like Godot had a big boost in users from this fiasco. Perhaps Unity is concerned about real financial damages done to their bottom line because of all this? I’d expect them to try a lot of stuff and see what sticks to make sure they don’t miss their targets this year.
  - philipov 3y ago
    I contend that even if he is a scapegoat, this should be considered a good thing. It's not enough to let them off the hook, but I don't think anything would be. However, needing to scapegoat someone is a materialized cost to a verifiable person in power. It is a precedent the next CEO and chair will have to pay attention to. They will need to be more careful in the future when they try to rip off their business partners. This situation is being watched by all the other executives out there at other companies, who are just waiting for a moment where they think they could get away with the same thing. This resignation is a loud and clear "don't you dare!"
    - starttoaster 3y ago
zeruch 3y ago
Unity didn't just screw the proverbial pooch, but dry humped the whole kennel. Something (someone) had to pay for it.
lizardking 3y ago
I don’t know if their brand can be salvaged, but if it’s possible this is a necessary first step.
sircastor 3y ago
I'm hoping that in 20 or 30 years, maybe he'll be on stage at some business symposium or something and will share the background for the decision and how it went down. A while back John Scully was answering questions and he talked (with surprising candidness) about the Apple board firing Steve Jobs, and how he (in retrospect) thought he could've handled it better. These sorts of stories are always secreted away because (probably more than anything) the liability risk associated with sharing the information.
okokwhatever 3y ago
Too late. Unity is dead for the game developers forever.
andersrs 3y ago
The enshitification business model is like a gold digging spouse. Someone gets into a relationship with and makes a baby then once the person is tied down everything changes.
initplus 3y ago
Unity lacks good technical direction. They are wasting so much money building and rebuilding the same features over and over again, or on half baked features that aren’t useful to 99% of their user base like DOTS.
- wilg 3y ago
  Yes, their core offering is suffering from deep technical debt and glomming on weird services won't fix it. They need a hardcore engine team that's empowered to do real stuff for real games.
- jay_kyburz 3y ago
  Probably because they are so large, there is a lot of variation in the quality of various features. I think they did a great job with the new UI (quite old now) The transition to prefabs inside prefabs seems to have gone smoothly for us, and updates to the editor itself seem well engineered. It was probably a mistake to split the renderer. And its not great that it took _years_ to bring the URP back up to the level of the old renderer. We only just upgraded to the 2022 LTS and only just got shadows on point lights back. They have been missing for years! The new input system works well, seems like good technology, but a little over complicated and documentation struggles because such a big system. I wish they were simply more prescriptive of how it should be used. The addressables are a total fuck up. They push it very hard in the documentation but every time I have to interact with it I wish we had just dumped everything in a resource folder. I can't comment on the DOTS because I never played with it. My favorite parts of Unity are the oldest parts.
  - raincole 3y ago
    > The addressables are a total fuck up. They push it very hard in the documentation but every time I have to interact with it I wish we had just dumped everything in a resource folder. At one point we finally gave up and just dumped everything in Resources and StreamingAssets. And that's... it? We even removed the Addressable package completely from dependencies.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
jimjimjim 3y ago
and find out
glimshe 3y ago
Riccitello is one of the most incompetent and anti-gaming game industry executives in history. Gaming is worse because of his exploitative tactics. Good riddance, let's just hope he goes play golf and stays clear of videogames.
xbar 3y ago
John Riccitiello was the CEO Silver Lake deserved. Sadness for the rest of us.
keepamovin 3y ago
It's weird, these days it seems no corporate position can endure more than one misstep or scandal. Everyone is one wrong foot away from stepping through the gallows trap door. Companies it seems are terrified of the internet lynch mob? Must be a tough gig. Can't afford to be wrong and grow in the role. Have to be pure or teflon. This might have a chilling effect on risk taking and innovation for some, leading to the sclerosis Teflon Musk talks about afflicting companies that become afraid of taking risks--ultimately risking making companies less effective, and more prone to unimpressive results. It's like these companies may meet their fate on the road they run to avoid it.
- TheAceOfHearts 3y ago
  This seems like a pretty big misstep for which any sensible person could've predicted the outcome. Companies should think twice before deciding to retroactively change their terms. Applying public pressure towards companies is good.
  - keepamovin 3y ago
