Unity Engine CEO steps down; former EA CEO John Riccitiello steps up
David Helgason announced today that he is stepping down as CEO of Unity, makers of the Unity Engine game development tools. In the same statement, he announces his replacement.
Unity Engine, one of the more popular game design tools around, is seeing some big changes to its team. CEO David Helgason announced today that he is stepping down as head of Unity. At the same time, John Riccitiello is stepping in to fill the role in his place.
Riccitiello has been in the games industry for a long time as both COO and CEO of Electronic Arts. He also played a role in funding and guiding startups like Oculus and Syntertainment. His experience and passion for Unity and its goal of "democratizing game development" makes him an ideal fit for leading the company into the future and growing its community.
As for Helgason, he isn't leaving the company. Instead, he'll be doing what he loves most: strategizing and connecting with developers. Together they are focused on making sure everyone has access to the best game development technology, services and tools. So, the future looks brighter than ever for Unity.
Source: Unity Blog
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replySteven Wong posted a new article, Unity Engine CEO steps down; former EA CEO John Riccitiello steps up
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Insert SimCity and Frostbite jokes here.
Seriously, Item 1 on John Ricitiello's PR agenda should be a stump speech on how he's going to be good for the continued success of the Unity engine as a platform. Also, I'd want to know if Elevation Partners (the private equity firm founded by Riccitiello, Roger McNamee, and Bono, which was responsible for installing Riccitiello as CEO of EA ( http://www.shacknews.com/article/45908/riccitiello-returns-to-lead-ea ), as well as leveraging the BioWare / Pandemic buyout ( http://www.shacknews.com/article/49412/ea-acquires-bioware-pandemic-for ).-
Item 1 on his actual list is going to be sell to Ubi EA or Activision and GTFO
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And by that I mean Tencen
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Tencent
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you've got an unclosed parenthesis (and an unfinished sentence). Like to know if Elevation Partners what?
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honestly, i think he was around a lot of good things at EA around 06-09 that often fell fucking flat on their faces (ex. mirror's edge > great game! > sold badly, or "let maxis do whatever with spore" > WTF IS THIS). no idea how to tell what he had a hand in and what he didn't, i guess.
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EA ruining yet something by proxy.
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Yeah, not super thrilled about that after what he did to BioWare.
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What did he do to Bioware?
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Effectively raped the brand by renaming many of their subsidiaries to be "BioWare" under a new BioWare group. After Dragon Age II sucked, Mass Effect 3 got mired in controversy, and the founders of BioWare retired among other dumb incidents, EA realized it was pretty dumb. A number of studios closed or were renamed. The whole thing was just a travesty.
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Pretty well this. He's the kind fo guy you hire if you want to sell. That's our theory. VCs were pressuring them to sell and they wouldn't so Helgason got the boot and now JR is in to get things ready for an exit.
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Yeah, we're kind of nervous as we've invested over a year of dev in Unity now.
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I know it's probably the uncertainty that makes people nervous, but I don't understand how people think that Unity will suddenly screw their entire revenue stream. They're a company with significant revenues built around 3.3 registered users. It's not like they're going to suddenly say goodbye to all that revenue in favor of being a private proprietary engine or anything.
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No, but they could change licensing models or mess with things in other ways.
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The Stephen Elop of videogames.
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I remember "BioWare Austin" (developer of SW:TOR), "BioWare Victory" (Command & Conquer Generals 2), and of course "BioWare Mythic".
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I certainly don't want to whiteknight EA or Riccitiello, but that MMO brought in $165 million last year and EA stock is around a 5 year high. I would probably point more to actual tangible mistakes like the Bioware founders leaving and the fan disappointment behind ME3 and DA2.
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Didn't that MMO cost $500 million to develop?
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Any of the reported numbers about its development budget were educated guesses by analysts. The only remotely official hint was when Riccitiello said it would start turning a profit after 500k subscribers, but it's unclear what accounting voodoo has to be done to arrive at that number.
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That's probably what they plan on spending on it over a period like a decade including development time. Also a good chunk is marketing, licensing, and the game has a ton of voice over work. But those estimated generally are inflated. Look at what Destiny, people said the same thing as well about its budget being $500 Million.
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Money still has to come from somewhere. Hundreds and hundreds of people worked on that game for over 5 years. That's not cheap.
