Riccitiello's exit a rare bit of accountability | This Week in Business

13.10.2023 - 16:23 / gamesindustry.biz / Bobby Kotick / Matt Booty / Marc Whitten / Unity Create / John Riccitiello / Rare

This Week in Business is our weekly recap column, a collection of stats and quotes from recent stories presented with a dash of opinion (sometimes more than a dash) and intended to shed light on various trends. Check every Friday for a new entry.

John Riccitiello stepped down from Unity this week, vacating the CEO and chairman roles less than a month after an ill-advised and poorly thought out attempt to impose a per-install fee on games made with the Unity engine.

The announcement of Riccitiello's departure makes no mention of the still-blazing Runtime Fee trash fire in the background that led to this. Instead, it frames it as a retirement "effective immediately," which is not the way this sort of transition normally happens.

We do see it from time to time in the case of an executive suffering some personal or medical catastrophe, and we obviously hope that Riccitiello is in fine health, aside from the metaphorical large-caliber bullet wound in the foot.

I'm not just hoping Riccitiello is fine because of basic human decency. I mean, that's part of it, sure. But if he's fine, then we also have something truly precious here, one of the rarest of all things in all the games industry (and increasingly the world at large):

Accountability.

I'm practically giddy at the very idea of it. A person in a position of immense power screwed up terribly, and as a result, they give up that position of power? It's almost unfathomable.

Riccitiello didn't push Unity Create head Marc Whitten onto his sword like Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick did to Blizzard president J Allen Brack to take the fall for Activision Blizzard's cultural rot.

Riccitiello didn't blame others for lying to him like Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot did when asked about whether he fostered the abusive and sexist work culture at the publisher or was simply ignorant of it.

Riccitiello didn't suggest the wrongs happened so long ago there's no point in righting them like Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty did when reports surfaced of Fallout 76 crunch, or like Twitch, Activision Blizzard, Ubisoft, and way too many others have done when dealing with anything that can be described using the past tense.

"Ah, but those are all about horrible work place harassment and abuse," you say. "What about accountability for something with a more tangible monetary impact, the thing companies are expected to care about most?"

That's a very good question, you.

For no good reason, allegations of harassment and toxic workplaces are taken much less seriously than botched business decisions. We know this because Riccitiello's in hot water for the Runtime Fee debacle, not because a former VP of Unity sued the company in 2019 alleging Riccitiello ran a "highly