John's gone, baby.

 From the lips of morons

Well I woke up to quite the curious little update to the whole 'Unity' situation where they tried to 'muscle their way into undue royalties' in a blatant attempt to try and cause a policy rush within game engines and create industry wide parity for the act of charging indie developers per game install. Of course it was picked apart mercilessly and every indie developer of note under the sun immediately announced their plans to drop Unity like a hit grenade, the CEO John Riccitiello earned the lionshare of the condemnation, although a choice like this probably bubbled up for an entirely rank leadership if we're being honest with one another, and there was at least one internal death threat made which ended up getting the police involved. It really was just a lighting rod of chaos over at the Unity headquarters, now wasn't it? But now we can claim some small iota of victory for our outrage- because John is gone.

After a month of damage control and reversing certain changes whilst not really going hard enough back to start for a lot of people's tastes, (I happen to be among their number.) it seems the board of directors have decided a sacrifice is what is most needed to quell the swirling storm, and that sacrifice is John's continued employment over at Unity. The man who served 9 years with the company, mostly as a spearhead of bewilderment at every insane choice that Unity made over the years, especially for a game engine that wasn't even close to being the number one in the world. His polices were dreamt up from the position of a monopoly, when he hasn't been near that position his entire career! But enough spitting on the man's career, it's over. Or at least, it's over at Unity- people like him always know how to land on their feet and pounce into the next unbelievably lucrative role, just you wait.

Afterall we're talking about a man who had a voice over at the EA offices and proved so mind numbingly, brainlessly greedy with his suggestions that he was treated like a joke. Some have claimed that his greed eclipsed even that of EA, and they forced him out of the company as a result, but I think in truth the man was served up as a sacrificial lamb once again during a poor financial year. Seems John has a tendency to be the kind of guy you want to figure out how to be away from, and can you believe it? Someone as brain broken by desires for endless profits is so unlikable that his fellows immediately turn to push him out the back of the bus whenever an opportunity arises? Almost as though that is the baseline personality of all CEOs. Almost as though a old-school scrooge like him should never have had a governing place in a creative industry in the first place...

Remember, this is the guy who snapped at developers that don't try and trap their consumers in endless microtransaction cycles by calling them 'F****** idiots', like a child unable to see the coming downturn of a money bubble. Maybe a mandatory reading of 'Prince of the Yen' should be forced upon every high level executive in the games industry so we can start to unwind their ball of chaos we currently find ourselves in. You know, where expenses are rising on all sides in a global economy that is trending the other direction, and we're just rocking along pretending that isn't the basic recipe for an incoming crash? After the slew of 'cut jobs' affecting literally every developer of every games company, that downturn should really be obvious to everyone. Still, at least one redundancy can be laughed about as well deserved.

However this is what a certain bald man with a surly attitude would refer to as a 'half measure', as are many of the walk-backs that Unity made in regards to their plans for charging developers. People like John don't just stink up the places they dwell in, they spread their filth- smear it all over the walls- seep it into the upholstery. By the time you reach the level that John does you don't do it on an island, you do it on an estate populated by snivelling worms you call 'like minded executives' you clap and bark at your whim eager for the day they can either fellate you for a smidge of praise or slit your throat and take your place. That is the kind of cesspit that John is leaving behind him. In many ways he's taking the easy way out.

Around about the time this was all happening there was a certain definitive mood travelling around all those developers who called it quits with Unity. They weren't just declaring a boycott, they were leaving. Finding alternatives and jumping ship for good. Why? Simple, because with companies who break grounds like these, there will never be a return to basic goodwill. That's shattered now. Just because John has jumped ship, that doesn't mean Unity is magically going to become a place worth staying now. They had a professional working relationship with a giant user base and they ruined it, wholly and totally. And they did so without the best tools on the market, or the largest user base in their niche of the industry, or even the most user friendly systems. They have nothing to blackmail users back to their stable, and if this doesn't send them under it's going to cost them dearly and for a long time.

And before that perception spreads too far I want to be very clear, this is not a punishment for John. At a certain point you reach a level where you can never fail or screw up- and John crossed that threshold years ago. Sure he leaves his exorbitantly overpaid position, on an exorbitantly over-stuffed exit parachute, no doubt. 'Consequence' doesn't exist at a certain level of success, at least not for the guilty. As important as John was to this ruinous policy implantation, and I'm going to randomly guess he's at least 50% to blame, it's the ground workers who will suffer the blowback, the loss of customers, the shrinking of revenue, the reduction of staff, the black mark on their careers- he'll just move on to the next executive role and forget any of this ever happened.

But by all means, make merry! Burn your effigies of the man and grind his visage into the swampy dirt where it belongs, let his legacy swirl in the rank sludge it spawned off from. But most of all, make an example out of him. Hang up his failures as a war trophy of what happens when executives get too raunchy for their ranch, and watch as the circling vultures that stalk around our industry, swooping and stealing ground each and ever year, back off just that little bit in weariness. That small reprieve is the only real victory out of this whole debacle. And it cost a whole lot of people responsible of nothing more than they deserve to get here.