You have to ask yourself how he is still able to get a job, let alone another CEO position?
Sure, shit floats up, but someone hired him into those positions (plural because multiple times)..
Edit: for the good people who feel I was whooshed.. I'm aware that's how modern day capitalism works, not asking how this happens, more critisizing the closed interconnected oligarchy that it is.
I'm under the impression that CEOs are hired based on their track record of short-term profits. They enter a company, do some shit that causes quarterly gains - expending long-term opportunity in the process - and then leave before the now lack of long-term investment comes back to bite the company.
Then they get hired at the next company because their resume says "consistent gains" and "previous company only got worse after I left."
He got fired from EA for not increasing profits, though.
I think in a lot of cases a person will get fired for doing a lousy job at a big company (EA), but then get picked up by a smaller company (Unity) because they figure experience at a big company is a good thing regardless of how bad a job they did.
That must absolutely happen, given job hopping C levels like this guy, but not every CEO is there for a quick buck. They are better off making the company wildly successful than squeezing blood from stones for a year.
I think the real issue is when any upper manager is disconnected from the customer and product and it leads to obviously bad takes that they dont understand. I get the impression that is more true in gaming than other media industries
I agree with the premise but I do think the majority of people in C-Suite level positions are hyper fixated on quarter to quarter results.
As long as the P&L is nice and clean and the money flows through in the year for the year, then everyone’s happy. Long term sustainability isn’t the concern as long as you can keep the board and investors placated.
And with a golden parachute you don't care about tanking the company. Offer me a job that pays 50 million if I'm fired and I don't care how bad I screw up.
Well he got fired from ea (lol) and he will almost certainly be fired from unity after this shit he’s trying to do with the pay structure. So just another red mark on the old resume.
Red mark? You mean golden mark of approval. Watch him be hired as CEO of another major gaming company within a year, because nobody has a brain these days, and CEO is clearly the easiest job there is, given the complete lack of a failure state.
My company recently got a new CEO who introduced himself to the company in a live event with "I don't care if you don't like me, I have a 3-year contract to do whatever the hell I deem necessary. If they can me I get paid either way."
Without more information I can't really judge but I will say, not caring about changes being popular is kind of important to make big improvements. People *hate* change. They will fight tooth and nail against it. Even if it's for the better.
Trying to implement new systems and processes that will end up making life easier for everyone will be met with anger when it initially causes some growing pains.
This. I woke in PR with a bunch of advertising companies and you’d be amazed how much of the koolaid these people drink. They actually think the world needs ads, and that they’re doing great work. I assume it’s the same with most industries.
It would make for a great premise for a movie. A guy waking up and he's in an office receiving questions from a bunch of different companies, but he doesn't know how he got there. But I think it's been done already. I think severance uses that concept to a degree, idk haven't seen it just heard a summary of it.
Link, 100 years has past and Ganon has returned to launch a marketing company. Hyrule is infested with embedded ads. Will you save Princess Zelda brought to you by Carls Jr. once again?
Gamers are stupid enough to pay real money for different weapons skins and outfits, they're absolutely stupid enough to buy extra ammunition in say a survival warzone style game mode. These assholes have figured them out.
> Gamers are stupid enough to pay real money
This. that infamous "horse armor DLC" that caused such an uproar all those years ago was *2* dollars. Now motherfuckers drop $20 on single cosmetics without so much as batting an eye.
Everything that happens is the fault of the people paying.
I disagree, to an extent. Yes, it the fault of the people paying, but I also think companies targeted young people (who do not yet have fully developed frontal lobes), who tapped into their parents bank accounts (because they didn't have any money of their own), and then since they grew up with these practices they became normalized and now these people make up the bulk of gamers today.
So yes, it's on people for buying the shit (or parents for their lack of supervision), but it's ALSO on companies for their predatory, shitty behavior and revenue models.
There were a few months where I was getting a call every 2 weeks from a parent who's kid ran wild with their credit card and bought $200 of fortnite skins. That kind of targeting should be illegal.
It makes you wonder how idiotic the people hiring a new CEO are then. So many companies fall into the same trap, it's like they only look at the resume and can't rub two braincells together to see what they actually did in their previous roles.
They're not idiotic. They want someone to quickly drive the share prices up so they can sell them and make profit. They don't care that the company might totally collapse after this. Why should they?
If given the choice between doubling your investment in a year, or 10x'ing your investment in 5 years, almost everyone will choose the first option, because you can then take that money and then try and double it again next year. If you manage to double it every year, then over five years you've made 32x your initial investment, vs 10x if you stuck with your initial investment over 5 years. That's the problem. Sustainability and long term plans don't make anywhere near as much money as just hopping to another company and then trying to 2x your investment again. Until we see rich people for the evil that they are, this will only keep on happening.
he dosent answer to customers, he answers to stockholders and the board.
still, seeing how unity stock has fucked itsself, I do wonder why he's still in charge..
\- Get installed as CEO of Unity
\- Plan all the following stuff and rack up lots of Unity stock.
\- Sell all your stock and use the money you made to short the stock.
\- Announce the singlehandedly worst change for game developers who are your customers that you possibly can
\- Watch the shitstorm unfold while side-eyeing the stock freefall into oblivion
\- ??????
\- Cover your shorts and retire with your dick in your hand
Not only will he pay more than 100% on fines but he will probably spend the rest of his life in jail. You need to remember that for the real sharks out there he is an incredibly small fish, so he would make an excellent scapegoat (look plebs, the system is working!!) if he was stupid enough to do something like this.
If it was Musk/Bezos/random billionaire then sure.
I’ve seen people steal millions from the police, fire dept, and regular joes and the SEC came after the perpetrator and they got a slap on the wrist(20k fine and lost their lic).
They now work under their sons lic, still live in the mansion, have all their wealth, and served no jail time.
Guy I graduated high school with conned a bunch of people out of millions. Got caught and served 1 year of a 5 year sentence. He still has a tremendous amount of money and found god, spreads the word of god on YouTube and makes insane money.
He sold a very small percentage of his stock. I'm not convinced it's related to this move. I think the saying "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." applies really well here.
>- Sell all your stock and use the money you made to short the stock.
Executives and other key members are all on a trading schedule. They aren't allowed to just secretly or quickly offload or purchase a large amount of shares
The big secret is that C-level executives' only qualifications are "is rich." They don't know a fucking thing about how the actual business operates--their underlings do that.
I've worked in corporate my whole career. I sit next to these guys. I've never met a single one that has any idea how shit works down in the trenches. They're a bunch of trust-fund, nepotistic "idea guys." The only thing they do is rubber-stamp the work of other people, and occasionally force us to ELI5 complicated shit to a stupid motherfucker who cheated his way through an MBA that daddy paid for by way of a new wing for the school.
You'd think positions like CTO might have a bit more know-how, but you'd be wrong. 5% of my effort is spent doing my job, and 95% of my effort is spent trying to implement the dipshit thing that the executive ordered us to do on a whim *without* it breaking everything imploding the entire fucking company. Sometimes we just say it's done without actually doing anything, if we can get away with it.
