Would it be…unfair of me to suggest that maybe, just maybe, it would be a bad idea to put anyone that ever had a leadership position in EA in any sort of leadership position at your company? I mean, it hasn’t worked out tremendously well for Unity.
If nothing else, John Riccitiello’s departure from Unity Technologies makes it seem like the system is working as intended. The decision to change the pricing model for use of the Unity engine was met with enough backlash to make even the most money-grubbing execs within the company realize that it was a bad call and that would cost them a lot of money. Not to mention cause anyone who was paying attention to immediately start researching possible alternatives.
Naturally. It’s already a little bit too late for Unity. Developers that made a commitment to leave the game engine have already done exactly just that and thinking about the best way to transition to something else. And although porting games to a new engine is absolutely not trivial, the advantages of not being locked to someone who has already demonstrated the capacity and the willingness to screw you over cannot be overstated. Especially if you’re a smaller studio that can’t readily stomach a hissy fit from their game engine provider. But at least they can still bill themselves as an option provided they don’t shoot themselves on the foot again. Which is more likely than some people would care to admit.
It’s important to take a moment to consider that, although it’s very likely that the decision to move forward with the new pricing model rests completely within Riccitiello’s hands, he’s not the only one to blame. Failure has exactly the same amount of fathers as success, only most of them don’t go around banging their chest and screaming it from the rooftops. It wasn’t just him on this one, he’d have to get the board to agree and run it through pretty much anyone who had a modicum of power in the company. Changing the business model of your core product is not something that’s lightly done.
Who voiced any opposition? Who thought it wasn’t going hard enough? who knows. Unless you believe that someone will be dragged in front of a judge over this and that people are truly unable to lie while under oath, I’m guessing that everyone will attempt to distance themselves from this one and hope it’s but a fading memory by this time next year.
Who’d have imagined that this would be the end result of the tenure of the guy who was chief of EA when they were making such classics as Madden NFL 25 By EA Sports or Army of Two: The Devil’s Cartel.
