Unity CEO John Riccitiello is retiring, effective immediately

Drops a nuke on their stock

"Well, guess my work is done. I'll take my $400 million golden parachute and just step over the pieces of my broken company as I shuffle out to my car. Peace, bro."

Then 6 months later gets a VP job somewhere else because he "has experience" all the while eyeing another run at CEO.
- Nah once they're CEOs they're good. They just go sit on various boards making millions for doing relatively nothing.
Someone find out if he or his family sold stock before the drop.
- I've heard he sold some stock but it was like a recurring sell-this-much-every-this-often type of thing so it wasn't out of the ordinary is what I heard.
I'm not sure if it's an accident, but the value of $400m is exactly how much private equity firm Silver Lake invested in them in 2017. They were backed by a lot of private equity and VC money before they had an IPO.

Unity IPO'd 3 years ago in Sept 2020 at $52 per share, they're now at $30/share, and have been under $50/share since May of 2022. The chairman of the board, Roelof Frederik Botha, is a partner at Sequoia Capital.

This is a business run by VC / PE people, that's doing shitty in the market, and was doing badly before this whole license fee event. It's not going to come to its senses and start behaving well just because the scapegoat CEO is gone. They need to juice their revenue streams to make investors happy, because it's worth significantly less than it was at the IPO.

I just hope nobody is saying "Yay, now that the evil CEO is gone, Unity will be good again." Anybody thinking that is just setting themselves up for whatever the company does next to juice their failing stock price.
Hmm can he exercise his stock at a lower rate now?

Then, with the assumption that the company adjusts in the coming years, sell for profit?

Pisses me off that CEOs never get fired for their bullshit and get to "retire" or "resign" like they didn't just make the most boneheaded decision that severely hurt the company.

There really needs to be some organizational structure where the CEOs have the power to make the decisions they make, but the employees have the power to punish and fire them when they do shit like this. No golden parachutes for them!

This is actually wrong. There's a near 100% chance that the decision was made by the board, and also the decision to remove the CEO. So we're talking about the fall guy, but being an insider, the fall guy will get a tidy sum for the dive

Then the CEO can be recycled to some other project, and a new CEO instated at Unity, so they can pivot or double down with no moral dilemma. In reality, the board was there all along and it's all a big PR game
- Also if we're talking about avoiding responsibility cause of privilege then the boards of companies are the topic.
  
  The C suite are just managers, usually wealthy from their own career rather than heritage. Board people are almost all old wealth, a parasitic race of nepo babies who ruin everything.
- CEO may have even wanted to leave anyway before the announcement and agreed to make this unpopular announcement knowing that he'd take the bad blood with him when he left.
- Maybe, but I'm betting that the CEO who floated the idea that FPS players would be willing to pay per-reload didn't push back too hard against the board's ideas.
- Except that guy was CEO and board
- Ackshually!
- LOL, you're not playing the game correctly! CEO = bad/evil/stupid, every time, always. They're all worthless scum that never lift a finger and don't deserve their job. (Mine's great and does a fine job of leading the company. We make hella money, but never at the cost of morals, employee pay/benefits or long-term profits. He's basically an alien. Apparently.)
  
  These kids have never heard of a "board of directors", nor do they realize the CEO serves at the board's pleasure. (For those of you working your first job, that means the board can fire the CEO anytime they fuck well please. CEO, in turn, gets a "golden parachute" against such an eventuality. Ya know, in case they get fucked for circumstances beyond their control. Because they're smart and negotiate the terms of their employment. Meanwhile, "How come my boss won't give me the raise I didn't ask/fight/learn for?! That shit should be automatic!")
  
  "Fall guy" or "patsy" is also a new term. Reminds me of reddit's Ellen Pao. Board wanted unpopular decisions made, put her in the hot seat, she made 'em, fired her ass.
You're saying the workers should own the means of production. Sounds fair to me.
Pisses me off that CEOs never get fired for their bullshit and get to "retire" or "resign" like they didn't just make the most boneheaded decision that severely hurt the company.

They're rich people and it's not considered acceptable to hold rich people accountable in even the most trivial way.
- The Rich only suffer under the boots of the evolved form ultra rich
- Well, it's only unacceptable to rich people who have the power to avoid consequences.
CEOs are beholden to the shareholders, not the employees
- Employees should be automatic shareholders. Ought to be a workers right by default to receive some portion of the equity they're producing.
  
  Edit: And to be clear, shareholders win too. More companies should voluntarily structure themselves to grant shareholder rights to employees. Dumbass company ending mistakes are usually seen a long way off by line and rank employees.
  
