Unity, the company behind a hugely successful video-game development engine, has appointed the ex-Electronic Arts chief John Riccitiello as its new CEO. Co-founder David Helgason has stepped down from the role, becoming executive vice president in charge of strategy and communications.
Set up in Copenhagen in 2004, Unity provides an affordable, cross-platform game engine, which it licenses to developers all over the world to implement into their own titles. The technology quickly became popular with smaller independent studios, which often lack the resources to build game development toolsets of their own, but are also unable to afford the larger commercial third-part engines like Unreal3D.
John Riccitiello previously served as CEO of games publisher Electronic Arts. Between 2007 and his departure in 2013 he oversaw the company’s transition away from relying on boxed game sales and toward digital distribution, via smartphones, tablets and EA’s own “Origin” PC games platform. However, despite rising revenues from digital and downloadable content, expensive investments and falling boxed copy retail sales made for a difficult financial climate. EA posted losses of $381m in October 2012.
Riccitiello is not new to Unity – he has served on the board of directors since November 2013. He has also invested in other tech newcomers such as VR specialist Oculus and ecommerce start-up, SilkCloud.
“I’m so proud of everything Unity accomplished in the past decade but now it’s time to look forward to an excellent future,” said Helgason. “Our mission is an important one, so I’m incredibly happy that John has agreed to lend his formidable experience to the role of CEO at Unity. We’ve had the chance to work together over the last year-and-a-bit and come to recognise how similar our views are on the importance of the democratisation of development to a thriving developer ecosystem and healthy games industry.”
The move will be seen in some quarters as the start of a new era for Unity, which for many years has been seen as an indie upstart within the highly corporate middleware and development tool industry. The last month has seen rumours that Unity is gearing up to offer itself for acquisition – and although, the company has denied it is up for sale, many will see the appointment of a corporate veteran as a step toward instigating that process.
“I would imagine Riccitiello’s appointment is about long-term growth with the possibility of an IPO in the future, rather than a buy-out in the short term,” said Matt Martin, editor of industry news site VG247. “Unity would be a great asset to many, including a company like Microsoft, but if it wanted to sell it could have done by now.
“Riccitiello may seem like a traditional ‘suit’ and he knows how to deal with investors, but he’s always very honest and down to earth, and at EA he really understood developers and their games. Riccitiello can be ruthless, but he’s not purely interested in the bottom line. It’s also worth remembering that Unity isn’t small beans – it has over 300 staff – so maybe it just needs a fresh take on leadership after so many years.”
Certainly, the scale of Unity’s operations has grown enormously, now allowing developers to create games that are scalable and portable to every major platform including smartphones, PC and even the current PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles. The development kit is now used by over 600,000 studios around the world and is almost ubiquitous in indie-scale development.
“The strength of Unity is in its platform and company agnostic positioning, so appointing an ex-CEO of what is an acquisitive games publisher is bound to raise some questions,” sais Piers Hard-Rolls, head of games at IHS Technology. “That said, I believe this appointment is primarily about steering Unity as it transitions from a small company to a larger corporate entity, and Riccitiello is very well placed to guide the ship.
“Founder and current CEO David Helgason is clearly more interested in the strategy and product development side of the business, so installing an experienced games-related CEO that can implement the processes needed to grow the company and perhaps lead it towards an IPO makes great sense”
