The Long-Con: Unity’s Leadership and a plan to destabilize the Mobile Games Market

By now, everyone who works in or adjacent to the games industry has heard of Unity and their dire plan to charge developers and platforms a price per installation fee. Naturally, the game dev community took the news poorly – it was more than a moment of broken promises from the company that aimed to democratize game development, it was a betrayal.

Yet, what everyone seems to be focusing on, the volume and pricing structure, are little more than red herrings. The real story is that this is a step in a much larger plan by none-other than CEO John Riccitiello and key members of Unity’s Board to destabilize and damage the mobile games industry.

Riccitiello, former EA CEO, and mastermind behind the barely legal acquisitions of BioWare and Pandemic that lead to the shuttering of one, and gutting of the other, hates indi game developers. And what he hates the most are games made with love. But when it comes to Unity’s leadership, he is not alone. Several of Unity’s board are also of a mind that game developers that love games are bad for business.

Since taking the helm at Unity in 2014, Riccitiello has systematically worked to steer the tools and platform away from the mission of democratizing game development. Each year was a foray into some other industry from automotive to metaverse.  In fact, I believe Riccitiello’s whole goal was to pump up Unity’s stock, go public, and exit a company in chaos that would bolster some other deal he had in the wings.

But when Unity became publicly traded, Riccitiello’s plan faced opposition in the form of Egon Durban, Tomer Bar Zeev, and Roelof Botha. A cadre of leaders that were even greedier and more short-sighted than Riccitiello. Shortly after joining, Unity entered a lopsided merger/acquisition with the failing ad-and-metrics platform IronSource, Tomer Bar Zeev’s company, for an outrageous 4 billion. Egon is notorious for Silver Lake, a capital firm that has been involved in several company killing acquisitions (like Twitter/X), and Sequoia’s own Botha has yet to see the kind of return he is used to. Meanwhile, Riccitiello brought on Luis Felipe Visoso as CFO to try and shore up the shaky financials that he himself created.

So, what is this evil plan? I can only deduce from the pattern of publicly available information, that it is part of an exit strategy to bolster holdings of a select few executives and board members. By tearing down Unity and the entire development community built on Unity’s services, the leadership creates an opportunity for another entity or entities to divide the market, vastly reduces the number of medium-sized mobile games published each year, and bolster the investments that holdings such as Silver Lake and Sequoia have. This creates an exit strategy for the board and firms, while striking indi developers hard enough to destabilize the market.

The acquisition of IronSource, the driving of Unity’s stock down in order to perchance massive shares, the frankly bizarre fundraising rounds that drove price fluctuations, and the quick stock sales leading up to pay per install fee announcement indicate a specific pattern of behavior. One we have seen before from Riccitiello, Egon Durban, Tomer Bar Zeev, and Roelof Botha, where a shell company or investment of theirs moves into an opportunity that has been engineered by the board of a destabilized company.

Now, Unity, the company that promised – and delivered – a small revolution in games, faces an existential threat from their own leadership. Leadership that helped fund several companies that take direct aim at Unity’s market.

It’s a four year long con, the aim is to break up the Unity community, poison the mobile game development market, and eliminate indie developers.

At least, that’s what it looks like to me.