    Applying pressures to companies can cause them to confront uncomfortable realities and consider the impacts of their choices. Undoubtedly this is good. I'm not clear on the specifics of this case, but the idea that a mistake, however obvious it is to others, is intolerable and fatal, could be considered something toxic, because it seems to try to enforce an unrealistic standard of "no mistakes". The perspective that the CEO is not sensible, or didn't think twice, because they failed to predict a pretty big outcome, is challenging to uphold in face of the reality that they became CEO in the first place, likely making a series of thousands of carefully considered choices that helped them accomplish that success. It may be helpful to consider the internal calculus, both around the departure of the CEO, and also underpinning the justifications for the choice that upset the community, to gain a wider understanding of the situation. There seems to be an expectation that corporate roles these days can make no mistakes. This goes against the reality of human imperfection, and seems overly onerous for people to live up to. Although it seems an extreme comparison, one possible outcome is a revolving door of leaders filling high profile roles, akin to the revolving cabinet of ministers in an authoritarian dictatorship, where mistakes are fatal, and often blamed on a scapegoat who must be purged to restore purity, and the illusion of perfection. I'm not sure if that's quite what's going on here, but certainly seems like we're less tolerant of recoverable mistakes these days than in the past, where it seems as if leaders could survive multiple mistakes and scandals and still manage to find a way to right the ship. Throughout history it seems there have been periods where mistakes are more tolerated than others, and that less tolerance is associated with other undesirable outcomes, such as war and state failure. In a personal, and professional sense, an environment where mistakes are not tolerated is not one which is psychologically safe, and can not be said to encourage the best work of people involved.
narenkeshav 3y ago
Finally... He does not know what it takes to make a superior product. He attitude is towards monetizing a superior product without understanding why it was superior on the first place.
qwery 3y ago
Lo and behold: he's out, Unity is saved! Where's my credit card? Restart your subscriptions, everyone! When the news first hit (re. "pricing structure"), the unpaid Unity evangelists (and I use the term literally: Unity evangelists that are not being paid for their efforts) immediately leapt to the defense of the company, declaring its innocence and fingering the evil mastermind at the top. He did this! Yes, the problem was that Unity had a badman at the helm... When Unity started moving decisively toward their IPO, the decision was already finalised: Unity exists not to make some money by building and selling a game engine, but to make all of the money, by whatever means necessary. It's not because of who the CEO is, it's their raison d'être. Seriously, it's good to see that the immense backlash made at least some ripples. But wow are the standards low.
- coffeebeqn 3y ago
  A startup IPO is just an exit event for the investors and founders. I wouldn’t expect anything positive for anyone else to happen in the median case
drumhead 3y ago
They need to rebuild trust with the developer community after the recent debacle, and the CEO seems to be most closely identified with unpopular changes. Whether this will work is debatable, too much trust has been lost. I cant really think of anything that could restore the trust.
upupupandaway 3y ago
Can anybody give me a TLDR; on the "Unity crisis"? It is mentioned in several comments but as I don't work in games I'm out of the loop.
deleted 3y ago
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irusensei 3y ago
Suda51's No More Heroes series has an antagonist based after him. It's Damon Riccitiello, CEO of Utopinia urban development corporation. By the time Riccitiello was CEO of EA.
picadores 3y ago
What feature can we develop, that developers can not do without? Thats the money question. "A basic engine needing replacement for almost all components." is not a good answer. Especially if you want to extract a fee for any movement within the eco-system. Its signialling a certain cluelessness about ones own buisness model.Extracting it, by inserting oneself in front of the producer to the player, is nothing that can work.
flipgimble 3y ago
It strikes me that this Penny Arcade cartoon is more prescient that I originally gave it credit for: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2023/09/18/undercraw https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2023/09/18/undercraw On the surface the cartoon is silly and extreme but speaks a deeper truth. Consider that SilverLake is the entity that has proven itself to care only about extracting profit and nothing about games as cultural expression of the community and welfare of those who make them. Riccitiello was incompetent in how he made the exploitation of game developers obvious but given Unity's funding structure they will keep doing the same. Maybe now they're scared that they are losing a valuable resource of developer trust, but they consider it only as far as it is a resource for profit extraction. This is another example enshittification that Doctorow is popularizing (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rimtaSgGz_4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rimtaSgGz_4) and is so well illustrated in the cartoon above.
- yankput 3y ago
  that reminds me of the famous “don’t anthropomorphize Larry Ellison” talk https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5170246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5170246