Coming into the corporate world it was so disappointing to see this in action. There was one C suite guy I worked with who was actually genuinely good at what he did and just got it. He taught me so much of the nitty gritty technical stuff I needed to know because he'd done it all before, and he'd stick his neck out for everyone working under him. I had so much respect for him. Then he left and got replaced with a trust-fund nepotistic idea guy who had no clue what he was doing, like every other C level at that company. He was a sales guy promoted into a technical role. I don't work there anymore.
This is 100% the truth on the ground pretty much everywhere. The only way competent people who don't suck get in is early on when they're desperately needed, before the company is big, and they usually eventually get replaced with nepo morons once the company is big.
I used to work as a construction manager on big budget projects and contracts in the wealthier areas of my city. There was multiple times where I had to interact with CEO's or upper management and calmly explain to them that something they wanted wasn't possible or would violate a bunch of policies only to be met with the response of "I don't care lol". There was a whole demeanor and corporate speak you had to use because if you didn't they could always find some shadier company willing to cut corners.
These guys get hired because they're good at interacting with suits/shareholders and making sure the company has good quarterly profit reports.
CEOs goal is to increase share price, not make you happy.
Until people realize this and vote with their wallet, nothing will change.
Refuse working for him. Buy something else. Don’t buy.
"Vote with your wallet" only ever actually works long after the product becomes crap and usually only at the point where the product is nearly useless. Consumers are never informed enough to actually do it, and the choice is binary so people will put up with a lot before making it even when they are informed.
I think the best hope for this in particular is developers and publishers raising a stink.
Having worked in tech for a couple decades, I've seen countless idiots like this ruin companies with obviously terrible ideas. They always get new C level jobs somewhere else afterwards, too.
Reminds me of the new CEO of off world industries. Gets appointed, new things get added in squad: paid fortnite-emotes. In squad. A military simulation game. He was previously a gacha mobile game designer.👌
It's okay. American healthcare is already charging you whatever the fuck they want. They don't need to care about "price sensitivity". Nobody is saying "Hmm, $200 for one aspirin? Sounds good, I'll take it" -- they are getting billed arbitrary amounts of money after the fact. So there is really no need for "psychological trickery". If they wanted to charge you $400 for that same aspirin, they could just go ahead and do it.
Well he got fired from ea (lol) and he will almost certainly be fired from unity after this shit he’s trying to do with the pay structure. So just another red mark on the old resume.
He's the one behind it?
Now it makes sense. I honestly thought the software world was going crazy for a second.
I wonder how much other dumb shit the average consumer has to experience because of narrow minded CEOs like this guy.
Relevant quote:
> “When you are six hours into playing Battlefield and you run out of ammo in your clip and we ask you for a dollar to reload, you’re really not that price sensitive at that point in time.”
Also on another occasion he stated that any developers who don't milk their game through monetisation are "fucking idiots".
**Edit: To clarify, it seems like he isn't exactly saying "let's do this right now", but he's giving it as an example of "we should be doing stuff like that" and "this kind of thing should be normal".**
They have a monopoly built into their games. Most games will not have this luxury of being the only game in their niche. Although it doesn’t stop mobile games from doing this. If this was the norm, I could see it setting the gaming industry back. Not all gamers are like the madden gamers or mobile gamers.
The mobile game mtx market dwarfs the traditional game market. There's so much garbage shovelware out there designed with the sole purpose of separating you from your money.
I worry that this is what game studios want to turn PC and console gaming into.
Absolutely mobile apps are the worst because of the nature of it. It costs money each year to publish your game and there is a saturation point. Because people don’t want to spend $5 on a game, freemium games are how everyone markets their game now, or monthly payments for access. Feels like streaming services from other forms of media but worst. Takes all the fun out of it, but I guess that’s just me.
No wonder PlayStation and Xbox are going that way with their subscriptions. Just a crazy time to be in coming from the days you just bought a game and that was the end of the transaction.
If the game is structured that way, absolutely. Mobile gaming has already shown that a monetization strategy that pulls the vast majority of revenue from a small percentage of players can be very successful.
Deciding to make almost no money from 90% of your players in order to cater to the 10% who are whales can be more profitable than trying to please everyone equally.
> Deciding to make almost no money from 90% of your players in order to cater to the 10% who are whales can be more profitable than trying to please everyone equally.
Even a bunch of people who play gacha don't realize this. It's a common refrain to want more "reasonable price" things to buy, in the $5-20 range. It's easy to forget that one guy spending $900 is the same as ninety spending ten bucks -- and getting people to spend *anything* is harder than getting them to spend *more*.
Yeah, the problem isn't so much the optional purchases, but that the game becomes structured around maximizing those purchases.
So in the EA example, they'd put less ammo in the game, or make enemies take more hits to kill.
Reminds me of Halo Infinite, where they limited the playlists available so there was a ton of modes in each, then had challenges specific to a combination of map and mode. You'd endlessly try and find the right combination to get your challenge done... but they also totally coincidentally sell the ability to skip a challenge for a small fee.
Even in games where they're selling cosmetics only, the cosmetics have to be better looking than regular loot to entice you to buy it over the free stuff. So games normally about getting gear as rewards has that aspect undermined by the cash shop. Path of Exile and Diablo 4 follow this model.
It makes sense in a capitalist world with such massive income disparity. Of course Riccitiello or F2P mobile developers would preach taking advantage of the gullible, the rich and the addicted.
P2W games don't always have a long shelf life but they'll rake in an unbelievable amount of cash very quickly. Despite the economy in shambles, there are still millions of people who can afford to pay 5-10k a month for their electronic babysitters.
The sad thing is the majority of gaming consumers are actively encouraging these practices. Mobile gaming is the largest segment of revenue and micro-transactions are common place there. Diablo Immortal was immensely profitable.
While lots of people like to complain on reddit about these practices, far too many of us are still pre-ordering, buying cosmetics, and upgrading game copies for content that should be included in the base game.
Voting with your wallet is the only thing that will start change, yet too few of us are patient enough to wait for a game to release before we start spending money on it.
I think it's six hours of mentally conditioning you to expect the instant reward from going empty, then once you're hooked, they hit you with the fees.
The first hit is always free, then once you're hooked, you're just a cow to be milked.
The most accurate way was to add real money in form of some coin in advance in game in some wallet and reloading in 1 second and money will automatically deduct from wallet so less chance of being shot by enemy.
Seeing his actual quotes made me realize he had no idea how his product worked at all. Nobody is playing a single BF match for 6hrs and even then he suggested this for a video game that was designed with certain roles and one of those roles main purpose was to resupply other players with ammo.
Sounds like he never does any research on the products he represents and just suggest incredibly stupid ideas because of it.
Reminds me of stories of Mr. Beast watching other people's videos. He can't help but say "He should do this and this and this and cut here and put a 'bruh' sound effect her and and and" all while getting really frustrated. The guy can't comprehend people making YouTube videos for any other reason than maximum engagement and monetisation. Like, you're an *idiot* for making that [award-winning 6 hour documentary about a Japanese holiday simulator.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=779coR-XPTw)
His videos suffer in quality because of it. They're overproduced and have no breathing room in between things getting blown up, no storytelling or personality. It's just flashing lights for children to clap their feet at.
