Unity CEO Riccitiello steps down, effective immediately
Game engine maker Unity has announced that CEO John Riccitiello will retire from his prominent positions at the company. Effective immediately, Riccitiello will retire as President, Chief Executive Officer, Chairman and a member of the Company’s Board of Directors. In short, Unity's unpopular and controversial CEO is out.
Which makes sense, given that Riccitiello is ultimately the person at the top of the reason why we had to publish an article called Why every game developer is mad right now, explained last month. Riccitiello's Unity unveiled confusing, controversial, and still very poorly explained pricing scheme changes that have since been partially walked back.
Unity has announced that James M. Whitehurst will take over as interim CEO. Whitehurst was formerly CEO at open source software company Red Hat from 2008 to 2020, then a President at IBM until 2022.
It's unclear what, if any, changes Riccitiello's ouster will have on Unity moving forward. In a press release, Whitehurst said that «Unity is well-positioned to continue enhancing its platform, strengthening its community of customers, developers and partners, and focusing on its growth and profitability goals.» The company also said that it doesn't expect changes to its expectations of profit in third quarter 2023. Unity has fired some 600 or more employees so far this year, and closed half its offices, classic tactics for boosting a business' profitability in the short term.
The announcement is already being hailed as a victory on social media. The pricing scheme is hardly Riccitiello's first controversy at Unity or the game industry at large. He's a business figure quite disliked by many rank-and-file players and developers as the face and man taking the blame
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