Hey Rocky, watch me pull a golden parachute out of my ass!
Chances are, you’ve heard about the whole Unity thing. And if you didn’t well, you’re about to.
Most of this centers on Unity’s current CEO, John Riccitiello. Let’s ignore the fact that he’s been dumping Unity stock for God knows how long. He comes out (after dumping roughly 2000 shares) and sets down the new deal for anyone developing, or has ever developed, a game with Unity. They’re gonna pay Unity a flat fee for every install of any game made with Unity. And this change is retroactive, superseding any previous deals.
Now, there have been attempts to clarify things (and by that I mean downplay the absolutely massive negative point), and they haven’t been successful. Because even if those clarifications were true, this would still be the biggest recurring cost of using Unity humanly imaginable.
It’s also worth knowing that you’d be hard pressed to find a single developer in the industry that hasn’t made at least one game in Unity. But for further reference, everything from the likes of Genshin Impact and Honkai Star Rail, to indie titles like Cult of the Lamb and Among Us, and a host of games in between use Unity. It’s practically the development utility for almost everything that doesn’t use Unreal or a to-spec engine. Needless to say, all of these developers are kind of pissed right now.
But look at that title; I said every developer, didn’t I? Sure, you know you dun goofed when Geoff Keighley, hallowed be his Cool Ranch Doritos on Earth as they are in Heaven, calls you a joke:
But let’s also consider that this pisses directly in the Cheerios of the big three. For example, what do you think Pokémon GO runs on? If you guessed Unity, you’re right! And PlayStation and Xbox? Well, maybe they have a few titles made in Unity, Maybe they don’t, I’m not going to take the time to check. Mostly because it’s ultimately immaterial, as they both have subscription services that offer access to hundreds of games, a considerable number of which are made in Unity!
Ah, but we’ve been dancing around the cause of this: current Unity CEO John Riccitiello.
Now there are many things I could say about this man to make you hate him. So I’ll start with the fact that he was the CEO of EA from 2007 to 2013. In my ideal world, he would’ve stuck with Sara Lee (1996-1997 in our real world) until he was assassinated by fat kids for charging an opening fee on every box of their snack cakes. But unfortunately he served as EA’s president and COO from 1997 to 2004, coming back in 2007 for the CEO position. During his tenure as CEO, he once floated the idea that Battlefield players could be charged actual money per clip/magazine reloaded in game.
Oh, also, there’s this quote on the monetization of games:
Ferrari and some of the other high-end car manufacturers still use clay and carving knives. It’s a very small portion of the gaming industry that works that way, and some of these people are my favourite people in the world to fight with – they’re the most beautiful and pure, brilliant people. They’re also some of the biggest fucking idiots.
John Riccitiello
There’s probably more, but I think I’ll end with Suda51 absolutely hating the man. EA was the publisher for Shadows of the Damned. Not only was Suda51 and Shinji Mikami’s artistic vision constantly compromised, he utterly screwed them both over in the end. He so hates the man, that he’s made him an antagonist in his games twice. Oh, and starting with the first of these, he made a very big deal about using Unreal Engine for these games. Just food for thought.
Now, there is one sad note: for some reason (who shall remain nameless), there are people who have been sending the Unity offices death threats. Which they really don’t deserve; if you think about it, the CEO and upper management’s screwing all of them over too, likely to the point of having their lives wrecked.
As noted, they’ve since put out damage control. As stated, it hasn’t helped:
Source: PC Gamer
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