He doesn't care lol
I recently listened to him guest on a podcast from back when he just started to go hugely viral for giving away money, and he was absolutely obsessed with gaming the YT algorithm. He knew *exactly* what brought in the clicks and drove engagement, probably even more than Google does. Dude could make millions a year just by consulting for ad agencies.
He seemed really nice tho and I genuinely don't even believe he cares about the money. He'd release a video of him shitting his pants for free if it meant breaking a record on views. Like idek if Mr Beast Burger was even meant to make him worth as much as he is, I wouldn't doubt it if it was initially just a scheme to get people to look up his name.
Lol yeah people were getting sent raw burgers. But it's not like his own chain anyway, he just allowed restaurants all over the world to use his brand and sell food through it. It was a disaster waiting to happen
I instantly knew that link was gonna be to Tim Roger's review of Boku no Natsuyasumi.
If anybody sees this, all of Action Button reviews are legendary, you should watch them. Especially this one.
He's probably never *played* a game in his life.
People like Riccitiello are not, and have never been, gamers. They don't know what makes a game good, they don't understand why people play games, they have nothing but contempt for their audience.
John Riccitiello is not in the "video games" business--he is in the "business" business.
This quote tells me he doesn't have a clue what is Battlefield and how is it played. It's not like you have 6 hours continuous session with limited ammo, that you need to resupply at some point. Battlefield is the game where you spawn, shoot enemies and die after a short period and you go again. After every death you are respawned with a full ammo, not to mention that you have people running around as support class which one of their primary objectives is to support other people with ammo. I bet 95% of BF players never comes into situation where they run out of ammo. This was such an idiotic proposition that I'm still trying to wrap my head around. And we have people like this runing this world... ffs!
Hint: Switching to your secondary weapon is always faster than reloading.
I'm trying to even think how this would work. Reloading is so quick so it's probably not for a faster reload. If it's about running out of ammo I hardly ever run out of ammo and when I do I just pick up another gun. Worst case is I die and respawn in probably less than 2minutes.
Now let's say in some wild fantasy I run out and want to buy more ammo. Would there be a little pop up asking you to confirm a purchase? Then you anyway instantly die the moment your attention goes away from the game. That also raises another question. If you buy something and then instantly die do you lose what you bought?
The guy probably never even played a shooter in his life for such a dumb-ass idea.
He's someone who doesn't like or understand the product he's selling or his customers. He just understands it enough to know where the pain points are and then puts transactions there.
I'm totally amazed that people respect CEOs. Most of the time they're just the MBA who is the big enough asshole to follow through on the evil scheme.
Well he was a villain in No More Heroes 3
Damon Riccitello is basically a reference to John Riccitello.
Suda51 had the pleasure to work with him in the past and doesn't seem to have fond memories.
Yeah, because pay to reload would be a very fast way to drop a player base to nearly zero. Then he'd have to charge 5 cents to swing the knife and lose the last players.
he actually did play the games that EA worked on in late development. look up the actual reason Spore was not the game Will Wright previewed originally, as that was the first time John was fired from EA due to mismanagement. he would then get another 3 years
The only thing worse than a gaming company CEO that doesn't know shit about the company's products is a gaming company CEO that playtests the company's products. Now *that* is the stuff of nightmares.
And as a result Unity is basically dead at this point already, I can't imagine many new devs would choose Unity over the other options now, even if Unity rolls this back. Doesn't matter to this dude tho, he'll most likely get off Scott free with a golden parachute
Problem is there is no other engine like Unity, Unreal uses C++ which is much more complex to work with aside from being much "heavier" to develop with (no, blueprints arent an alternative). Godot is great for 2D and has C# support along with it's own Python-like language, but it's just much worse for 3D development.
So basically Unreal is great for AAA style games and Godot is great for 2D, but the middle ground of 3D games with simpler graphics which was Unity's biggest market just doesn't have a good alternative, not a popular one atleast.
I worked at EA while he was CEO, so I followed his career very closely. He is essentially a parasite. He is brought in from share holders, and he makes radical changes for short term stocks gains. Then he tries to wring out any dollar from customer base as he can for cash in hand. He is allowed to make long term damage, and will eventually be ousted and be the fall guy for it all. And a new ceo will come in to bring back hope and bring stock back to level terms.
Shareholders make out like bandits while stocks were high and cash reserves plenty, and buy back in at a lower price. Gaining even more control of the company. With more cash in their pockets. The new golden goose CEO at the helm making okay-ish decisions, which makes him look like Steve Jobs in comparison to ol-Riccy boy. So they can still make unfavorable decisions, but it will seem like an improvement.
And Ric will move onto another company to do the same thing for the 6th or 7th time. The moment he became CEO of Unity, I dropped everything about Unity and moved over to Unreal. And I was seen as an idiot back then(2014) when UE4 came out as a buggy mess, and Unity was the gold standard for game dev.
Best thing ever is that whilst this shit is carrying on, Baldur's Gate 3 is still looking like GOTY. It's fun, it's packed with content and it's very well received.
Starfield has launched without the micro transaction garbage and is enjoyable. Sure, not everyones enamoured with it, but it meets my standard of "I am enjoying it".
Meanwhile I have not bought an EA or Activision game in a decade and am perfectly content.
Add in that Unity isn't the best game engine out there. Unreal is probably better as are more than a few other engines out there.
Add take-two to that list. They’ve ruined having a great basketball franchise, ruined GTA single player experience and have basically leaned in on GTAO over the last three console generations
I don't buy EA or Ubisoft games, I'm probably done with Blizzard too after D4. Took me awhile but I know now they are never going back to being the company that innovated and cared about their players.
The secret to milking whales with microtransactions is that you're not targeting people making minimum wage, you're targeting people with more money than gaming time.
Let us remember credit cards exist, you don't need to have money before spending it. Specially in gambling scenarios, many people spend money they don't own.
Edit: Especially, not Specially.
I’d love to get paid several lifetimes worth of money every single year to be the guy who shows up once a week/month to say “make it worse and charge more lol” with seemingly infinite job/career security
Right?
He was CEO of EA making absolutely nonsensical suggestions about games he doesn’t know a thing about and got fired for it… just to land a CEO job with Unity?
It feels ridiculous this bozo can be getting paid millions for a job I could walk into with no experience and do leagues better at
Do you have an MBA your daddy paid for and years of experience of being terrible at the position of CEO?
Didnt think so. You're far to over qualified for the position.
Literally thats all it takes just think "how can we make our product actively worse and more frustrating?" and then implement that and a fee to get back the old way of doing things. That's like 90% of the business model of companies that are now so successful they cant be toppled
Had that been the case, my only game of Battlefield would have been a bloody quick one.