926 points by AndrewKemendo 3y ago

How can we know if John Riccitiello was not basically told what did by major share holders? "Ok, we are going try to push the envelope, if it does not work don't worry, you'll get a nice bonus while endorsing our despicable behaviour on you departure."

CoastalCoder 3y ago

I'll be curious if they can unring this bell. If nothing else, this reminded small developers how vulnerable they are in terms of negotiating power.

eps 3y ago
If they bring back Unity's original co-founder and CEO (David Helgason) and restructure/debloat the company, they might have a chance of reacquiring some of the goodwill. People still want the "old", pre-IPO and pre-Riccitiello Unity back.
- catothedev 3y ago
  It would really turn the energy around to cut the bloat, bring in Helgason as CEO w $1 salary but boatload of call options, have him explain a model that encourages indie devs while milking cash from gaming giants, and works towards a sustainable income statement for Unity.
- jjoonathan 3y ago
  They can restructure the company, but they can't restructure their incentives.

pjmlp 3y ago

Finally!

deleted 3y ago

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foobiekr 3y ago

Amazing to see a CEO paying the price. I wonder if he got some kind of golden parachute.

wslh 3y ago
May be he doesn't know how to increase revenue without changing the terms and conditions and leave the position to someone else?
gofixurcode 3y ago
If I were on the board I’d vote he gets a golden cannonball to the nuts.
- Exuma 3y ago
  Or a golden parachute that’s been slashed with a knife
- wkat4242 3y ago
  The board are just covering their own asses. I'm sure they were aligned on all the plans because the board represent the shareholders and those have super short term vision these days. It's a problem that plagues the whole industry.
BackBlast 3y ago
Probably an unpleasant conversation with the board. Resign, or be fired. This is very likely covered in the contract to begin with so there isn't much room for negotiation unless the board feels he's breached some significant contract term. Nice to see a company really try to make it right.
- ncr100 3y ago
  All conversations with a board are possibly unpleasant, even successful moments, "why aren't you more successful." Market economy. Bleh.
boeingUH60 3y ago

throwawayunity 3y ago

Unironically the best thing that could have happened to Unity. The dude is the definition of short-sighted management that caters to short-term shareholder gains at the expense of long-term value. Now if only they could undo their acquisition of IronSource...

wkat4242 3y ago

This is not bad news for once. A new CEO could really bring back some goodwill. He was going about it the wrong way and with a poor attitude (referring to the idiots incident), the malware company acquisition etc.

yownie 3y ago
I'm not familiar to the idiots incident could you summarize?
- kevingadd 3y ago
  https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/18/23269218/unity-ceo-john-riccitiello-apology-game-developers-fucking-idiots-ironsource-merger https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/18/23269218/unity-ceo-john-r...
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    Yeah I know the overall context was not as negative as indicated. But someone who thoughtlessly refers to their customers as "the biggest fucking idiots" really has an attitude problem that goes deeper than he claims.

Ajay-p 3y ago

What ...encouraged the initial decision to increase the price? Because I can think of a few examples of discouragement, such as the backlash against Reddit, that should have given the executives an idea of what could happen as a result. Yet they went through with it which makes me think: a) the company truly believed people would pay; b) They believed that the fallout would not be that bad; or c) Worst case, they did not consider fallout at all and just said raise it.

bagels 3y ago
Or, the alternative was somehow worse? Run out of cash and fail to get more investment?
- basisword 3y ago
  Companies can't just continue raising and burning money forever. At some point they have to charge an amount that's worth the value they provide. We're weirdly not used to that concept after a decade or more of low interest rates, but it's something we're going to need to get familiar with - paying for things we use that save us or make us money.
  - bagels 3y ago
    I agree. People seem to imagine there's some evil cartoon character twirling a moustache figuring out how to comically oppress them, when the reality is usually a lot more mundane.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      Ehh threes a bit of mustache twirling. Unity isn't profitable becsuse it didn't charge enough. It's not profitable because it was focused on growth and promising big profits later. A strategy that worked for some of the largest sites out there. This generates bad pr with customers becsuse customers just want their (very long standing) issues fixed and instead they announce a billion dollar acquisition-merge with ad tech and a bunch of other new products for different industries. So when the pricing changes hit these already frustrated customers, the backlash was severe. You don't fix the core issues and charge more for the engine you broke in some places? If we had shareholders happy with steady profits we wouldn't be in this mess to begin with. They'd focus on the core product and have much leaner teams that do R&D for maybe 1-2 new products. But that's now how the stock market works. .

endisneigh 3y ago

I have to give it to them - who knows what they’re thinking - but the fact that they adjusted the pricing scheme and that the leader is leaving at least suggests they’re taking (and have took) the feedback seriously. That being said, even before the drama, unity was a sinking ship that was not profitable. Something will have to give eventually.

