this post sucks:
https://www.reddit.com/r/unity/comments/16j23ci/i_know_people_dont_want_to_hear_this_you_shouldnt/
Yes, John is undoubtedly an asshole, since they don't let you be a CEO unless you are one. But he has also been the CEO of Unity since 2014 and oversaw its progress from "that engine that lets you port your game to anything" to "the platform that every single mobile game is made on and the backbone of the inde developer market."
so immediately this is wrong. this is so wrong. unity was absolutely crushing the mobile market when riccitiello took over. they had been for years, in fact. unity had a major head start in the mobile market thanks to their history as a well-established engine for mac. they were one of the first game engines you could use to develop for iOS. when 3.0 rolled around in 2010, they had android support and that took them from being the biggest deal engine on iOS to the biggest deal engine on mobile
the statement about indie developers is also entirely wrong. unity was a major cornerstone for indie developers pre-2015 to the point it was practically a meme. if you were doing 3d indie dev, you were either using unity or rolling your own engine because it was basically the only game in town that gave you commercial access. see, by 2010, right when the indie boom was hitting, unity's indie version was free.
now, there were problems with the indie version. you didn't get dynamic shadows. you didn't get render texture support at all. you didn't get image effects. it was kinda a mess but for a lot of people it was more than enough. it was the most accessible 3d engine on the market. if you weren't using 3d? game maker was right around the corner. like we aren't even done the first paragraph and I already have this much to say
The main reason why so many of you are only hearing about him being the CEO now, is because he HAD (past tense) been doing a relatively good job.
well that's a lie. the only reason people were hearing about him being the CEO now isn't because he had been doing a "relatively good job" but that he didn't fuck up in a massively public way. like, there's no other way to put it. he fucked up in a way that pissed literally everyone off and there's no real going back from that. but people who use unity, who have had to make use of the engine and deal with decisions made by the company?
we've been complaining about this dude for nearly a decade
not long after riccitiello took over, unity became obsessed with what I like to call "back of the box" features. things that look good on the back of the box, that can drive a lot of new user growth, and seem like they'll be a great addition to the engine. of course, these features almost always either got barely implemented and/or would be abandoned not long after their addition. the kinda thing where you start to pick up a stink coming from how things are being run because the engineering teams are more than competent
another big thing that started happening around 2016 was unity really pushing its ad services. in fact, it felt a lot of the time like unity was starting to push services more than it was focusing on the engine itself. features continued to languish, roadmaps became less and less frequently updated when it came to engine features, sometimes outright abandoned, community comms teams seemed to just completely vanish. but paid user acquisitions? you better believe that shit kept getting attention and updates
because that shit makes a lot of money. this is the sort of service that brings in the big bucks. mobile ads were and still are pretty fuckin' huge. he was doing a good job as a ceo in the sense that he was doing things that could bring money to the company. to mixed success, of course, but to say "you never heard about him because he was doing a good job" is really a poor interpretation of events
What changed ... In 2020 Unity went public, and a bunch of shit heads bought their way onto Unity's board of directors. Ultimately the CEO works for the Board, so when these new bosses tell him to do something self destructive, he does it.
again, no. aside from the fact that unity's problems before they went public were getting to be so bad that people who had to deal with unity had started to go "I hope they go public so they'll have to actually answer to investors." this became a reasonably common refrain on reddit and the unity forums because a lot of people were starting to look for anything that could possibly steer the company back on course. the problem is that the course being set was deliberate in that it was an attempt to make money
but also, saying "ultimately the CEO works for the board" is kinda a really weird view of what a CEO does? I think people have that idea because the main thing they know about a CEO is that a board of directors can vote them out. they know that technically a CEO answers to somebody but that's really where that understanding ends. the CEO's job is making a lot of decisions in how the company operates. they're not some generic figurehead, they're effectively tasked with setting the direction the company takes, evaluating proposed plans and putting them into motion
much as we like to say that the CEO's job is to take fifty-two vacations a year, they do have actual jobs. it's just that those jobs pay a disgusting amount of money and come with a shitload of bonuses if they can wrangle things in their favour, which they pretty much always do
Here are the names you should be talking about instead of John:
Tomer Bar Zeev
Roelof Botha
Egon Durban.
(Edit: I forgot to say that they are Board members)
instead of? absolutely not. alongside? yes. effectively the entire board is at fault here, but the idea that they have some sort of massive puppeteering influence over the CEO of a company is kinda like... romanticizing the position that riccitiello was in. it's attempting to craft a pretty specific narrative that pushes away the idea of his own wrongdoing. the whole post really does this a lot
Remember IronSource, that dog shit monetization company that absolutely everyone in the industry dumped, and was circling the drain until Unity bought them for $4.4 billion? Tomer Bar Zeev is the founder of IronSource, and following the merger he became Unity's 3rd president (along with John and Marc) ... yes, this is the asshole who sold a package of malware under the guise of monetization software & ultimately is the root cause of this install tax. Given IronSource's history of malware, I feel that it is safe to say that the Unity runtime will likely start getting flagged by antivirus programs and casually request admin rights during installation.