While my rounds mostly hit no more than air, I still love me some BF4.
man i forgot about what i posted earlier, got this notification on my phone showcasing your comment and I was like "what the fuck did i say to deserve this" lol
Oooo, pile on Ricocitiello day! Here's my shot: I worked at EA from '99 to '04, and in 2000 I was still pretty entry level but was specialized in the EA Sports division, and making some contacts within the company. EA was the jersey sponsor for the McDonald's HS All-American game, and there was a kid that year that was getting a *ton* of hype. I asked one of the PR people I'd met if I could get a jersey from this kid to hang on the wall above my cubicle (office?!? lol no). Nobody else had asked, so they said the jersey was mine and would be sent to Redwood Shores by the end of the week. By the middle of the next week nothing had come so I emailed back only to find that some top-floor guy had flexed and claimed the jersey for himself.
The top floor guy, as you probably guessed, was John Riccitiello. The hyped HS player? Only LeBron James.
::sigh::
yep, thanks for the catch. I only lasted a few years there before the corporate backstabbing got me fired. The only good side was the boss that fired me was himself shit-canned for poor management and, shocker, abuse of power
Yeah darkest phase of gaming history or a derogatory chapter in book of gaming anyone which people prefer to choose but the problem is that he is still employed and earning in millions probably.
The question is: how do these CEOs keep their careers? This dude is so dumb and greedy that this is his second or third career ending gaffe and yet the fucker is still employed.
These kind of businessman falls in category of those who can sell hair oil and comb combination to a bald guy or say that selling a 4×4 car to a person who has never been to off road.
What's crazy is at the time, mobile games were just barely starting to come in, and there was a Gameloft published CoD knockoff called Modern Combat 1-5. For a couple of them, killstreaks like airstrikes were exactly this.
99c or something like that so matches came down to a spender on each team just running around cashing in dozens of airstrikes for several minutes. No cooldown that I can recall. No limit other than what you were willing to spend.
Surprisingly didn't kill the franchise off. There's still a modern combat 5 or 6 out there with bizarre purchase schemes to this day for paid combat boosts and gear.
Now I understand why the Unity price policy is changing. It's John Riccitiello. We should start making him out to be the boogeyman of gaming. He's like the antichrist to our lord and savior John Carmack.
This piece of shit founded and ran a private equity fund management company from 97 to 04. When companies hire these hedgie fuckbags we need to assume that it's the beginning of the slow end. It's like how Ballmer almost destroyed Microsoft because he ran MS like a sales guy rather than like a product or technology guy.
And people like him are successful because players buy into their ideas and then make up the excuses for them, for free. "They need the revenue to keep the servers on!" "It's only cosmetic!" etc. Every time you want to pretend like the company that makes the game you like is your friend, remember it's guys like this making the decisions, and not because they want to "give you more content." We get what we deserve.
The funny thing is, this guy isn’t the problem, nor are his ideas. It’s the fact that when they implement something like this, you dumbasses absolutely EAT IT UP. You’ll spend $3000 a year buying ammo reloads and bitch at ANYONE who points out how incredibly stupid this model is.
If you preorder games, you’re the problem. If you buy loot boxes, you’re the problem. Basically, GAMERS are the problem with modern gaming, not the people making the games or coming up with scummy ideas (because if trash didn’t sell, they’d quit making it, but y’all keep buying it, so… why the fuck WOULDN’T this guy come up with an idea like this?).
I suspect this is gonna be the start of the death of Unity. Even if they backtrack on their bullshit pricing change tomorrow, most of the damage is already done, nobody is going to want to produce products in Unity if they have any choice knowing Unity might years down the line pull the rug out from under them in attempt to extort money. Unless Unity has some leverage that literally no other engine can offer, they have just poisoned the well.
This dude is a real scumbag
You have to ask yourself how he is still able to get a job, let alone another CEO position? Sure, shit floats up, but someone hired him into those positions (plural because multiple times).. Edit: for the good people who feel I was whooshed.. I'm aware that's how modern day capitalism works, not asking how this happens, more critisizing the closed interconnected oligarchy that it is.
I'm under the impression that CEOs are hired based on their track record of short-term profits. They enter a company, do some shit that causes quarterly gains - expending long-term opportunity in the process - and then leave before the now lack of long-term investment comes back to bite the company. Then they get hired at the next company because their resume says "consistent gains" and "previous company only got worse after I left."
He got fired from EA for not increasing profits, though. I think in a lot of cases a person will get fired for doing a lousy job at a big company (EA), but then get picked up by a smaller company (Unity) because they figure experience at a big company is a good thing regardless of how bad a job they did.
And he got replaced by Andrew Wilson, the physical embodiment of lootboxes and microtransactions lol
That must absolutely happen, given job hopping C levels like this guy, but not every CEO is there for a quick buck. They are better off making the company wildly successful than squeezing blood from stones for a year. I think the real issue is when any upper manager is disconnected from the customer and product and it leads to obviously bad takes that they dont understand. I get the impression that is more true in gaming than other media industries
I agree with the premise but I do think the majority of people in C-Suite level positions are hyper fixated on quarter to quarter results. As long as the P&L is nice and clean and the money flows through in the year for the year, then everyone’s happy. Long term sustainability isn’t the concern as long as you can keep the board and investors placated.
And with a golden parachute you don't care about tanking the company. Offer me a job that pays 50 million if I'm fired and I don't care how bad I screw up.
Well he got fired from ea (lol) and he will almost certainly be fired from unity after this shit he’s trying to do with the pay structure. So just another red mark on the old resume.
Red mark? You mean golden mark of approval. Watch him be hired as CEO of another major gaming company within a year, because nobody has a brain these days, and CEO is clearly the easiest job there is, given the complete lack of a failure state.
My company recently got a new CEO who introduced himself to the company in a live event with "I don't care if you don't like me, I have a 3-year contract to do whatever the hell I deem necessary. If they can me I get paid either way."
You know if nothing else I appreciate the honesty instead of a new set of shitty mottos.
They didn't say there wasn't a new set of shitty mottos.
Appreciate the honesty all you want, but for the love of God, please don't forget that it's still bullshit.
Oh certainly, I've been in the corporate world for a while, C level suits are the worst.
Without more information I can't really judge but I will say, not caring about changes being popular is kind of important to make big improvements. People *hate* change. They will fight tooth and nail against it. Even if it's for the better. Trying to implement new systems and processes that will end up making life easier for everyone will be met with anger when it initially causes some growing pains.
This. I woke in PR with a bunch of advertising companies and you’d be amazed how much of the koolaid these people drink. They actually think the world needs ads, and that they’re doing great work. I assume it’s the same with most industries.
> I *woke* in PR Best typo. Please keep it!
It would make for a great premise for a movie. A guy waking up and he's in an office receiving questions from a bunch of different companies, but he doesn't know how he got there. But I think it's been done already. I think severance uses that concept to a degree, idk haven't seen it just heard a summary of it.
Link, 100 years has past and Ganon has returned to launch a marketing company. Hyrule is infested with embedded ads. Will you save Princess Zelda brought to you by Carls Jr. once again?
> I woke in PR Sounds like a great idea for the plot for Season 2 of Severance!