  But it should also be legally mandated structure, much like 401k rules exist now. I propose that all players involved are better off with such a rule, other than the (not currently rare) asshole CEOs who only want to pump and dump their stock.
- I don't see why the shareholders wouldn't want his head on a pike as well.
- Yes, I understand that's the current structure. I'm saying there needs to be a new structure where CEOs can't make greedy decisions with impunity. Clearly the idea that the board is supposed to prevent that doesn't work because this story is all too common.
- In a co-operative the shareholders are employees and associated members, and they elect the board.
  
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumers'_co-operative
  
  Not that Unity is a co-operative, but there is another way.
That's not just CEOs. All employees after a certain point up the ladder have to "put in their resignation" if they are to be fired. It's a convention that saves face for both parties.
The only way this can be done in a capitalist way, is by distributing exactly one company share for every employee that's not tradeable at all, flattening the hierarchy completely, and making every decision in a direct democratic way.
- Or being a cooperative business.
- wouldn't an untradeable share just be worthless? give employees stock options
Being fired as CEO essentially black lists you from working. So they get nudged out instead
- I mean, some people need to get blacklisted.
- Yeah good, being fired from anything above an entry level job gets you blacklisted from similar level positions. It's the world telling you, you belong at a lower level position.

Former EA CEO will be replaced in interim by James Whitehurst from IBM/Red Hat.

Is that better or worse?

I swear they treat CEO's who tank companies like they do priests who molest kids and just send them to another place whenever they get caught.
- That's corporatism in a wider sense. Existed since times immemorial. It's a systemic problem, that is, defined by architecture.
- If you need someone to implement a greedy, extreme position then "pull back to something reasonable" (still further than original), he's on the short list.
red hat

Given their decision making in 22-23 especially, yikes
- but if they isn't anymore in red hat so they didn't take the 22/23 decisions, no?
- That's more at the feet of current leadership at IBM/RH, he resigned in mid 2021. The licensing move could've also been made and it just took a while to be official though so who knows.
Gamers don't know who he is so probably better
- People in software know who people in software are. Unity is for software developers, not gamers.
- Probably hasn't had a chance to fuck up publicly, hopefully he pays attention to the news and doesn't want to be unpopular

Tell me again why these hacks get paid so much for "taking risks" when they never end up being fired? I have not seen a single CEO officially fired from a company for driving it into the ground. They always "choose" to retire after fucking up the entire thing and collect a fat paycheck for doing so.

He's been told to retire or be fired.

Being actually fired is not at all good for his CV at that level, hence he is leaving by "retiring", a different process in legal terms.

That said, anybody with any experience with high-level management knows that a manager "retiring" after having made the kind of the decision this one did with the consequences it had, actually means he's been pushed out, just not through the formal process of "firing".
- that's why I put the "choose" into air quotes. It's bs, anybody with a bit of info about the matter knows it but he still gets to cash out his boni because he has not been technically fired for crashing the company's future
- Being actually fired is not at all good for his CV at that level,
  
  He ran EA. It doesn't matter if he retires or is fired. It's irrelevant at that level. Everyone knows the board said you need to leave, which means being fired. The only potential difference is final compensation. Future job prospects are not changed either way for him.
Once you slightly climb the career ladder, vocabulary turns into marketing bs. Suddenly you most not say "problem" anymore. They're "opportunities" or "challenges". So at that level you don't get "fired" because that would sound bad for the next company you're going with. You're looking for new challenges elsewhere. Leaving behind a dumpster fire like in this very case.
- I mean with a company that big, they can just google you to see what you messed up
when they never end up being fired

When you're a career professional, this is what being fired looks like.

"Choosing to retire" is face-saving language for "is being asked to step down," which is sort of like the police asking you to turn yourself in. You can choose not to, but you're still getting arrested either way
- yes and that's bullshit. They run a company into the ground, risking and often costing the livelyhoods of hundreds or thousands of employees and then take a fat bonus because, as you said, they were not fired, they were forced to resign. Sitting comfortably in their golden parachute they then glide over to the next opportunity to ruin people's lives and days.
  
  Also since you did not get that I was hinting at exactly what you wrote by using "choose" instead of choose and you seemingly not being the first person to stumble over that I have to work on my sarcasm skills.
Yep they get all the praise when things go good. But shit happens and it's lnever their fault.
You don't get fired when you're at the management level, you "resign".
You only get to become CEO when you have friends in high places. Why would anyone risk the backlash for hurting you when silently letting you go with a golden handshake doesn't cost their own money or at least a neglegible part of it.
- I know but to the common pleb it's still always sold as "well they get this much money because they're on the hook if the company goes down" which, as shown time and time again, is just not how these parasites operate. No they operate exactly as you describe it moving from one opportunity to suck money out of the lower classes to another.

