A departure with immediate effect. Unity, an American group at the head of a technical toolbox popular with video game creators (3D modeling, lighting, animation, object physics management, etc.), announced Monday evening the resignation of John Riccitiello, at head of the company for almost ten years. The manager had been mired for a month in a controversy which damaged the confidence of his customers, some of whom threatened to leave for the competition, and caused the company’s shares, valued at $11 billion, to plummet by 20%. Wall Street applauded this decision with a 4.5% price increase at the opening of trading on Tuesday.
It was a serious communication error that precipitated the fall of John Riccitiello. On September 12, the company announced a radical change in pricing policy. Until now, Unity was free for low-income development teams, with others having to pay an annual subscription of around $2,000 per employee. Enough to attract the favor of small video game studios, on console (50% of releases on Nintendo Switch) and on mobile. Unity wanted to move to the much more profitable commission model: from January 1, 2024, creators will have to pay 1 to 20 cents per download of their game, as soon as it crosses the 200,000 installation mark.
The publication sparked an immediate outcry. The independent studio Over The Moon, whose game The Fall was free to access after a commercial agreement with the Epic Games Store, calculated that it would have to give Unity “three times the amount that Epic paid us”. The game was downloaded 7 million times, which amounted to a commission of nearly $200,000, according to Le Figaro calculations. Many other small studios took out their calculators and realized that the tens of thousands of dollars in fees they were going to have to pay risked jeopardizing their business. “We will remove our game from sale on January 1,” warned the creators of the game Cult of the Lamb, which has sold more than 1 million copies. Other structures have threatened to move to the competition after denouncing an unacceptable change in the terms of their user licenses. Unity’s stock began to fall on the stock market.
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In view of the fire, the group had to make an act of contrition. ” We are sorry. We should have consulted you more and taken your feedback into account before announcing this new pricing policy,” one of Unity’s executives wrote in a press release on September 22. John Riccitiello has remained publicly silent throughout the crisis. The company subsequently significantly reduced the scope of its policy, which now only concerns professional accounts. Only games developed from the next version of Unity, scheduled for 2024, will be affected. And studios will have the choice between two calculation methods. During a briefing with Unity employees on September 18, John Riccitiello admitted that “things could have been handled better.” His interim role will be taken over by James Whitehurst, former president of IBM. He will present the company’s quarterly results on November 9.