basisword 3y ago
>> That being said, even before the drama, unity was a sinking ship that was not profitable. Surely the new pricing is the solution to that? The fact that we have these massive companies, creating complex software, used by tens of thousands of people to build their own companies, and they are unprofitable is insane. Their original pricing scheme was a mess, but charging more generally and becoming profitable is good for them and therefore good for the tens of thousands of companies building their businesses using Unity software (given that Unity doesn't die and they don't have to retool their entire dev stack).
- KaoruAoiShiho 3y ago
  I mean John fucked up the delivery of the message, somehow the cheapest pricing scheme I've ever seen was interpreted by the customers as an example of dastardly extreme greed, and the fix was to roll out a much more expensive pricing scheme. Something was lost in the sauce and that was all John's fault.
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    The biggest problem was applying it to already released products. You have to give the developers the chance to pivot their business model to meet the new reality. They can't do that for already sold products that they would still be charged for under the new scheme.
    - Root_Denied 3y ago
      If they tried to enforce that on previous version they'd get sued from all directions for contract violations. It was never going to work like that, there's no way Unity could have even afforded to defend themselves against such a barrage of lawsuits. So the only question remaining is this: Did they announce these changes with the intent to walk them back to something else, or are they really that stupid? My bet is on the latter, honestly.

Pulcinella 3y ago

Direct link to the Unity press release: https://investors.unity.com/news/news-details/2023/Unity-Announces-Leadership-Transition/default.aspx https://investors.unity.com/news/news-details/2023/Unity-Ann...

justinclift 3y ago

That's unexpected. The new CEO is a guy who led Red Hat (successfully) for many years. Not sure how he'll turn the Unity ship around, but his outlook is likely to be 100% in the opposite direction to the previous (dodgy) CEO.

andrewedstrom 3y ago

It makes sense the CEO would either step down or be forcibly removed by the board. Unity's mishandling of the Runtime Fee policy announcement has caused permanent damage to their reputation. It was a perfect case study in how to undo decades of trust-building in one day. I follow a lot of game developers online. Every single one that uses Unity today is planning to switch engines for their future games.

lofaszvanitt 3y ago
Nah, this was mass hysteria.
- starburst 3y ago
  Nah, people in position of picking the engine for the next project are not going to pick Unity.
  - sbarre 3y ago
    At least one publisher jokingly (but not jokingly) said "developers: make sure you include which engine you're using next time you pitch us a game!"...
    - teamonkey 3y ago
      That's normal and has been for years. Your choice of engine affects your business model.
      - sbarre 3y ago
        Yes but a very public tweet about it in the middle of this Unity debacle was not accidental timing or just a random reminder of this fact.
- readyplayernull 3y ago
  When they tell you that you have to report your installs and sales each month just like you do your taxes, that's when you notice there are other free engines.

paxys 3y ago

Remember that executives are never fired for bad decisions, they are fired for bad press. The Unity business model & strategy changes/price hike were most definitely approved by the board. The CEO's job was to make it digestible to the general public, and he failed at that. Don't expect the new one to pull a 180. He will simply hire better PR firms and do better sugar coating.

alexpetralia 3y ago
But who proposed those changes? Ultimately the CEO is accountable.
- dboreham 3y ago
  The board
  - AlexandrB 3y ago
    I'm not an expert on corporate governance, but does a board of directors get into the nitty gritty of pricing models? I can totally believe they told the CEO to "bring in more revenue, or get replaced", but I have a hard time imagining they got too involved in the details how that would happen. Many board members sit on multiple boards or are CEOs of other companies. Do they really have time to do the kind of market research you'd need to propose such a change?
    - hiatus 3y ago
      Having been in board meetings where members went in on the nitty gritty of our _salesperson_ compensation structure, I would say yes.
      - airstrike 3y ago
        Public company boards?
      - jojobas 3y ago

theogravity 3y ago

Stock price is down 22% in the past month: https://www.google.com/finance/quote/U:NYSE?sa=X&sqi=2&ved=2ahUKEwjip9yH8emBAxUSGjQIHUfUAYAQ3ecFegQIbxAX&window=1M https://www.google.com/finance/quote/U:NYSE?sa=X&sqi=2&ved=2...

chx 3y ago
This is it. Bad press? Developer feedback? These, by themselves, are no concern to the board. But my man here lost three billion dollars of investor money and for that he needs to go.
- j_maffe 3y ago
  what else would someone expect board members to care about? It's naïve to expect otherwise, really.
  - kibwen 3y ago
    It's not that we're surprised, but rather that we're angry about how unsurprised we are.

beigeoak 3y ago

I doubt this will end the scummy money grabbing thinking. https://old.reddit.com/r/unity/comments/16j23ci/i_know_people_dont_want_to_hear_this_you_shouldnt/ https://old.reddit.com/r/unity/comments/16j23ci/i_know_peopl... The actual people who should be removed is probably the incompetent board of directors who signed on in 2020.

