“Bloody idiots”? The shitstorm surrounding Unity and ex-EA boss Riccitiello should neither surprise nor annoy us

He’s backtracked long ago: John Riccitiello, ex-EA CEO and now boss at engine provider Unity, regrets his choice of words in an interview in which he called developers who didn’t consider monetization early in the game design process “damn idiots”. .

In his clarifying tweet, he also provides the – much more tame – wording that he should have chosen, but which clumsily pretends that he had not made a drastic assessment with his original statement.

But basically it’s too late anyway, the echo still reverberates and got stuck at first: Various developers and players reacted outraged on social media, including the creator of the brilliant Donut County, Ben Esposito. I don’t think the excitement is really appropriate. Although I should probably say first: I too hate this way of thinking about games and their development:

The first, say three dozen questions a game developer should ask should all be about how feature X or Y improves the quality of the game and user experience. Also, for me, Riccitiello has long been the face of everything that went wrong in the gaming industry, making the PS3 and Xbox 360 generation very tough and creatively depressing backwards. And yet the old request to look at the context is not a diversionary or blackout maneuver here. Context is extremely important here.

It starts with the fact that the interview by PocketGamer in the course of the merger of Unity with the mobile company IronSource. So it was about mobile games, where the games are rarely offered as one-time purchase items, but are much more often free-to-play. Anyone who then thinks about monetization too late will definitely have a problem integrating it afterwards. An engine that makes this difficult has a competitive disadvantage. So it’s in Unity’s interest to simplify the process.

Second (and this has more to do with Riccitiello’s style and form) the “idiots” phrase began by first calling the developers “some of the purest, most beautiful, and most brilliant people”. In essence, it was about the old “creative geniuses don’t think enough about the financial side”. We can criticize the choice of words (but then we should also question our own), but the content of this statement cannot be dismissed out of hand.

And then there’s another little thing: Here a CEO is being interviewed, a money man who is looking for ways to generate more money. You don’t have to agree – the designers and developers working on the front lines of the game would probably be better off not doing it. But if you want to earn something from this activity, at some point in the process someone – preferably someone else – should think about it.

Therefore: You don’t have to like Riccitiello, you can find his attitude of thinking about games as a business unappetizing and bad for creativity. But please don’t bring out torches and pitchforks again because a CEO does what CEOs do. hammers and nails and such. If you want to change that, you have to get politically involved and not act as if you could scold individual companies out of existence from the couch. Above all: you should – especially in these difficult times – think three times what you are upset about, especially since in this case it has very little to do with the games we are interested in.

As I said, this is not a defense of Riccitiello – at most, in the sense that I would defend a lion for snatching a zebra. But I still don’t see the danger that we’ll all suddenly get an incredible appetite for black and white striped steaks because of such clumsy formulations.