Riccitiello's exit a rare bit of accountability | This Week in Business

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John Riccitiello stepped down from Unity this week, vacating the CEO and chairman roles less than a month after an ill-advised and poorly thought out attempt to impose a per-install fee on games made with the Unity engine.

The announcement of Riccitiello's departure makes no mention of the still-blazing Runtime Fee trash fire in the background that led to this. Instead, it frames it as a retirement "effective immediately," which is not the way this sort of transition normally happens.

We do see it from time to time in the case of an executive suffering some personal or medical catastrophe, and we obviously hope that Riccitiello is in fine health, aside from the metaphorical large-caliber bullet wound in the foot.

I'm not just hoping Riccitiello is fine because of basic human decency. I mean, that's part of it, sure. But if he's fine, then we also have something truly precious here, one of the rarest of all things in all the games industry (and increasingly the world at large):

Accountability.

I'm practically giddy at the very idea of it. A person in a position of immense power screwed up terribly, and as a result, they give up that position of power? It's almost unfathomable.

Riccitiello didn't push Unity Create head Marc Whitten onto his sword like Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick did to Blizzard president J Allen Brack to take the fall for Activision Blizzard's cultural rot.

Riccitiello didn't blame others for lying to him like Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot did when