They treated a game engine company like a Silicon Valley startup. It's a limited customer base. It was never going to scale. Dummies.

No way, bro, we just gotta get each user to pay, bro. Have them pay a monthly fee to us to play games, bro. It’ll totally scale, bro.
Crazy idea. Come up with a new products in your portfolio instead of milking 1 dry.

It's a start.

Now do the Board who chose an EA CEO with his track record to lead Unity and stood behind this until finally forced by the consequences of his actions to push them out.

Certainly and after what happenned, merelly pushing out one guy in the nicest, most career protecting way possible, isn't sufficient to restore my trust in Unity as a platform on top of which to base my business.

Burn the whole board.
- They don't make good fuel. Drown em. Takes less effort.

I'm excited to know where that money hungry pos is going next 🤔

Judging by those eyes alone, I'd say he's going back to the collection of dismembered prostitutes in his basement.
- Not sure if you're joking, but people with those droopy eyelids tend to be psychotic
He probably has a dartboard filled with company names and wherever a dart hits, he'll go ruin that company.

death to Unity long live Godot

Are we all just Waiting for Godot?

Is that.. the guy from EA?

This explains lot!

Too late, I wouldn't trust Unity from this point on. Spend tons of time and effort only to have it all yanked away. Screw that!

We'll see what happens with Dyson Sphere Program. They're too far into development to switch engines, and are still in early access with a technically "complete" game already.

Urrespective of all the other BS, why was the CEO also president of the board?

The role of the board is to supervise the executives.

That's not exactly an uncommon structure. In case you're just realizing this now: rich people are a bunch of corrupt fuckers.
- "We investigated ourselves and found we did nothing wrong." is a common sentence in America.
Who wouldn't want to supervise themselves?
- Damn this CEO is so good, maybe he should get a raise
- I see you're CEO material, interested in running Unity?
Well how else could he supervise himself?

Unity is dead, but at least one guy made it out like a bandit.

pops the golden parachute

"Later, bitches!"

"So, board of directors, you can force me to do any dumb thing you want, or fire me for not doing it? Yeah. Imma need an escape shuttle."

"Fine. We'll cut you a check for a couple of million if it comes to that. But we're so smart, it won't come to that."

"It came to that."

"Here's your check."

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
Maybe the solution for CEOs that take the golden parachute is a literal golden parachute.
- Abd what would you propose we do with the board of directors? Ya know, the people actually running the show?
  
  Y'all are suckers. They put out a Judas goat and you eat it up.
- The solution is to tax the rich so a golden parachute mostly goes to the tax payer. Including stock options.
- They get a rucksack filled with gold bullion, and the only way out of the building is through the window of their corner office.
- Times are tough, best we can do is lead.

Wow he only had to tank the company before his 50m worth of EA ownership became a problem...

Do not let the door hit you on the way out.

Why do we call it "retiring" when we all know he'll be CEO of some other company in 2 months?

I can't imagine who would hire him. He fucked Unity badly.
- Just a reminder that Unity hired him after EA.

inb4 he gets a job at fucking blackstone inc or something lmao

Yeah, after burning down something popular, he get off without any repercussions (aside maybe a big bag of cash) and is likely to go find the next successful thing to burn it down, to get another big bag of cash.

Can we purge these people out once they failed everywhere?

He didn't fail. He did what the board asked of him which proved to be more unpopular than they all had expected. So they gave him an obscenely generous severance package and sent him on his merry way.

He's been rewarded and they're just trying to position it so it looks like the company leadership gives a shit and won't try the exact same thing at a later date.

Good riddance, but idk if this is a case of too little too late

Out with the old guy and in with the new guy. No change to the incentive structure. I wonder if things will turn out differently this time?

I hope Unity users will get to continue to use the tool they have spent so many hours learning. I also think the industry should try to make things more CEO proof.

The problem is making it more shareholder proof. Enshittification comes from the line go up mandate. Unity is but a single example.
- Enshittification might be my new favorite word
- This is so true. Shareholders couldn't care less if he was popular with customers. All they care about is whether he can do anything to boost profits. In their world, even the situation with Unity can be spun as "innovative" (in the sense that it introduced another revenue stream for the company) and that even if this initial implementation is scrapped, it can be learned from and improved on for future ones.
I also hope that they continue to be able to use that tool, but at this point, it's clear to me that it would be wise to start learning new tools. For me, it's not just that the company has made a mistake, but that the mistake was a repeat of a mistake they made back in 2019, which indicates that they may well do it again.