I saw recent studies show that Facebook is no longer cool to younger generations, and the older generations are either not remotely interested in VR, and/or aren’t interested in Meta out of principle (security, ethics, etc). I know that’s hand-wavy and anecdotal, but I’m trying to gather who is going to buy these in big enough numbers to make them profitable. Probably just another vector that they want to hoard your data from.
The worst thing about jagex is their management. They are so out of touch and only see runescape as something to squeeze money from. They should be happy they have generated as much revenue as they have from such an old game. Last I checked it was pulling in hundreds of millions in profit.
@chloyster good, he's been a plague on the industry. When you see your customers as wallets with legs you are bad for the people and bad for the company.
Standard tactic when making unpopular changes, and a company would really like to keep them. Sacrificial CEO gets replaced, to make it look like things changed.
He should start a game company with Don Mattrick and the ghost of Bernie Stolar. Then everyone will know which games NOT to buy, just like back in the days of Acclaim.
Edit: Actually this guy signed onto Unity in 2014 Unity was still privately held. It went public in September of 2020. Unity's founder, David Helgason is still on their board and served as some sort of Senior Executive whatever position at Unity. Dude still has a 4% share of their stock.
So anyway, probably this David Helgason character who hired him. And/or whoever else (including Riccitiello!?) who was on the board at the time.
The relationship between CEOs and boards of directors is so fucked up and incestuous...
In any case and in retrospect, Johnny boy was 100% hired to cue them for up for the eventual IPO and boy did he ever. It's amazing how fast companies go down hill when they become publicly traded.
He’s been involved in several of the big Unity scandals, yes.
This most recent event wasn’t one thing, it was a culmination of poor decisions. If Unity had been sunshine and rainbows all up until now, then the reaction wouldn’t have been so bad. It was the final nail in the coffin, really.
Since he’s been involved, it’s been fuck up after fuck up.
Off the top of my head there’s failing to prepare for massive changes to the ads they could run on Apple and Google’s platforms and then realising that the money they were making was way less than expected, purchasing a company associated with malware, calling game developers “fucking idiots”, growing the company enormously over lockdown and then realising they’ve pissed all their money away. I don’t really know what a CEO actually does so a lot of that could be just company decisions, but JR definitely seems like a loose cannon who can’t help being wildly unprofessional.
There was also a bunch of sexual harrassment that was swept under the rug. He’s an incredible scumbag and a shitty CEO, which is why the psychopaths that inhabit corporate boards seem to love him
9 years of everyone telling him that forcing the UNITY splash screen on “baby’s first game” was a bad idea and was hurting the engine, because people were assuming all games made in the engine were bad, because good games didn’t show they also used Unity. Now that he is gone this changes.
Also he is a huge fan of the “metaverse” idea: venturebeat.com/…/unity-ceo-john-riccitiello-the-… and I am sure some of Unity’s money went there at a time they could not afford it and with nothing to show for it.
My only argument against your opinion, is that he actually has a trackable history of poor performance as a CEO and a trackable record of very bad monetization schemes. He’s the reason EA is the way it is.
This isn’t the first company he’s ruined the reputation of.
Granted, the board that elected him is still there. That’s an issue that will persist for a while.
My only argument against your opinion, is that he actually has a trackable history of poor performance as a CEO and a trackable record of very bad monetization schemes.
…which could be because he has offered this service to many boards in the past.
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