cojo 3y ago

I have to say, the only thing more surprising to me than seeing the board actually hold Riccitiello responsible for this (with consequences) is seeing that their interim replacement / transitional CEO is someone with a pedigree that, on the surface, seems even more management consulting / investor / revenue focused than Riccitiello was himself. To be clear, I know essentially nothing about James M. Whitehurst other than what is readily publicly available (IBM / Red Hat, advisory roles, etc.). But my read on a lot of the Unity crisis, as a long-time game industry veteran myself, was that one of the increasingly common "management consulting" / investor- & revenue-focused type of gaming executives (e.g. Riccitiello, Don Mattrick [Zynga replacement CEO when Pincus stepped down], Kotick [Activision-Blizzard]) had finally overstepped their bounds and let revenue goals drive decision-making just a bit too far without customer consideration. So, I had assumed that if Unity did make a leadership change here, it would be in a direction away from that - i.e. a more industry-seasoned executive with less of a pure revenue / "business" focus. I think I clearly misjudged the situation here in light the Whitehurst pick; while it's possible that is truly just an interim role and they will still pivot to this in the final hire, or that I simply misjudge "the label on the tin" and Whitehurst is very culture / customer focused, I don't think I would bet on it. This seems like the board actually "doubling down" on driving revenue results - and fast.

Willish42 3y ago
"doubling down" indeed... One possible interpretation of events is that he was ousted not for the initial proposal and backlash but precisely for how he backtracked after the fact -- perhaps the board gave a clear mandate and Riccitiello was unable to successfully change pricing structure to match financial expectations. That would explain the replacement. Things aren't looking great for Unity right now...
- cojo 3y ago
  Yeah, I think this could definitely be one explanation. Other commenters in the thread have also given good thoughts / potential scenarios in similar veins - essentially that this was actually a failure of messaging, sticking to the plan, and / or both, plus some other combination of "no, seriously, we need to make money and become profitable, nothing else matters as long as the boat still floats, make it happen and keep this ship going." And I do suspect that Whitehurst will likely be a better fit for that. A seasons gaming industry executive (regardless of investor / revenue focus) may actually be a negative if that's the goal right now... I'll be very interested to see how this all turns out.

doomlaser 3y ago

James M. Whitehurst is new CEO, previously at IBM, but originally CEO of Red Hat. He joined IBM after they acquired it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Whitehurst https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Whitehurst He wrote a book about open source software while running Red Hat, The Open Organization: https://www.redhat.com/en/explore/the-open-organization-book https://www.redhat.com/en/explore/the-open-organization-book He is an MBA, but he got his undergraduate degree in CS from Rice.

justinclift 3y ago
> ... originally CEO of Red Hat. When he joined Red Hat, he was widely known as having turned around Delta Air Lines fortunes.
leviathan303 3y ago
His wikipedia article says he got his BS in CS from Rice.
- Thorrez 3y ago
  Has the comment been edited? That's exactly what doomlaser said.
  - monsieurbanana 3y ago
    It said Harvard
    - doomlaser 3y ago
      His MBA is from Harvard Business School. Undergrad CS at Rice.
- badRNG 3y ago
  Whitehurst went to Rice University for Computer Science
  - 3y ago

riscy 3y ago

> 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. I thought they only slightly adjusted the new pricing scheme due to uproar, rather than retract it.

orliesaurus 3y ago

Well, what did you think was gonna happen...the stock tanked hard!!!

GoofballJones 3y ago

I'm just amazed it took this long.

eskatonic 3y ago

"Unity would not be where it is today without the impact of his contributions." something something damning with faint praise...

dev_tty01 3y ago

Anyone else wondering if this was all planned? Maybe Riccitiello was planning to retire and the board asked him to play bad cop and announce the new fee structure. After he is gone they will announce something slightly more agreeable that will look good in comparison. Maybe I'm just too cynical...

j_maffe 3y ago
I think you are, in fact, too cynical. They've already announced the new fee structure which is a lot more sensible. And before you go "that's how they wanted people to react to the final structure", there's no way how this thing unfolded came to the benefit of the company and they'd have been idiots if this was in any way the plan.
octygen 3y ago
This is not cynical - it's a common/smart play with little downside taking advantage of a bad situation (e.g., like the CEO being hated in general by the community).

amitmathew 3y ago

Wow...I wrote up a whimsical account of what could happen after the price increases. I got the timing wrong (I thought it would take several months for the CEO to step down), but some of it is starting to come true: https://quiver.dev/blog/stepping-into-the-unity-ceos-calfskin-loafers/ https://quiver.dev/blog/stepping-into-the-unity-ceos-calfski....

