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.
Not 100% in the loop with the unity scandal just know the basics but theyre probably using him as a scapegoat to save face. No way was it just his decision haha
On the flip side, no dev worth their salt was going to trust Unity with him still as CEO.
No dev worth their salt is going to trust Unity period. When someone tells you who they are, believe them. Investing in FOSS has never failed me, and Godot is growing exponentially as a result of Unity’s actions.
The craziest thing to me about this whole situation is how Unity even came into being.
I was in school learning Unreal back when it was an absolute trash fire - pre “UDK” days when Epic was splitting their time between working on their engine and making the next Gears of War game.
Unity was this breath of fresh air that made it so the interface made sense. No more “clicking the 3rd green checkmark” to import your skeletal mesh that you generated from your $2,000 software from Autodesk with a plugin that barely works made by desperate people in forums…
Unity’s main initial release (version 2.5)…
…was not only BEAUTIFUL by comparison to the “Unreal Editor…”
…software from around that time, but it worked with interchangeable file formats and eventually native program files like PSDs.
They are the main reason that Epic got scared, lowered their stupidly high price of ~$1,000,000 to license their game engine, and started really redoing the whole UX to the point that it actually wasn’t cryptic arcane magic but on par with and sometimes even above what Unity offered… and they helped make the entire indie game industry able to hire folks with skills in an engine that wouldn’t break the bank and that everyone could carry over.
It used to not be like that. I worked at a studio with 20 guys and they had their own engine… and the original engine programmers were all gone. It was like trying to do maintenance on a commercial jet liner while flying it and never having been given a manual but just a few guys with second-hand knowledge.
It’s so goddamn maddening to see them completely destroy themselves like this. It’s some Star Wars prequel “you were the chosen one” type meme shit.
I’m happy that Godot was there to fill the gap, because I hate to think what would happen were Unreal not to have any competition with the 3rd party engine market again… but Unity… man… it never was “as good” as Unreal visually, but it had gotten to a point where it was “close enough” that everyone used it.
Now though? I can’t ever see any studio wanting to risk using it again at the chance they get greedy again and try to rug pull small dev houses.
great post man, that quote had me laughing… this whole saga is really high on the scale of legendary ego blindness or something…
Seems to always go back to that one Dark Knight quote…
Harvey really can’t get over how great he looks, and how much he deserves to be The Man
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Dark Knight quote
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Ok, how?
Are you saying it’s “crazy” that something was created to fill the massive hole in the market that you described, or…?
Yeah… it’s crazy because it was created specifically as a way to take advantage of how completely arrogant Epic was licensing their trash fire game engine for $1,000,000… and now they did something in the exact same sort of vein of arrogance.
We’re using godot at the university this semester
Exactly. The biggest hurdle to getting new FOSS off the ground is adoption. It’s really hard to gain inertia when the vast majority of users refuse to switch. When they already know how to use the closed-source version, they’ll be resistant to change. Even if the closed-source version is less user friendly and more annoying to use, people will still continue to use it because they don’t want to start learning something new. Unity did Godot a massive favor, by scaring all of their users away and leading them straight into Godot’s open arms.
It would be like if Microsoft did something stupid enough to cause 50% of Windows users to switch to Linux overnight. Even if Microsoft later rolled those changes back, a lot of users have already installed (and started to learn) Linux, and aren’t going to go through the trouble of switching back again. And by that point Linux will have an established user base and will be able to maintain and grow that population much easier.
He can’t be a “scapegoat” if he is the CEO. The buck stops with him, there is literally no one else left up the chain who can be responsible. It’s his job.
Except for the board of directors that actually steers the company.
OK, how about the shareholders that elect the Board of Directors? Should they be “removed” as well?
My point is the function of the Chief Executive Officer is specifically to be accountable and responsible for the business functions of the company. Yes, BOD has made a bad call selecting him as a CEO and the shareholders will have an opportunity to re-elect the BOD, but how the business is run (the “Chief Executive” part) is owned by the CEO. And in this case he fucked up especially if he championed this pricing structure.
The Board chose him, an EA guy with his track record of screw-the-customer decisions, to head a B2B company where customer relationships are totally different from B2C, and customers aren’t mainly naive fad-following kids that will keep pre-ordering games from companies that screw them in the past.
They’re dealing with adults with businesses as customers, not thrill-seeking teens who will forget any and all shit done to them in the past just to keep on playing the same games as their friends.
At the very least the members of the Board are spectacularly incompetent and should be removed so that the company has a chance of not collapsing withing the next 2 or 3 years (as projects that can’t be moved out of Unity wrap up and customers chose different frameworks for new projects).
The shareholders elect the BOD and they can remove them if they like. So in theory if you want to burn the house down then go after the shareholders too and the capitalistic society, but in my opinion that’s another battle for another time.
In practice this is the reason why companies have CEOs. They are practically accountable for exactly the stuff like this, it’s a well known part of their job description. That’s the reason why I don’t really consider him a scapegoat because, well, it’s literally his job.
The scapegoat part is that the company won’t change at all.