John Riccitiello is stepping down

"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."

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About James M. Whitehurst

James M. Whitehurst previously served as Senior Advisor at IBM from July 2021 to May 2022 and President of IBM from April 2020 until July 2021. He joined IBM through the acquisition of Red Hat,
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Mr. Whitehurst currently serves on the Board of Directors of United Airlines and Amplitude, on the Supervisory Board of Software AG, and as a Special Advisor at Silver Lake.

Source: https://investors.unity.com/news/ne...-Announces-Leadership-Transition/default.aspx

 

They could've replaced him with a doorknob.

 

One of the best things that could happen to unity. Hopefully his replacement isn't at the same level of self-destruction.

 

Damn, from Silverlake, that does not really mean it gets better.

 

This was really the only thing that could restore any of the trust lost. The 'new' pricing model is fair, and everything about what they said checks out... but because the initial plan was so poorly thought out and disregarded internal feedback, even with the updated pricing model, it was still not a good situation because we would always have been waiting for the next horrible decision. With all that said, the problem is always going to be Unity now being a publicly traded company with quarterly earnings reports...it just pits the shareholders verses the customers in any business.

 

I mean, all good and dandy, but Unity is still a public company and main goal is to make shareholders happy, not the game devs . So I still will hold my reserve optimism about this decision.

 

Wake me up when the rest of the c suite and board are gone. Otherwise this is just a pr ploy that changes absolutely nothing.

 

Excited to see what the future holds, change is good, especially in the current stagnant game engine side.
Brace for impact, for both the good and bad this will bring.

Hope the new CEO come from a more technical background, the real spearhead that has been relentlessly pushing the game engine internally from within since the beginning. (Yes you know who you are! )

 

This.

 

good, it shows the pay per install scheme hurt their reputation and bottom line
selling software to devs is different than selling to gamers (like Riccitiello was notorious for)

from what I've read on ycombinator, people that worked under Jim said he was good CEO
and that he is a good choice to restore faith in Unity.

in the end going public maybe saved Unity.. investors with money to lose hold Riccitiello
responsible.

 

Absolutely nothing of actual consequence has changed for the better.

 

Good, makes and will make no difference to Unity or to John, but good.

 

Well, they can always find someone worse.

 

They've acted well since the breach... however, hard not to feel a bit ...

Now back to my Netcode

<3 community

 

who cares?
He is now the sacrificial lamp, he wasn't the only problem, fire the rest and do a proper apology.

 

Yep, nothing is going to change. John wasn't the only one who was part of making this backwards decision for price changes. Other people responsible are still working at Unity.

 

From an ex-EA to an ex-IBM president. What could possibly go wrong?

 

Nothing will change.

 

Fixed that for you. After all CEOs are typically paid many millions of dollars in severance packages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_parachute

 

The Silence of the Lamps

 

"Cult of the Lamp".

 

To the person who posted that unity’s purpose is to make the share holders happy,… you are wrong.

The purpose of a company is to provide a product and for the users of that product to be happy. Without that there will be no users, in this case developers. That is number one priority.

Please read the Unity mission statement, it’s to “enable developer success” , without this there is no company.

 

I mean, those are just words.

 

You never know, I've worked for a lot of software companies that replaced the CEO and within weeks, that new CEO "shakes things up". Suddenly a lot of C's and VP's "pursue other opportunities" and the CEO brings in people he knows from his previous companies. Give it time...

 

Is unity mission statement legally binding? As far as I know, it isn't. in which case it doesn't matter what's written in there.

Company needs customers, and not users. Company can switch to a different area of expertise, and swap customer base, and remain afloat.

A good example of that is nintendo. They started as a hanafuda card company, at some point had a love hotel and operated a taxi company.

 

Under the link is some analytics

https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/9/23910441/unity-ceo-president-john-riccitiello-out-retire

Unity has not made a profit since its inception still??? That actually blows my mind. That is hard to believe.

 

They’re spending everything and more so they can “grow” end of Akira style.

 

This is crazy

 

You should read that sentence again. They did not say they weren't profitable since their inception. They say they accumulated this much loss. Those are two very different things. According to Unity veterans the company was profitable up until the point when they decided they go with the IPO and started to prepare both the market and the company to publicly traded. They started to accumulate the losses back then. So it's a half-lie. Technically it is truth but it gives you the impression of that they never made a profit, which is a lie.

 

It's the case with a surprising number of services/software products we see and hear about every day.
Twitter only has been profitable for a brief period in 2018 and Twitch has never been profitable.
Even Uber only became profitable recently after 14 years of making debt..
That's how the IT-related world works for some reason.

 

Reading more about this interim guy, he actually seems like the kind of person they need.

 

The kind that have never opened Unity editor? Or... never worked on a game?

 

That would just be a nice bonus, absolutely not essential to what he's going to be doing day to day.

 

Best of luck to James M. Whitehurst. But im still sticking to my previous rant. Unity hasnt used its own engine to create a completed game in how long?. Could be very profitable, and looks great to the gaming public. It all comes down to that damn board table, the decisions, and who actually cares for Unity. From what i see, most of them are out to lunch.

If you dont care about your product, but care more about profits... we all loose...

 

Then you can continue to enjoy their focus on everything except the core technology they don't understand and can't solve its main problems.

 

It's pretty pointless to speculate on what they will focus on at this stage. Unity needs a competent manager with a proven track record, it's not going to make a difference if they can make flappy bird clone or not.

The new guy did a good job at Red Hat despite not being a programmer. He seems to have a good reputation so I'm not going to automatically be negative about it. I know this is a strange concept to some people who post here a lot.