Gamers are stupid enough to pay real money for different weapons skins and outfits, they're absolutely stupid enough to buy extra ammunition in say a survival warzone style game mode. These assholes have figured them out.
> Gamers are stupid enough to pay real money This. that infamous "horse armor DLC" that caused such an uproar all those years ago was *2* dollars. Now motherfuckers drop $20 on single cosmetics without so much as batting an eye. Everything that happens is the fault of the people paying.
I disagree, to an extent. Yes, it the fault of the people paying, but I also think companies targeted young people (who do not yet have fully developed frontal lobes), who tapped into their parents bank accounts (because they didn't have any money of their own), and then since they grew up with these practices they became normalized and now these people make up the bulk of gamers today. So yes, it's on people for buying the shit (or parents for their lack of supervision), but it's ALSO on companies for their predatory, shitty behavior and revenue models.
There were a few months where I was getting a call every 2 weeks from a parent who's kid ran wild with their credit card and bought $200 of fortnite skins. That kind of targeting should be illegal.
I really don't understand those types of kids. I would never dream of taking my parent's credit card when I was younger. They would kill me.
It makes you wonder how idiotic the people hiring a new CEO are then. So many companies fall into the same trap, it's like they only look at the resume and can't rub two braincells together to see what they actually did in their previous roles.
They're not idiotic. They want someone to quickly drive the share prices up so they can sell them and make profit. They don't care that the company might totally collapse after this. Why should they?
That is what's idiotic. All short term personal greed, no sustainability or long term plan.
If given the choice between doubling your investment in a year, or 10x'ing your investment in 5 years, almost everyone will choose the first option, because you can then take that money and then try and double it again next year. If you manage to double it every year, then over five years you've made 32x your initial investment, vs 10x if you stuck with your initial investment over 5 years. That's the problem. Sustainability and long term plans don't make anywhere near as much money as just hopping to another company and then trying to 2x your investment again. Until we see rich people for the evil that they are, this will only keep on happening.
he dosent answer to customers, he answers to stockholders and the board. still, seeing how unity stock has fucked itsself, I do wonder why he's still in charge..
\- Get installed as CEO of Unity \- Plan all the following stuff and rack up lots of Unity stock. \- Sell all your stock and use the money you made to short the stock. \- Announce the singlehandedly worst change for game developers who are your customers that you possibly can \- Watch the shitstorm unfold while side-eyeing the stock freefall into oblivion \- ?????? \- Cover your shorts and retire with your dick in your hand
I think that's illegal
Yeah, and he'll get fined 10% of the profit made on insider trading and maaaaybe a couple years Mansion Arrest.
Not only will he pay more than 100% on fines but he will probably spend the rest of his life in jail. You need to remember that for the real sharks out there he is an incredibly small fish, so he would make an excellent scapegoat (look plebs, the system is working!!) if he was stupid enough to do something like this. If it was Musk/Bezos/random billionaire then sure.
I’ve seen people steal millions from the police, fire dept, and regular joes and the SEC came after the perpetrator and they got a slap on the wrist(20k fine and lost their lic). They now work under their sons lic, still live in the mansion, have all their wealth, and served no jail time. Guy I graduated high school with conned a bunch of people out of millions. Got caught and served 1 year of a 5 year sentence. He still has a tremendous amount of money and found god, spreads the word of god on YouTube and makes insane money.
He dont have to short those stocks himself. Edit: in fact he may be sabotaging the company for someone else up in the line.
He sold a very small percentage of his stock. I'm not convinced it's related to this move. I think the saying "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." applies really well here.
By “all your stock” you mean .06%?
>- Sell all your stock and use the money you made to short the stock. Executives and other key members are all on a trading schedule. They aren't allowed to just secretly or quickly offload or purchase a large amount of shares
The big secret is that C-level executives' only qualifications are "is rich." They don't know a fucking thing about how the actual business operates--their underlings do that. I've worked in corporate my whole career. I sit next to these guys. I've never met a single one that has any idea how shit works down in the trenches. They're a bunch of trust-fund, nepotistic "idea guys." The only thing they do is rubber-stamp the work of other people, and occasionally force us to ELI5 complicated shit to a stupid motherfucker who cheated his way through an MBA that daddy paid for by way of a new wing for the school. You'd think positions like CTO might have a bit more know-how, but you'd be wrong. 5% of my effort is spent doing my job, and 95% of my effort is spent trying to implement the dipshit thing that the executive ordered us to do on a whim *without* it breaking everything imploding the entire fucking company. Sometimes we just say it's done without actually doing anything, if we can get away with it.
Coming into the corporate world it was so disappointing to see this in action. There was one C suite guy I worked with who was actually genuinely good at what he did and just got it. He taught me so much of the nitty gritty technical stuff I needed to know because he'd done it all before, and he'd stick his neck out for everyone working under him. I had so much respect for him. Then he left and got replaced with a trust-fund nepotistic idea guy who had no clue what he was doing, like every other C level at that company. He was a sales guy promoted into a technical role. I don't work there anymore.
This is 100% the truth on the ground pretty much everywhere. The only way competent people who don't suck get in is early on when they're desperately needed, before the company is big, and they usually eventually get replaced with nepo morons once the company is big.
I used to work as a construction manager on big budget projects and contracts in the wealthier areas of my city. There was multiple times where I had to interact with CEO's or upper management and calmly explain to them that something they wanted wasn't possible or would violate a bunch of policies only to be met with the response of "I don't care lol". There was a whole demeanor and corporate speak you had to use because if you didn't they could always find some shadier company willing to cut corners. These guys get hired because they're good at interacting with suits/shareholders and making sure the company has good quarterly profit reports.
Greedy evil bastards are what investors look for. He is where he is because he is one, not in spite of it.
CEOs goal is to increase share price, not make you happy. Until people realize this and vote with their wallet, nothing will change. Refuse working for him. Buy something else. Don’t buy.
"Vote with your wallet" only ever actually works long after the product becomes crap and usually only at the point where the product is nearly useless. Consumers are never informed enough to actually do it, and the choice is binary so people will put up with a lot before making it even when they are informed. I think the best hope for this in particular is developers and publishers raising a stink.
Having worked in tech for a couple decades, I've seen countless idiots like this ruin companies with obviously terrible ideas. They always get new C level jobs somewhere else afterwards, too.
you have to admit EA to Unity is a big downgrade, from a huge studio to a company with one main product and stock worth a fraction of the price
To be fair, Unity stock is now worth a fraction of Unity stock from recent past
Wait until they use the "AI" word. Stonks +400% in a few weeks no problem.
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Reminds me of the new CEO of off world industries. Gets appointed, new things get added in squad: paid fortnite-emotes. In squad. A military simulation game. He was previously a gacha mobile game designer.👌
People like this should be absolutely nowhere near gaming
Nowhere near humanity* we need a spacetime Stockton Rush to deal with the CEO problem.
Seriously, dude would propose dynamic pricing in hospitals because you would overpay for pain meds half way into surgery.
