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John Riccitiello is stepping down as CEO and president of Unity (investors.unity.com)

submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by mr_MADAFAKA@lemmy.ml to c/games@lemmy.world

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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.

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[-] ICastFist@programming.dev 5 points 10 months ago

You make a great point, and I want to add to that.

The popular sentiment here is that Unity is doomed to fail, and the internet as a whole kind of wish it did.

A lot of people confuse their wishes with the observable reality. There were a lot of people that migrated to lemmy and thought reddit would die in 3 months, tops. Many people are still waiting for Xitter to suffer a "sudden death". Unity is in a similar situation, it's too big to simply close down and file for bankruptcy.

The shitstorm made some people migrate away from it, just like people migrated off reddit when fuck u/spez started fucking things around, and twitter when elon musk took over. Yet all of them survived with healthy-ish userbases, despite many people wishing otherwise.

Things a lot of people forget or ignore for whatever reason is the sheer volume of shovelware produced with Unity, aimed straight at Google Play and Microsoft Stores. Asian studios targeting Asian audiences are probably the highest source of income for Unity, due to sheer numbers (China, India and other SE Asian countries are roughly half of the world population). Unity gets money from "per seat" subscriptions and from advertising. Even assuming a 20% reduction of those subscriptions, there's still enough money coming in to keep the company going, especially if they decide to axe sectors that are "money drains".

Also, some studios simply can't afford to let go of Unity because their main income earners are made with Unity and they need to keep the game updated. If their games also use stuff they can't easily replicate in a different engine, like some plugin, that's an extra reason for them to put up with Unity's shit. I also wouldn't be surprised if Unity's now previous license of "no royalties" was preferred over Unreal and the reason some studios went with it, as the subscription cost would be lower than paying "success fees", with Honkai/Genshin Impact being likely examples.

Unlike Twitter or Reddit, Unity is in a better position to make a slow comeback. Whether they'll manage remains to be seen, but even assuming all the worst choices taken by the higher ups, the company will live for a good 2 years as is, then sell out to someone bigger.