Unity CEO 'retires' in the wake of fee fiasco Unity has announced the immediate retirement of president, CEO, chair, and board member John Riccitiello. The boss's departure follows a botched attempt to charge developers per-install fees for games created with Unity's tools – a step that effectively amounted to charging royalties on each sale of a game. Unity had …
Well, part of it the c-suite class' ego. The other part of it is that it allows the overall organization to anthropomorphize decisions. This was something that Unity knew would be both unpopular and potentially insanely lucrative. If it worked, Riccitiello gets the credit. If it failed, as it did, he takes the fall as an apology while the company's board figures out another way to extract additional value.
Everyone* wins!
*Except the losers.
> Immediately start remembering the Spitting Image skit on all of bad holiday songs.
That is ( as far as I'm aware) where The Chicken Song- and the line quoted from it- came from in the first place! It was released as a single, got to number 1, and I knew all the words as a kid. :-)
Ironically, the song it most obviously parodied was... Agadoo.
> If it worked, Riccitiello gets the credit. If it failed, as it did, he takes the fall as an apology while the company's board figures out another way to extract additional value.
The same board that picked this idiot in the first place ?
Bravo..maybe they should get kicked themselves for being blind - they are part of the problem, the entire concept and its mechanism is a failure here and basically everywhere.
I was thinking exactly the same thing. In the source novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the primary distinguishing characteristic between replicants and humans is a lack of empathy and compassion, which was a commentary, in part, on the state of society and how we elevate sociopaths to positions of influence and power. Whether "retirement," as practiced in the book and movie, is suitable for such individuals is left as a thought exercise for the reader.
"The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons" - to quote Ralph Waldo Emerson.
In other words, a properly decent person or company wouldn't need to say things like "do no evil" or "we promise never to do X", because it would go without saying.
It's like hiring a baby-sitter who makes a point, unasked, of promising you she's not a murderer. Why, isn't that reassuring?
As someone who used to work at Diebold I can indeed confirm that they are, or at least were, doing it wrong. For a company that flogs ATMs (and used to sell voting machines) their approach to security was erm... sub optimal! In my long experience, they are rivalled only by the NHS in terms of their terrifyingly bad approach to 'security'. Some of the things I saw there would make your hair curl, one of the best was when I came across a private signing certificate - the cert that was used to create other certificates that give you a cast iron guarantee that an ATM is definitely a Diebold ATM - in some production ATM source code. For those who aren't up to speed on these things, Its hard to state how daft and reckless this is. It's one of the stupidest things you can do in terms of security. Standard practice is to keep these certs on offline machines locked in a safe, or in hardware security modules. This cert gave anybody the ability to prove their computer was a Diebold ATM.
The worst bit was that the person who put it there knew it was bad, because they left a comment saying something like: '//todo it's bit naughty this, need to move it really when I get the time...'. Sheesh!
I wish I could properly attribute this, but some commentator on the intertubes once observed that the longer the country name, the more oppressive its regime. Thus, The Free, Fair, Democratic and Totally Awesome Republic of Somewhere would be a country to avoid like the plague.
Some programming tools charge for the runtime, and that can be a completely reasonable thing to do.
However, developers hate it. They would much rather pay for the tools and have a royalty free runtime. It avoids a whole bunch of complexity, regarding counting installations and paying the vendor. It also avoids the risk that the vendor will increase the runtime price.
So it's understandable that they promised never to charge for the runtime. It was a major feature.
One thing developers hate more than paid runtimes, are tool vendors who try to change the deal after the developer has invested a huge amount of time and money building programs with their tool.
> Unity's share price, which was $38.97 before it changed pricing plans, ... , bounced from $29.56 to $30.11 in after-the-bell trading – suggesting investors are quite happy with the changes.
Just as a general reporting note, I don't think we can draw any strong conclusions about investor sentiment from a change in the share price of <2%. It's hardly moved, which suggests indifference.
It depends on the timing, which is one reason they were talking about trading outside of normal market hours. Swings like that during a day can represent people making larger decisions and a stock getting swept up, but movements when the markets are closed tend to be smaller because fewer people are trading it. A 2% move is not a large increase, but it could still mean something unless there was some other news at the time affecting the company. We could compare it against comparable businesses' after-hours activity, but it probably means at least some investors think it's a good thing.
This would be part of the minimum requirements for me to even consider staying with Unity. A complete walk back of the proposed changes -- I could grudgingly accept it if they wanted to apply it starting with the next major version of the engine, but it would only apply to that version and subsequent ones -- and then the total departure of the person responsible for the proposed change. Not just hanging around in some other title (like Board Chair -- which is a conflict of interest anyway and shouldn't be allowed) or maybe they go on sabbatical for a bit... gone. Ideally all their shares are cashed out along the way.
Even then, I'd probably be keeping my eye on other game engines and start developing future projects in a way that would make moving to a new game engine as easy as possible for as long as possible. There's obviously a point of no return, but trying to make sure you could switch with as little pain as possible up to that point. And there's no guarantee I'd stay with Unity, because maybe I'd find one of the other alternatives is better for my projects.
You're just the kind of dev they like.
They've proved that they'll try and shaft you as soon as they can get away with it.
Your answer is to give them another go but give yourself loads more work by abstracting their api behind a shim so you aren't tied to it.
Can you switch the game engine once your game is out, if they apply their fees retroactively like they were talking about?
Unity took tons of dirty venture capital money and now they have to return value on that, new CEO or not.
Fabermetrics at Ars made a really great comment about this, so let me just quote that:
> This is less a CEO issue and more a "must pursue eternal exponential quarterly revenue growth" mindset issue. Once a company starts making these moves, they will continue, no matter what. Expect microtransactions for lines of code written in unity, frames rendered, load time booster packs, the most scummy monetization ever. The MBAs running these places are programmed from birth to do this. You can rotate the exec board every month for a decade and they'll still push it. Its a dead company, time for everyone to move on.
Dead? Not necessarily, it's just very few companies in tech rise back after a trip over a waterfall.
A few years will show how bad the damage is, and they will probably either rebound or die a slow agonizing death trying to claw back a fraction of their original market share going forward. But the companies that already rage quit aren't likely coming back, and the community will keep bringing this up in the endless flame wars over which engine is the best. So even if they survive the scars will likely stay on them. So if Unity can't come back with some killer features, and their competition doesn't make their own stumbles, the herd will slowly drift away from them.
The a look at operating margin over the last few year: Macrotrends - Unity Software Operating Margin 2019-2023 | U. It is hovering around minus 50% operating margin, even though revenues are increasing. With todays high interest rates, investors are likely to bail. There is nothing inherently wrong with a sustainable economic model that provides job and products or services, it's all how you go about it.
The best bakeries around where i live are all co-ops, worker owned and operated, and they wouldn't be there without making a profit. (One did fold).
Same with John Lewis and Waitrose the current CEO is ruining the company. She doesn't appear to understand it made it a success because all the staff own a part of the company. More hours you did, the bigger your bonus was each year. Stacking shelfs was actual worth it. Now she's looking to remove this its gonna all go to shit.
While I obviously do not approve of the choices made; leaving the company running at a loss isn't really an option either. Unless it is some subsidiary being abused to gain tax advantages for a parent corporation.
Enough titles (were) made in Unity for developers to suck up a future licensing rise; and/or having built the tooling, a downsizing of the dev team responsible to support-only; and slashing of inferior manglement staff on $ludicrous bonuses.
The IPO and dumping a load of liability on the business to pay shareholders was, let's be honest, a mistake; if the objective was the continuity of Unity as a business (which it wasn't).
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