fyrn_ 3y ago

Didn't they only give some minor concessions, not actually roll back the pricing changes?

accrual 3y ago

Is this one of those things where the previous leadership does something awful (retroactively change pricing schema), then they quickly enact new leadership to distance themselves from their actions?

muppetman 3y ago
Oh no I'm sure this is 100% unrelated!
ptcrash 3y ago
Well, the transition in leadership is uncommon but they don’t officially give us a reason, so we’re left to speculate until someone inside gives us more info. But from a purely speculative standpoint, it seems very possible that they were ousted because of the pricing debacle. I could see a world where the stakeholders aren’t thrilled with the damage the pricing changes did to their brand and took action.

crunkykd 3y ago

spending $4B for ironsource ads and $1B for weta authoring stuff was expensive and took lots of their more indie-friendly choices off the table. maybe the ipo path they took made these things inevitable. anyways, their choices are behind them now. godot and elsewhere are where the parade will move on to

xyst 3y ago

No mention of his “exit package” or “golden parachute”. Dude is going to be sitting pretty and then fuck over the next company. I’m surprised the board actually did something and held him accountable. It’s a small step but this is a stain that won’t be washed off.

kibwen 3y ago
Like a caterpillar becoming a butterfly, an executive cannot graduate to an oligarch without failing upward into fabulous wealth. This is but another step on his beautiful journey.

benjismith 3y ago

I find myself wondering if Apple applied some kind of back-channel pressure to oust Riccitiello. With Unity at such a privileged position in the developer ecosystem of the upcoming Apple Vision Pro, I can imagine that Apple execs were pissed off that Unity would do something so stupid and shortsighted to jeopardize their developer ecosystem. I haven't heard anyone float that idea yet, and the term "Apple" doesn't appear anywhere (yet!) in the comments of this post, so it doesn't seem to be on most people's minds. But still, I wonder...

ocdtrekkie 3y ago
I mean FWIW, they also probably really aren't thrilled with any game engines likely handing market share back to Epic, who is trying to put them in front of the Supreme Court for antitrust.
valyagolev 3y ago
an important theory is that Unity's initial actions were prompted by Apple's App Tracking Transparency changing the gamedev market and jeopardizing Unity's recent ad-driven monetization strategy, and that's how Apple's on everyone's mind around those news

japhib 3y ago

a LOT of the comments I saw rejecting the new Unity pricing format (which was walked back and is now not so bad) blamed John Riccitiello … I have to wonder, was he forced out by other Unity peeps who were unhappy with the surprise pricing update (and how bad it was)?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

tuckerpo 3y ago

I was hoping to see Mike Acton become Dictator of Unity. Shame.

tmccrary55 3y ago
You can't have someone with passion in charge, they'd create great products that change the industry. You need MBAs who eek out profit margins at the expense of the overall product and business.
rudedogg 3y ago
You might already know, but he no longer works there: https://twitter.com/mike_acton/status/1654169432598478848 https://twitter.com/mike_acton/status/1654169432598478848
johnnyanmac 3y ago
Johacim coming back would also offer a vote of confidence.

feelandcoffee 3y ago

I'm so grateful to John Riccitiello, without his pricing changes, not as many indie devs would have jumped on Godot.

deleted 3y ago
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TillE 3y ago
The extra funding alone is fantastic for Godot. The next year is going to be really exciting, with console support via W4 Games, ironing out some rough edges and missing pieces in C# support, renderer improvements, etc. It's already a great engine for a lot of games, but very soon it's going to be a really serious alternative for most small teams. It was already on a strong trajectory since Godot 4, but yeah John helped.

sacnoradhq 3y ago

Even if nothing actually changes, this is what happens if you try to turn your customers into the product by unfair gotcha capitalism. The problem is that most customers, especially Americans, rarely push back, so product managers incorrectly assumed their customers wouldn't complain.

stuaxo 3y ago

Will he go back to EA, just like Satya Nadella did to Microsoft after he burnt Nokia's platform?

moogly 3y ago
That was Stephen Elop. Nadella was against[1] acquiring Nokia. Elop was let go about a year after going back to Microsoft. [1]: https://www.windowscentral.com/satya-nadella-confirms-he-wasnt-favor-microsofts-nokia-acquisition https://www.windowscentral.com/satya-nadella-confirms-he-was...
upupupandaway 3y ago
That was Elop. I used to for Nokia and (fun fact) have been in meetings with Stephen in person. He made no impression on me other than his amazing memory.

chocoboaus 3y ago

He's going immediately so its possible he was pushed by the board to resign or be sacked. The only way Unity was going to be able to begin to recover from their recent PR snafu was for him to go. They needed a fresh start.