so this malware stuff is a pretty common thing people bring up whenever ironsource comes up, but it's not entirely accurate. ironsource's malware problem was ultimately caused by their own extremely severe negligence. they became a malware vector because they basically sold access to everyone with extremely little oversight, causing them to absolutely tank their reputation in the whole online monetization industry (that this industry is capable of having a reputation beyond "fucking ghouls" is horrific, but that's beside the point) because their software became a malware vector. people like the thing it was the installcore situation that lead to this but installcore really wasn't a thing for ages at that point
because that's how this profit motivated bullshit always goes. do everything you can to make as much money as possible and just kinda hope you have the foresight to not shoot yourself in the dick with a rocket launcher. this paragraph also made some assumptions about the unity runtime that were completely based on how we had next to no information on how it worked, clearly written before it came out that unity's solution to figuring out the install base was "we'll just guess"
and really they'd always have had to guess because if they did it literally any other way they'd have a whole ass european union situation where they'd go "hey buddy what the fuck." additionally, that's the only way they'd ever have been able to do their initially proposed retroactive costs thing. the whole runtime fee thing was half-baked from the start, as you might be picking up on
How Unity got infected with IronSource, is that Sequoia Capitol and Silver lake pledged to invest $1 billion into Unity if the deal went through. Frankly, the math doesn't add up for Unity to trade $4.4 billion to buy a plague blanket of a company, only to receive $1 billion in return. Especially when a rival mobile monetization company offered to pay Unity $17 billion if they called off the IronSource deal & merge with them instead. Unless that $1b was for the sake of C-suite bonuses, in which case all of this makes perfect sense.
this is where the post starts getting into some real Conspiracy Theory Bullshit. like real "pinboard with twine" shit. the ironsource thing has a much more simple explanation than is being given credit for, as usual. I even mentioned it earlier on when I was talking about shit that unity was doing before going public that sucked ass
it's because ironsource is balls deep in the same monetization strategies that unity was getting into and develops a lot of software and analytical tools to do just that. it also falls in nicely with unity's extremely severe acquisition fever that, yes, admittedly started really taking off after they went public. going public was one of the worst things to happen to unity, and that was guided pretty heavily by, you know, it's CEO
But who the Hell is Roelof Botha & Egon Durban, and why are they important names? Roelof is a Director of Sequoia, Egon is the founder of Silver Lake, and both of them have ties back to Elon Musk ... which is pretty obvious for how fast Unity has caught on fire.
If Egon's name is familiar, it is because he was on Twitter's Board and was the one who pushed to have them accept the deal, & then got thrown off the board when they realised that he was just spying for Elon during the resulting lawsuit. He also was the one who helped Elon with his fake " Taking Tesla private" scam.
unity didn't really catch on fire fast. we've all been watching it burn since 5.0 especially, something that happened in early 2015. 5.0 was a pretty monumental release in a lot of ways because it was then that there was no longer a feature divide between pro and indie aside from having to use the splash screen in indie and (at the time) no access to the dark mode. this was kinda a problem!
for unity, I mean
see, unity pro's main value propositions until that point were modern engine features, analytics features, and access to console release options given appropriate platform access. I genuinely do not know of anyone who was actually using stuff like cloud build but anything's possible. people who were using pro never even thought about the splash screen or dark mode because they never had to. by making the modern engine features, you know, free, they basically destroyed that value proposition
I imagine this had a lot to do with why they also went with a new license model at the time based on subscriptions, since it made it so they could start collecting license money from a wide group of people, especially those who had fallen victim to the (utter bullshit) idea that having the unity splash screen would keep anyone from buying their games
there were other things, of course, like how the old licenses had their own revenue limits and such, but shit like "you can actually have shadows in your game and use a deferred renderer" were way more important to a lot of people. but you can see how this meant that, with those value propositions gone, unity was going to have to start pushing hard into new ways to make money
incidentally, this is the last year you could buy a permanent license for a major release version of unity
Roelof was the CFO of PayPal before it got acquired and has a long history of being involved with mergers that result in a lot of money for some, but absolute shit deals for end users and employees.
which is why this really sticks in my proverbial craw. absolutely shit deals for end users and employees? you mean those same things that riccitiello was doing? why was riccitiello doing a "relatively good job" but roelof wasn't? this is what I mean when I say the reddit post has a lot of speculation and conspiracy stuff in it while simultaneously running defence for riccitiello. I don't think it's a reliable post and a lot of the things it outright says are wrong enough for me to discard it entirely!
Looping back to the top ... I think John is done with Unity, but not in the "yay, us consumers have protested hard enough to get him fired" kind of way the internet wants. I think he was done in 2020 when he went from being the guy actually running the company, to the guy who answers to a room full of investment fuck heads (of the 13 board members, 11 are investment managers), and then gets to take the blame for their shit decisions. I feel like the reason why he sold his stock is because he knew this was a shit idea that was going to tank the company, but these assholes wouldn't listen. So he cashed out his stock and will be announcing his retirement at the start of Q4.
Don't be shocked when Tomer Bar Zeev gets named as his replacement.P.S. MAYBE THEY CAN MERGE WITH ZENGA NEXT!!!!!!
and the hits keep comin', y'know? we've gone from "John is undoubtedly an asshole" to "actually it's the fault of everyone but him. it was already on thin ice for saying he was doing a good job to start, but now we've reached the point where he's being presented as kinda blameless. and that's weird because, from the perspective I've had being a long-time unity dev and the perspective of many others, we've been watching this shit go down before these dudes were even in the picture. we've seen people come and go from unity while all this stuff was carried out before they went public and there was one definite, concrete feature in all that
this whole reddit post is like... bad. it's not a good post. I really hate how many times I see it because I feel like I'm losing my goddamn mind since I remember all these things that just aren't right about it that everyone else seems to have either forgotten or are ignoring to make this specific narrative stick
Incredible that Reddit users are already writing their redemption arcs for a CEO who called developers “fucking idiots” because monetization wasn’t the first thing on their minds.