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I was referring to Bioware, not EA. Between the Mass Effect 3 ending controversy and the poor performance of TOR, one of the doctors left the studio. we'll see if Dragon Age 3 gets them back on track but it could be argued (by me) that Bioware hasn't made a good game in many years.
Dragon Age 2 was fucking awful.
Mass Effect 3 was great until the final hour, then it wrecked the series. It retroactively made the previous games worse. That takes a special effort.
The Old Republic was so overbudget and behind schedule that Bioware had all of their best writers working on it. That helps explain why DA2 and ME3 were so terrible, but its no excuse.
I blame EA for the destruction of Bioware. EA is doing great and it always will.-
That is a much better argument, but still, "destroyed" is the wrong word. Despite a poor DA2, they are about to release a much bigger DA3 and they're working on another Mass Effect game. That is the opposite of destroyed.
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Most definitely, but gamers are fickle both ways. If Dragon Age 3 is anything like what has been promised, gamers will be right back with them.
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They have it, but the content is pretty thin.
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The reason would be that Unity has a much larger userbase and since Unity is typically used for smaller less intensive projects, the types of assets on their store are much less complicated to make.
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Not really. Making a textured model takes the same amount of work regardless of the engine. Programming is another story, if you dive into source code then yeah UE is going to be more complicated.
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While both engines are capable of doing many things, Unity is generally used as a mobile engine and Unreal 4 is generally used as a next-gen PC/console engine. Even a cursory look at the complexity of assets on Unity's store versus Unreal's store shows a large difference.
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There are tons of Unity based PC games. Yes, they are in the indie category, but Unity is not mostly mobile. Also, I am not sure how you arrived at your final statement.
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From their website http://unity3d.com/public-relations
Unity dominates 3D mobile games
In every major market in the world, an overwhelming majority of the top-grossing 3D mobile games made with third party tools are made using Unity.
This also concurs with most of the businesses I talk to about it. But to be fair, your point is probably true that the people who use Unity on the PC are indie.
My other statement. For example, here is the top grossing model package on the store right now. It is fairly low poly and low production value and not meant for a next-gen game.
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/5730-
None of the data on that page contradicts what I said. Unity didn't start as a mobile platform and it's still got deep roots in the indie PC/Mac space. Also, I have no idea what businesses you are talking to, but being big in mobile doesn't preclude a huge market in desktop gaming. Unreal still trumps them in the console world because it had a pretty strong foothold there for a long time. Lastly, are you really cherry picking a model pack to try to say that Unreal has more complex assets? Nothing stopping you from making high poly (and there are) models for Unity as well. Lower poly sells because it's cheaper to make and gives you a lower spec for your minimum.
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I would think that only serving small indies on the PC/console platform is what precludes having a huge market in desktop gaming. But yes, I would like to see actual breakdown of where their revenue comes from and they do not provide that explicitly.
In regards to complex asset, I can't very well link you the entire site, so I chose one example that is their best seller. Have you yourself spent much time trying to get high spec models on the Unity asset store? I have, and it was quite difficult to find anything production-capable. I don't think that is really a knock on the store itself. It just isn't where most of its userbase is. Nothing wrong with that. But that was my point.
What do you do? You sound like an industry person.-
I'm an audio director and have been in games for 15 years and have been working on a Unity game for a little over a year now. Have also worked on UE3 titles in the past.
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I am sure it could, but they have to have the customer base and Unity has built that over the last 5 years. It will take a while.
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Our team likes it because it's WAY better than UnrealScript. Less of an issue with UE4 of course.
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I never checked. Have they totally abandoned Uscript?
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hm. they grabbed RenderWare with Criterion back in 2004 - did they actively screw it up with that one?
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RenderWare was pretty long in the tooth when they bought it and no publisher in their right mind would want to line their competitors pockets by licensing ther toolset, so it pretty much died very quickly.
They did say they were going to use it heavily for their own projects, but I think the cost to get it up to a fit state for future titles was just far too much. Was easier for them to just shit out Burnout sequels.-
they didn't though, did they? after they bought criterion as burnout 3 came out, there was:
burnout legends, 1 year later
burnout paradise, 4 years later. and i'd find it pretty tough for somebody to complain about this game, it's one of the 'Good Things' that i think EA did!
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