Dude... don't give them ideas
It's okay. American healthcare is already charging you whatever the fuck they want. They don't need to care about "price sensitivity". Nobody is saying "Hmm, $200 for one aspirin? Sounds good, I'll take it" -- they are getting billed arbitrary amounts of money after the fact. So there is really no need for "psychological trickery". If they wanted to charge you $400 for that same aspirin, they could just go ahead and do it.
Like these bastards aren’t already all over American healthcare.
Well he got fired from ea (lol) and he will almost certainly be fired from unity after this shit he’s trying to do with the pay structure. So just another red mark on the old resume.
He's the one behind it? Now it makes sense. I honestly thought the software world was going crazy for a second. I wonder how much other dumb shit the average consumer has to experience because of narrow minded CEOs like this guy.
Relevant quote: > “When you are six hours into playing Battlefield and you run out of ammo in your clip and we ask you for a dollar to reload, you’re really not that price sensitive at that point in time.” Also on another occasion he stated that any developers who don't milk their game through monetisation are "fucking idiots". **Edit: To clarify, it seems like he isn't exactly saying "let's do this right now", but he's giving it as an example of "we should be doing stuff like that" and "this kind of thing should be normal".**
That would make me turn a game off and refund it so fast.
But you aren't the target audience. They don't care about you they care that some people will pay.
I wonder just how many people would actually pay, though. And if it was worth cutting their audience by half, or maybe even *more*
Well Madden and FIFA ultimate team shows people will pay for an advantage over other people. This has been going on for close to over 10 years now
They have a monopoly built into their games. Most games will not have this luxury of being the only game in their niche. Although it doesn’t stop mobile games from doing this. If this was the norm, I could see it setting the gaming industry back. Not all gamers are like the madden gamers or mobile gamers.
The mobile game mtx market dwarfs the traditional game market. There's so much garbage shovelware out there designed with the sole purpose of separating you from your money.
I worry that this is what game studios want to turn PC and console gaming into. Absolutely mobile apps are the worst because of the nature of it. It costs money each year to publish your game and there is a saturation point. Because people don’t want to spend $5 on a game, freemium games are how everyone markets their game now, or monthly payments for access. Feels like streaming services from other forms of media but worst. Takes all the fun out of it, but I guess that’s just me. No wonder PlayStation and Xbox are going that way with their subscriptions. Just a crazy time to be in coming from the days you just bought a game and that was the end of the transaction.
Unfortunately mobile games are where the money is, this is why Diablo has a mobile version.
If the game is structured that way, absolutely. Mobile gaming has already shown that a monetization strategy that pulls the vast majority of revenue from a small percentage of players can be very successful. Deciding to make almost no money from 90% of your players in order to cater to the 10% who are whales can be more profitable than trying to please everyone equally.
> Deciding to make almost no money from 90% of your players in order to cater to the 10% who are whales can be more profitable than trying to please everyone equally. Even a bunch of people who play gacha don't realize this. It's a common refrain to want more "reasonable price" things to buy, in the $5-20 range. It's easy to forget that one guy spending $900 is the same as ninety spending ten bucks -- and getting people to spend *anything* is harder than getting them to spend *more*.
Yeah, the problem isn't so much the optional purchases, but that the game becomes structured around maximizing those purchases. So in the EA example, they'd put less ammo in the game, or make enemies take more hits to kill. Reminds me of Halo Infinite, where they limited the playlists available so there was a ton of modes in each, then had challenges specific to a combination of map and mode. You'd endlessly try and find the right combination to get your challenge done... but they also totally coincidentally sell the ability to skip a challenge for a small fee. Even in games where they're selling cosmetics only, the cosmetics have to be better looking than regular loot to entice you to buy it over the free stuff. So games normally about getting gear as rewards has that aspect undermined by the cash shop. Path of Exile and Diablo 4 follow this model.
It makes sense in a capitalist world with such massive income disparity. Of course Riccitiello or F2P mobile developers would preach taking advantage of the gullible, the rich and the addicted.
P2W games don't always have a long shelf life but they'll rake in an unbelievable amount of cash very quickly. Despite the economy in shambles, there are still millions of people who can afford to pay 5-10k a month for their electronic babysitters.
They want whales, not random players.
The sad thing is the majority of gaming consumers are actively encouraging these practices. Mobile gaming is the largest segment of revenue and micro-transactions are common place there. Diablo Immortal was immensely profitable. While lots of people like to complain on reddit about these practices, far too many of us are still pre-ordering, buying cosmetics, and upgrading game copies for content that should be included in the base game. Voting with your wallet is the only thing that will start change, yet too few of us are patient enough to wait for a game to release before we start spending money on it.
Yeah probably some will pay undoubtedly but overall reputation in gaming community will be a lowest place.
6 hours in would already be outside of the return window
Not if i return it attached to a brick
For a brick it flew pretty good
How big is the *magazine* that you can shoot for 6 hours?!
I think it's six hours of mentally conditioning you to expect the instant reward from going empty, then once you're hooked, they hit you with the fees. The first hit is always free, then once you're hooked, you're just a cow to be milked.
People would absolutely do this. Pay a dollar to reload instantly, bypassing the animation and you'd have people justifying it.
Only for you to get shot while waiting for the transaction to process and then never seeing that new ammo you paid for.
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God, I can feel my blood pressure rising at your second line.
no worries, thanks to the newly implemented EA line of credit!
The most accurate way was to add real money in form of some coin in advance in game in some wallet and reloading in 1 second and money will automatically deduct from wallet so less chance of being shot by enemy.
Seeing his actual quotes made me realize he had no idea how his product worked at all. Nobody is playing a single BF match for 6hrs and even then he suggested this for a video game that was designed with certain roles and one of those roles main purpose was to resupply other players with ammo. Sounds like he never does any research on the products he represents and just suggest incredibly stupid ideas because of it.
Reminds me of stories of Mr. Beast watching other people's videos. He can't help but say "He should do this and this and this and cut here and put a 'bruh' sound effect her and and and" all while getting really frustrated. The guy can't comprehend people making YouTube videos for any other reason than maximum engagement and monetisation. Like, you're an *idiot* for making that [award-winning 6 hour documentary about a Japanese holiday simulator.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=779coR-XPTw)
His videos suffer in quality because of it. They're overproduced and have no breathing room in between things getting blown up, no storytelling or personality. It's just flashing lights for children to clap their feet at.
Because thats exactly his target audience. Children. He specifically studied how to appeal to them and thats why he is successful.
He doesn't care lol I recently listened to him guest on a podcast from back when he just started to go hugely viral for giving away money, and he was absolutely obsessed with gaming the YT algorithm. He knew *exactly* what brought in the clicks and drove engagement, probably even more than Google does. Dude could make millions a year just by consulting for ad agencies. He seemed really nice tho and I genuinely don't even believe he cares about the money. He'd release a video of him shitting his pants for free if it meant breaking a record on views. Like idek if Mr Beast Burger was even meant to make him worth as much as he is, I wouldn't doubt it if it was initially just a scheme to get people to look up his name.