starttoaster 3y ago
Given the transparency of the gesture of removing a person in power after a controversial change being an obvious and common scape goat mechanism, I'm not convinced this is Unity recovering right here. Pretty sure this is just Unity acknowledging they fumbled the ball and they're desperately trying to spin this as, "no, no, we're the good guys, that _one_ person in power was the one you had beef with." I say, why let them create that spin?
- ptcrash 3y ago
  Both situations seem possible. I guess time will tell how Unity wants to move forward. Others mentioned it earlier but it looks like Godot had a big boost in users from this fiasco. Perhaps Unity is concerned about real financial damages done to their bottom line because of all this? I’d expect them to try a lot of stuff and see what sticks to make sure they don’t miss their targets this year.
- philipov 3y ago
  I contend that even if he is a scapegoat, this should be considered a good thing. It's not enough to let them off the hook, but I don't think anything would be. However, needing to scapegoat someone is a materialized cost to a verifiable person in power. It is a precedent the next CEO and chair will have to pay attention to. They will need to be more careful in the future when they try to rip off their business partners. This situation is being watched by all the other executives out there at other companies, who are just waiting for a moment where they think they could get away with the same thing. This resignation is a loud and clear "don't you dare!"
  - starttoaster 3y ago

zeruch 3y ago

Unity didn't just screw the proverbial pooch, but dry humped the whole kennel. Something (someone) had to pay for it.

lizardking 3y ago

I don’t know if their brand can be salvaged, but if it’s possible this is a necessary first step.

sircastor 3y ago

I'm hoping that in 20 or 30 years, maybe he'll be on stage at some business symposium or something and will share the background for the decision and how it went down. A while back John Scully was answering questions and he talked (with surprising candidness) about the Apple board firing Steve Jobs, and how he (in retrospect) thought he could've handled it better. These sorts of stories are always secreted away because (probably more than anything) the liability risk associated with sharing the information.

okokwhatever 3y ago

Too late. Unity is dead for the game developers forever.

andersrs 3y ago

The enshitification business model is like a gold digging spouse. Someone gets into a relationship with and makes a baby then once the person is tied down everything changes.

initplus 3y ago

Unity lacks good technical direction. They are wasting so much money building and rebuilding the same features over and over again, or on half baked features that aren’t useful to 99% of their user base like DOTS.

wilg 3y ago
Yes, their core offering is suffering from deep technical debt and glomming on weird services won't fix it. They need a hardcore engine team that's empowered to do real stuff for real games.
jay_kyburz 3y ago
Probably because they are so large, there is a lot of variation in the quality of various features. I think they did a great job with the new UI (quite old now) The transition to prefabs inside prefabs seems to have gone smoothly for us, and updates to the editor itself seem well engineered. It was probably a mistake to split the renderer. And its not great that it took _years_ to bring the URP back up to the level of the old renderer. We only just upgraded to the 2022 LTS and only just got shadows on point lights back. They have been missing for years! The new input system works well, seems like good technology, but a little over complicated and documentation struggles because such a big system. I wish they were simply more prescriptive of how it should be used. The addressables are a total fuck up. They push it very hard in the documentation but every time I have to interact with it I wish we had just dumped everything in a resource folder. I can't comment on the DOTS because I never played with it. My favorite parts of Unity are the oldest parts.
- raincole 3y ago
  > The addressables are a total fuck up. They push it very hard in the documentation but every time I have to interact with it I wish we had just dumped everything in a resource folder. At one point we finally gave up and just dumped everything in Resources and StreamingAssets. And that's... it? We even removed the Addressable package completely from dependencies.
johnnyanmac 3y ago

jimjimjim 3y ago

and find out

glimshe 3y ago

Riccitello is one of the most incompetent and anti-gaming game industry executives in history. Gaming is worse because of his exploitative tactics. Good riddance, let's just hope he goes play golf and stays clear of videogames.

xbar 3y ago

John Riccitiello was the CEO Silver Lake deserved. Sadness for the rest of us.

keepamovin 3y ago

It's weird, these days it seems no corporate position can endure more than one misstep or scandal. Everyone is one wrong foot away from stepping through the gallows trap door. Companies it seems are terrified of the internet lynch mob? Must be a tough gig. Can't afford to be wrong and grow in the role. Have to be pure or teflon. This might have a chilling effect on risk taking and innovation for some, leading to the sclerosis Teflon Musk talks about afflicting companies that become afraid of taking risks--ultimately risking making companies less effective, and more prone to unimpressive results. It's like these companies may meet their fate on the road they run to avoid it.