 

Suppose I design race cars for a living. Do I need to also drive a car in a race to understand how?

 

They don't need a game dev to run the company, they need a competent leader.

That being said, if it were up to me I'd hire John Carmack.

 

If you're designing race cars for a living, you need to understand how cars in general work and how driving mechanics impact the design. I don't get the metaphor in this case. I'm not talking about actually programming video games, JR had a long career in video games where he was directly involved in shipping some titles and had at least some idea of what that entails. You know, first hand knowledge of how the industry works and how this technology fits into it. A competent leader is not enough if he has no clue about the problem space he's working in. So I don't see how a rando suit from airplane and enterprise software industries is a good fit. If anything, bad enterprise practices is why Unity is such a mess in the first place.

 

Technically, yeah, it was profitable. But... I think stuff just tends to end up looking so much less black/white in practice.

I joined Unity in 2012 (left 2022). Yes, technically, we were turning a profit. Which, however, was achieved by extremely conservative spending. Which, in turn, meant that there wasn't much growth. Most teams were heavily understaffed and there simply wasn't much room to work on anything but the most critical things. A lot of time was just spent bugfixing. Many areas of Unity were "technically" owned by a certain team but in practice they were abandoned because no one had capacity to look at them (the "Asset Server", for example, was owned by my team; no one ever did anything with it until it was then just nuked).

Then came JR. I have my own thoughts about the guy (who I met and talked to a couple of times) and what he did to Unity but one thing that was just flat out undeniable was that after he took over (we're talking *well* before IPO here), for the first time there was significant growth. The good kind. Suddenly teams had the capacity to do stuff. I don't mean going off on all kinds of tangents (that came later). No, really invest in core tech. In fact, one of the things that changed with JR was that stuff that wasn't about core Unity got axed. And more and more we had teams that actually covered reasonable amounts of code.

So yeah, we probably left the path of extremely conservative fiscal policy right around then and went on a path of investment and loss making. Whether that was good or bad in the end, I don't know. I did very much appreciate the investment in Unity as an engine. Unity wouldn't be where it is today if this hadn't happened. And I think it all could have turned out quite different if Unity hadn't then later suddenly tried to go in every possible direction all at once and end up doing a lot of mediocre and disjointed stuff that probably still didn't end up being profitable. Man, all those f'ing acquisitions...

Anyway, waffling now. I think this stuff is complicated. Lots of facets. I'm not happy with where Unity is as a company today but I'm also thankful for all the growth the product did see.

////EDIT: Actually forgot about one more interesting angle to the whole profit and JR thing. Right before he was ousted, David, the previous CEO, actually happened to make an acquisition that turned out to be a major win for Unity. Which got the company into ads. Those quickly ended up far outstripping licensing in performance. Which, in turn, made a good deal of money available for growth. So, for quite a while, ads were funding core tech in a major way. IMO another great example of how messy reality is. Which CEO's achievement was that growth then? And was it great for Unity to become an ads-based business?

 

Some of you are really wild. Everyone has been demanding that Riccitiello is fired since the announcement. Now it finally happens and instead of being happy, you're moving the goalpost and now want the entire board fired. Come on, seriously.

 

Lol

 

I don't know, I have never worked for Unity, but as a user, who has some understanding (well I like to think) about Unity as a system of offerings, I think Unity is back at that state for years now.
Neither the engineering teams nor the teams has anything to do with the engine have abundant resources. Engineering teams are working timelines involves months and years for any features. Bug-fixing is barely existent. The results are often closed tickets with either Won'tFix or ByDesign status just for fun, because the team has no time or inclination to fix the problems.
The support teams are in the same, Asset Store submission is above two months, support tickets for refunds are weeks, other problems, months out.
And at the same time Unity has more employees than ever before and even the similarly positioned companies (yes, talking about Epic Games and satellites, although the extent of the used outsourcing isn't really known publicly).
Anyway, if they were "golden years" under JR, they are long gone. And many people would argue they only left half-assed features and unfinished systems behind so the next generation of teams scrap them and start to work on the next shiny. Obviously there are some rare honorable exceptions (mostly in the advertisement and mobile development part...).

Read back some posts, my friend, many of us aimed at the entire board, because CEOs aren't the lone decision makers when it comes to publicly traded corporations.

 

Only a few people wanted him exclusively removed and didn't care about anyone else, a few people weren't aware of all of the affiliations the C-suite and board of directors had and changed their stance after they learned, but the rest of us have wanted everyone in upper management to be removed from the beginning.

 

The most common thing I heard was "everyone involved in this decision", so whether it was just JR, the board, some subset of executive VPs, whatever. If any Unity exec thought the new pricing scheme was going to be a good idea, their business acumen deserves to be questioned at least.

 

I think these would be pretty good:

 

Whether things improve (or not) likely depends on the culture Unity has established within its senior leadership.

For example, did Riccitiello leave behind executives with a growth mentality, who are laser-focused on building an amazing product and ecosystem? Or are they self-serving, risk-averse individuals whose decision-making is detached from the consequences of failure?

The answer to this question informs whom the board will select as the permanent CEO and what the long-term outcome will be.

 

Aras for CEO?

 

He took about $350M in stock sales with him. Stock that could have been sold to invest in engineers.

He was a sacrificial lamb, thrown out to indicate a new direction, but damage is done, and he smartly took profits a couple years ago.

Curious if next CEO is going to donate 10% of Asset store sales to Palestine or Israel next month. Guess we will have to wait until we are told who the good guys are.