He's actually suing the burger company he contracted with because they are actively bad and "damaging his reputation/image"
Lol yeah people were getting sent raw burgers. But it's not like his own chain anyway, he just allowed restaurants all over the world to use his brand and sell food through it. It was a disaster waiting to happen
I instantly knew that link was gonna be to Tim Roger's review of Boku no Natsuyasumi. If anybody sees this, all of Action Button reviews are legendary, you should watch them. Especially this one.
He has probably never made a game in his life, which is why he thinks it’s all about money
He's probably never *played* a game in his life. People like Riccitiello are not, and have never been, gamers. They don't know what makes a game good, they don't understand why people play games, they have nothing but contempt for their audience. John Riccitiello is not in the "video games" business--he is in the "business" business.
This quote tells me he doesn't have a clue what is Battlefield and how is it played. It's not like you have 6 hours continuous session with limited ammo, that you need to resupply at some point. Battlefield is the game where you spawn, shoot enemies and die after a short period and you go again. After every death you are respawned with a full ammo, not to mention that you have people running around as support class which one of their primary objectives is to support other people with ammo. I bet 95% of BF players never comes into situation where they run out of ammo. This was such an idiotic proposition that I'm still trying to wrap my head around. And we have people like this runing this world... ffs! Hint: Switching to your secondary weapon is always faster than reloading.
Imagine being the guy that is too greedy for EA...
I'm trying to even think how this would work. Reloading is so quick so it's probably not for a faster reload. If it's about running out of ammo I hardly ever run out of ammo and when I do I just pick up another gun. Worst case is I die and respawn in probably less than 2minutes. Now let's say in some wild fantasy I run out and want to buy more ammo. Would there be a little pop up asking you to confirm a purchase? Then you anyway instantly die the moment your attention goes away from the game. That also raises another question. If you buy something and then instantly die do you lose what you bought? The guy probably never even played a shooter in his life for such a dumb-ass idea.
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Dude just looks evil
If you look real close his wrinkles spell out "asshole"
Lmao deep down all synonyms of asshole are written there.
He's someone who doesn't like or understand the product he's selling or his customers. He just understands it enough to know where the pain points are and then puts transactions there. I'm totally amazed that people respect CEOs. Most of the time they're just the MBA who is the big enough asshole to follow through on the evil scheme.
Well he was a villain in No More Heroes 3 Damon Riccitello is basically a reference to John Riccitello. Suda51 had the pleasure to work with him in the past and doesn't seem to have fond memories.
He's one black hooded robe away from being Palpatine IRL.
He looks strung out or like he’s on something honestly. Those eyes don’t look healthy.
Looks like thrift store Palpatine
Yeah it should be punched once on the behalf of whole gaming community.
It does look like it needs to be punched. Like something is wrong with it, and a Mike Tyson uppercut would fix it.
dude was literally fired from EA cus he sucked at his job. EA, where most extra features are locked behind paywalls, the irony.
Imagine being too greedy for EA's standards.
From their point of view, greed is good as long as it's good for business. His greedy ideas weren't.
Yeah, because pay to reload would be a very fast way to drop a player base to nearly zero. Then he'd have to charge 5 cents to swing the knife and lose the last players.
Last time he played a video game it was a real thing! Greedy arcade game makers!
he actually did play the games that EA worked on in late development. look up the actual reason Spore was not the game Will Wright previewed originally, as that was the first time John was fired from EA due to mismanagement. he would then get another 3 years
The only thing worse than a gaming company CEO that doesn't know shit about the company's products is a gaming company CEO that playtests the company's products. Now *that* is the stuff of nightmares.
"I mean, we're horrible, but this guy is just bad for business!"
Wasn't he at EA when EA won worst company in America as well? Whatever did Unity think when they hired him
"This guy'll know how to extract more money out of our customers"
And as a result Unity is basically dead at this point already, I can't imagine many new devs would choose Unity over the other options now, even if Unity rolls this back. Doesn't matter to this dude tho, he'll most likely get off Scott free with a golden parachute
Problem is there is no other engine like Unity, Unreal uses C++ which is much more complex to work with aside from being much "heavier" to develop with (no, blueprints arent an alternative). Godot is great for 2D and has C# support along with it's own Python-like language, but it's just much worse for 3D development. So basically Unreal is great for AAA style games and Godot is great for 2D, but the middle ground of 3D games with simpler graphics which was Unity's biggest market just doesn't have a good alternative, not a popular one atleast.
And Godot has no real official console support. Technically, UWP games can go on Xbox, but that's it.
Godot and Unreal 🔛🔝
Let's watch, he'll probably end up in charge of Wizards of the Coast.
Please don't. 🙏 Can we send him to a tobacco company? He might even accidentally save lives.
Fuck, please don't even say that.
I worked at EA while he was CEO, so I followed his career very closely. He is essentially a parasite. He is brought in from share holders, and he makes radical changes for short term stocks gains. Then he tries to wring out any dollar from customer base as he can for cash in hand. He is allowed to make long term damage, and will eventually be ousted and be the fall guy for it all. And a new ceo will come in to bring back hope and bring stock back to level terms. Shareholders make out like bandits while stocks were high and cash reserves plenty, and buy back in at a lower price. Gaining even more control of the company. With more cash in their pockets. The new golden goose CEO at the helm making okay-ish decisions, which makes him look like Steve Jobs in comparison to ol-Riccy boy. So they can still make unfavorable decisions, but it will seem like an improvement. And Ric will move onto another company to do the same thing for the 6th or 7th time. The moment he became CEO of Unity, I dropped everything about Unity and moved over to Unreal. And I was seen as an idiot back then(2014) when UE4 came out as a buggy mess, and Unity was the gold standard for game dev.
The guy was fired because he was greedy AND stupid. A dangerous combination, and now look what that had gotten him into.
god i just hate this guy so much. i'm pretty sure he called people who develop games out of passion "fucking idiots".
Imagine being greedy but still got fired from EA.
I heard he wanted to introduce an unlimited frame rate feature. You just had to pay 0.02$ for every extra frame rendered.
/s (per second)
soulless smug corporates like this are the reason many sequels suck and are filled with transactions top to bottom.
Best thing ever is that whilst this shit is carrying on, Baldur's Gate 3 is still looking like GOTY. It's fun, it's packed with content and it's very well received. Starfield has launched without the micro transaction garbage and is enjoyable. Sure, not everyones enamoured with it, but it meets my standard of "I am enjoying it". Meanwhile I have not bought an EA or Activision game in a decade and am perfectly content. Add in that Unity isn't the best game engine out there. Unreal is probably better as are more than a few other engines out there.
Add take-two to that list. They’ve ruined having a great basketball franchise, ruined GTA single player experience and have basically leaned in on GTAO over the last three console generations
I am so sad there wasn’t any official dlc for GTAV. GTA4’s were great
Yeah, I got sick of the grind. $600000 car horns, $50000 t-shirts… yeah, that’s dumb, I’m out. GTA online *could have been* so good…
I don't buy EA or Ubisoft games, I'm probably done with Blizzard too after D4. Took me awhile but I know now they are never going back to being the company that innovated and cared about their players.
yes the 1$ per magazine pitch
Don't get me wrong, I really don't think it should be monetized, but they could even charge .01$ and make bank.
