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.
It’s one thing to bet “$50” on “it’s going to be fine” like lots of gamers did after what EA did with this guy at the helm, it’s a whole different thing to bet “my company and livelihood” on “it’s going to be fine” after what Unity did with this guy at the helm.
Unity is in B2B, not B2C, so the stakes are way higher for customers and so are the guarantees that customers require to keep on doing business with Unity after such an outrageous attempt at screwing them.
The incompetence level of the Board of Unity must be trully world-beating given that they’re still acting as if the stakes for their customers in trusting Unity again were anywhere near the same as the stakes for teenage gamers to keep on buying games from EA after being basically scammed.
There’s going to have to be some ironclad legal guarantees that this will never happen again and a purge of the Unity Board before at least those customers with the most to loose (i.e. the ones with successful games, either paying Unity directly or indirectly by using their Ad network) walk back from their decision of protecting their businesses from future similar actions by the management of Unity (such protection being mainly ditching Unity for future or early-stage projects).
I’m pretty sure that if they’d actually tried to keep going in the route they were going with the rules they’d have been sued out of existence. It was almost definitely illegal so it baffles me that they tried to do it.