John Riccitiello, CEO of Unity, the company whose 3D game engine had recently seen backlash from developers over proposed fee structures, will retire as CEO, president, and board chairman at the company, according to a press release issued late on a Monday afternoon, one many observe as a holiday.
Yeah, after burning down something popular, he get off without any repercussions (aside maybe a big bag of cash) and is likely to go find the next successful thing to burn it down, to get another big bag of cash.
Can we purge these people out once they failed everywhere?
He didn’t fail. He did what the board asked of him which proved to be more unpopular than they all had expected. So they gave him an obscenely generous severance package and sent him on his merry way.
He’s been rewarded and they’re just trying to position it so it looks like the company leadership gives a shit and won’t try the exact same thing at a later date.
Good.
Presumably with a generous severance package and pension.
Wow he only had to tank the company before his 50m worth of EA ownership became a problem…
Good riddance, but idk if this is a case of too little too late
inb4 he gets a job at fucking blackstone inc or something lmao
Fucking capitalists
It’s a start.
Now do the Board who chose an EA CEO with his track record to lead Unity and stood behind this until finally forced by the consequences of his actions to push them out.
Certainly and after what happenned, merelly pushing out one guy in the nicest, most career protecting way possible, isn’t sufficient to restore my trust in Unity as a platform on top of which to base my business.
Burn the whole board.
They don’t make good fuel. Drown em. Takes less effort.
Is that… the guy from EA?
This explains lot!
Do not let the door hit you on the way out.
Former EA CEO will be replaced in interim by James Whitehurst from IBM/Red Hat.
Is that better or worse?
Gamers don’t know who he is so probably better
Probably hasn’t had a chance to fuck up publicly, hopefully he pays attention to the news and doesn’t want to be unpopular
People in software know who people in software are. Unity is for software developers, not gamers.
It wouldn’t have gotten nearly as much visibility if gamers didn’t know who the dude was
deleted by creator
red hat
Given their decision making in 22-23 especially, yikes
but if they isn’t anymore in red hat so they didn’t take the 22/23 decisions, no?
That’s more at the feet of current leadership at IBM/RH, he resigned in mid 2021. The licensing move could’ve also been made and it just took a while to be official though so who knows.
I swear they treat CEO’s who tank companies like they do priests who molest kids and just send them to another place whenever they get caught.
That’s corporatism in a wider sense. Existed since times immemorial. It’s a systemic problem, that is, defined by architecture.
Corporatism like this is fairly new. Creating bullshit positions for your followers is an old tradition among kings and other rulers, but putting people from one leadership position where they fucked up into the next is only here since the capitalist class established itself after the industrial revolution.
Actually the former included the latter. So no.
The legal fiction known as incorporation or corporate personhood did not exist until the 1400s, and for the first couple of hundred years was used only for churches to acquire assets and land.
I think what you’re thinking of might be conglomeration, where one company buys every business in its supply and distribution chains. Such as when the Tonight Show and The Late Show are owned by the same people that make nuclear reactors.
That’s not what I’m talking about, I meant, say, helping those similar to you with the implicit idea that they’d help you too, and that being a common rule in a certain subset of the society, thus working.
Can’t remember now why I chose that word, “corporatism”. (Not important for the subject, but Knights Templar or any trading family or clan that would exist before 1400s can still be called corporations, same for religious sects.)
If you need someone to implement a greedy, extreme position then “pull back to something reasonable” (still further than original), he’s on the short list.
Out with the old guy and in with the new guy. No change to the incentive structure. I wonder if things will turn out differently this time?
I hope Unity users will get to continue to use the tool they have spent so many hours learning. I also think the industry should try to make things more CEO proof.
The problem is making it more shareholder proof. Enshittification comes from the line go up mandate. Unity is but a single example.
This is so true. Shareholders couldn’t care less if he was popular with customers. All they care about is whether he can do anything to boost profits. In their world, even the situation with Unity can be spun as “innovative” (in the sense that it introduced another revenue stream for the company) and that even if this initial implementation is scrapped, it can be learned from and improved on for future ones.
Enshittification might be my new favorite word
I also hope that they continue to be able to use that tool, but at this point, it's clear to me that it would be wise to start learning new tools. For me, it's not just that the company has made a mistake, but that the mistake was a repeat of a mistake they made back in 2019, which indicates that they may well do it again.
Why do we call it “retiring” when we all know he’ll be CEO of some other company in 2 months?
I can’t imagine who would hire him. He fucked Unity badly.
Just a reminder that Unity hired him after EA.
They treated a game engine company like a Silicon Valley startup. It’s a limited customer base. It was never going to scale. Dummies.
Crazy idea. Come up with a new products in your portfolio instead of milking 1 dry.
No way, bro, we just gotta get each user to pay, bro. Have them pay a monthly fee to us to play games, bro. It’ll totally scale, bro.