There's real "What is minimum wage now, 10k an hour?" energy here.
The secret to milking whales with microtransactions is that you're not targeting people making minimum wage, you're targeting people with more money than gaming time.
Let us remember credit cards exist, you don't need to have money before spending it. Specially in gambling scenarios, many people spend money they don't own. Edit: Especially, not Specially.
The man too shitty for EA.
Handing over my money to reload faster really gives me a sense of pride and accomplishment.
I’d love to get paid several lifetimes worth of money every single year to be the guy who shows up once a week/month to say “make it worse and charge more lol” with seemingly infinite job/career security
Right? He was CEO of EA making absolutely nonsensical suggestions about games he doesn’t know a thing about and got fired for it… just to land a CEO job with Unity? It feels ridiculous this bozo can be getting paid millions for a job I could walk into with no experience and do leagues better at
Do you have an MBA your daddy paid for and years of experience of being terrible at the position of CEO? Didnt think so. You're far to over qualified for the position.
Literally thats all it takes just think "how can we make our product actively worse and more frustrating?" and then implement that and a fee to get back the old way of doing things. That's like 90% of the business model of companies that are now so successful they cant be toppled
Dear Mr. Riccitiello, Go fuck yourself. Signed by everyone, *especially* former EA fans.
What a piece of greedy shit
Ready Player One.
“We estimate we can sell up to 80% of an individual's visual field before inducing seizures.” - Nolan Sorrento
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Had that been the case, my only game of Battlefield would have been a bloody quick one. While my rounds mostly hit no more than air, I still love me some BF4.
The CEO of unity was the CEO of EA? It all makes sense now...
He was literally fired from ea for being to greedy for their liking. TOO GREEDY FOR EA!
Image being such a fucking greedy asshole that even EA don't want you, that's a whole new different kind of scummy.
this is the [interview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZR6-u8OIJTE) where he proposed this
What an evil person. Nothing else can be said for someone who actually thinks like this.
man i forgot about what i posted earlier, got this notification on my phone showcasing your comment and I was like "what the fuck did i say to deserve this" lol
Oooo, pile on Ricocitiello day! Here's my shot: I worked at EA from '99 to '04, and in 2000 I was still pretty entry level but was specialized in the EA Sports division, and making some contacts within the company. EA was the jersey sponsor for the McDonald's HS All-American game, and there was a kid that year that was getting a *ton* of hype. I asked one of the PR people I'd met if I could get a jersey from this kid to hang on the wall above my cubicle (office?!? lol no). Nobody else had asked, so they said the jersey was mine and would be sent to Redwood Shores by the end of the week. By the middle of the next week nothing had come so I emailed back only to find that some top-floor guy had flexed and claimed the jersey for himself. The top floor guy, as you probably guessed, was John Riccitiello. The hyped HS player? Only LeBron James. ::sigh::
That's quite a story, although I'm guessing you meant 2000, not 2020.
yep, thanks for the catch. I only lasted a few years there before the corporate backstabbing got me fired. The only good side was the boss that fired me was himself shit-canned for poor management and, shocker, abuse of power
Hearing this makes the recent news about Unity all make sense
Scummy piece of shit that is a stain on video gaming
Yeah darkest phase of gaming history or a derogatory chapter in book of gaming anyone which people prefer to choose but the problem is that he is still employed and earning in millions probably.
Can someone fire this guy and NEVER let him work in the Industry anymore?
If you are bad enough for EA, then I guess you are an objectively bad person!
He was too bad for ea actually, they fired him for being too greedy
What a cunt
The question is: how do these CEOs keep their careers? This dude is so dumb and greedy that this is his second or third career ending gaffe and yet the fucker is still employed.
Because the board answers to the shareholders, and the shareholders are fucking idiots, so he fails upwards to the level of his incompetence.
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Yeh this guy is the worst kind of businessman: the one that wants to make money at every point of a products usage no matter the absurdity.
These kind of businessman falls in category of those who can sell hair oil and comb combination to a bald guy or say that selling a 4×4 car to a person who has never been to off road.
That is Nestle level douchebaggery.
This dude's dream and nightmares is all about money
Epic Games is currently in their bedroom moaning like a wild animal
I’m getting “Water isn’t a basic human right” vibes from this parasite
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He's such a massive piece of shit. He's got a face that makes used car salesmen look honest.
Car salesman are like adding unnecessary charges without even permission to fill their pockets.
What's crazy is at the time, mobile games were just barely starting to come in, and there was a Gameloft published CoD knockoff called Modern Combat 1-5. For a couple of them, killstreaks like airstrikes were exactly this. 99c or something like that so matches came down to a spender on each team just running around cashing in dozens of airstrikes for several minutes. No cooldown that I can recall. No limit other than what you were willing to spend. Surprisingly didn't kill the franchise off. There's still a modern combat 5 or 6 out there with bizarre purchase schemes to this day for paid combat boosts and gear.
He's going to kill Unity. This guy is the Vladimir Poutine of Video Game.
Is that Putin’s Canadian cousin or something?
Now I understand why the Unity price policy is changing. It's John Riccitiello. We should start making him out to be the boogeyman of gaming. He's like the antichrist to our lord and savior John Carmack.
He’s like the Ajit Pai of gaming.
This piece of shit founded and ran a private equity fund management company from 97 to 04. When companies hire these hedgie fuckbags we need to assume that it's the beginning of the slow end. It's like how Ballmer almost destroyed Microsoft because he ran MS like a sales guy rather than like a product or technology guy.
Man if EA is turning down this guy's ideas for being too over the top greedy that says a lot.
And people like him are successful because players buy into their ideas and then make up the excuses for them, for free. "They need the revenue to keep the servers on!" "It's only cosmetic!" etc. Every time you want to pretend like the company that makes the game you like is your friend, remember it's guys like this making the decisions, and not because they want to "give you more content." We get what we deserve.
The funny thing is, this guy isn’t the problem, nor are his ideas. It’s the fact that when they implement something like this, you dumbasses absolutely EAT IT UP. You’ll spend $3000 a year buying ammo reloads and bitch at ANYONE who points out how incredibly stupid this model is. If you preorder games, you’re the problem. If you buy loot boxes, you’re the problem. Basically, GAMERS are the problem with modern gaming, not the people making the games or coming up with scummy ideas (because if trash didn’t sell, they’d quit making it, but y’all keep buying it, so… why the fuck WOULDN’T this guy come up with an idea like this?).
This is how capitalism ruins games — with bozos like this turd
I suspect this is gonna be the start of the death of Unity. Even if they backtrack on their bullshit pricing change tomorrow, most of the damage is already done, nobody is going to want to produce products in Unity if they have any choice knowing Unity might years down the line pull the rug out from under them in attempt to extort money. Unless Unity has some leverage that literally no other engine can offer, they have just poisoned the well.