TheAceOfHearts 3y ago
This seems like a pretty big misstep for which any sensible person could've predicted the outcome. Companies should think twice before deciding to retroactively change their terms. Applying public pressure towards companies is good.
- keepamovin 3y ago
  Applying pressures to companies can cause them to confront uncomfortable realities and consider the impacts of their choices. Undoubtedly this is good. I'm not clear on the specifics of this case, but the idea that a mistake, however obvious it is to others, is intolerable and fatal, could be considered something toxic, because it seems to try to enforce an unrealistic standard of "no mistakes". The perspective that the CEO is not sensible, or didn't think twice, because they failed to predict a pretty big outcome, is challenging to uphold in face of the reality that they became CEO in the first place, likely making a series of thousands of carefully considered choices that helped them accomplish that success. It may be helpful to consider the internal calculus, both around the departure of the CEO, and also underpinning the justifications for the choice that upset the community, to gain a wider understanding of the situation. There seems to be an expectation that corporate roles these days can make no mistakes. This goes against the reality of human imperfection, and seems overly onerous for people to live up to. Although it seems an extreme comparison, one possible outcome is a revolving door of leaders filling high profile roles, akin to the revolving cabinet of ministers in an authoritarian dictatorship, where mistakes are fatal, and often blamed on a scapegoat who must be purged to restore purity, and the illusion of perfection. I'm not sure if that's quite what's going on here, but certainly seems like we're less tolerant of recoverable mistakes these days than in the past, where it seems as if leaders could survive multiple mistakes and scandals and still manage to find a way to right the ship. Throughout history it seems there have been periods where mistakes are more tolerated than others, and that less tolerance is associated with other undesirable outcomes, such as war and state failure. In a personal, and professional sense, an environment where mistakes are not tolerated is not one which is psychologically safe, and can not be said to encourage the best work of people involved.

narenkeshav 3y ago

Finally... He does not know what it takes to make a superior product. He attitude is towards monetizing a superior product without understanding why it was superior on the first place.

qwery 3y ago

Lo and behold: he's out, Unity is saved! Where's my credit card? Restart your subscriptions, everyone! When the news first hit (re. "pricing structure"), the unpaid Unity evangelists (and I use the term literally: Unity evangelists that are not being paid for their efforts) immediately leapt to the defense of the company, declaring its innocence and fingering the evil mastermind at the top. He did this! Yes, the problem was that Unity had a badman at the helm... When Unity started moving decisively toward their IPO, the decision was already finalised: Unity exists not to make some money by building and selling a game engine, but to make all of the money, by whatever means necessary. It's not because of who the CEO is, it's their raison d'être. Seriously, it's good to see that the immense backlash made at least some ripples. But wow are the standards low.

coffeebeqn 3y ago
A startup IPO is just an exit event for the investors and founders. I wouldn’t expect anything positive for anyone else to happen in the median case

drumhead 3y ago

They need to rebuild trust with the developer community after the recent debacle, and the CEO seems to be most closely identified with unpopular changes. Whether this will work is debatable, too much trust has been lost. I cant really think of anything that could restore the trust.

upupupandaway 3y ago

Can anybody give me a TLDR; on the "Unity crisis"? It is mentioned in several comments but as I don't work in games I'm out of the loop.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

irusensei 3y ago

Suda51's No More Heroes series has an antagonist based after him. It's Damon Riccitiello, CEO of Utopinia urban development corporation. By the time Riccitiello was CEO of EA.

picadores 3y ago

What feature can we develop, that developers can not do without? Thats the money question. "A basic engine needing replacement for almost all components." is not a good answer. Especially if you want to extract a fee for any movement within the eco-system. Its signialling a certain cluelessness about ones own buisness model.Extracting it, by inserting oneself in front of the producer to the player, is nothing that can work.

flipgimble 3y ago

It strikes me that this Penny Arcade cartoon is more prescient that I originally gave it credit for: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2023/09/18/undercraw https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2023/09/18/undercraw On the surface the cartoon is silly and extreme but speaks a deeper truth. Consider that SilverLake is the entity that has proven itself to care only about extracting profit and nothing about games as cultural expression of the community and welfare of those who make them. Riccitiello was incompetent in how he made the exploitation of game developers obvious but given Unity's funding structure they will keep doing the same. Maybe now they're scared that they are losing a valuable resource of developer trust, but they consider it only as far as it is a resource for profit extraction. This is another example enshittification that Doctorow is popularizing (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rimtaSgGz_4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rimtaSgGz_4) and is so well illustrated in the cartoon above.

yankput 3y ago
that reminds me of the famous “don’t anthropomorphize Larry Ellison” talk https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5170246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5170246