Two weeks ago, during an all-hands in front of roughly 3,000 full-time Unity employees, Riccitiello assured staffers the company was not in any financial trouble, and that Unity wouldn’t be laying anyone off, according to sources who attended.
Wonder if this was accurate or if we are starting to see the onset of a recession and companies are trying to shore up their financials (at the cost of their employees livelihoods).
It's such a weird thing to say out loud, since it means you either have a CEO who's lying, or one who's incompetent and can't forecast past 2 weeks. Not sure Riccitiello has to care about either, given he makes $22 million dollars a year though.
How can Unity justify paying him & $22m a year when they need to lay off employees to stay afloat? Surely option 1 would be cutting the CEOs salary, even so a very modest but perfectly livable wage of I dunno, $1m?
Why do CEOs make so much anyway? My theory is it's become a corporate status symbol, a way to grift the wealthy by flashing a well-to-do CEO in front of them. "We're not desperate for your investment, why we pay our CEO $22 million a year! But yeah please send that check ASAP please..."
Why do I keep being surprised time after time with these seemingly very big head counts... Maybe I just misunderstand what these companies are doing. But 3000 for Unity seems somewhat on high-side.
Gaming revenues across the board are flat or down post-COVID, and especially with Russian consumers taken out.
Gaming is mostly unprofitable given the excessive 30% commissions charged by Valve, Apple, Google, Sony, Microsoft. Only platform owners make consistent profits.
The first part may be true but the second part certainly isn't.
Most gaming companies may be unprofitable for the same reason most restaurants end up shuttering quickly; it's a hard thing to make a successful business in a saturated market.
But it's certainly not bexause of the fees that Valve, Apple, Google, etc. charge. Those have been there for over a decade and if you're running or starting a game company now, you would factor those into your business plan just like payroll and taxes.
The fees are pretty high but the free distribution and in the case of Google and Apple, free development kits and usable SDKs have to get paid for somehow. Those things have been subsidized by the platform fees for so long now we have a generation who seem to think they should/have/always will be free. But just two decades ago they weren't. And getting distribution and eyeballs for your indie game was much, much, much more of a barrier and distributors/publishers took more than 30%.
30% really isn't that bad when there were many many more players in the chain with physical products. And it is not like the services offered by platforms like Valve are cheap... Global billing and distribution to basically any country allowing games...
Turns out dropping over a billion in cash on two companies to acquire tech your org can barely use, banking on ads, a decade of teaching your devs to build monolithic spaghetti, thinking that Nvidia was telling the truth about who was buying GPUs, and an aversion to open source weren't winning ideas.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 32.1 ms ] threadWonder if this was accurate or if we are starting to see the onset of a recession and companies are trying to shore up their financials (at the cost of their employees livelihoods).
Gaming is mostly unprofitable given the excessive 30% commissions charged by Valve, Apple, Google, Sony, Microsoft. Only platform owners make consistent profits.
Most gaming companies may be unprofitable for the same reason most restaurants end up shuttering quickly; it's a hard thing to make a successful business in a saturated market.
But it's certainly not bexause of the fees that Valve, Apple, Google, etc. charge. Those have been there for over a decade and if you're running or starting a game company now, you would factor those into your business plan just like payroll and taxes.
The fees are pretty high but the free distribution and in the case of Google and Apple, free development kits and usable SDKs have to get paid for somehow. Those things have been subsidized by the platform fees for so long now we have a generation who seem to think they should/have/always will be free. But just two decades ago they weren't. And getting distribution and eyeballs for your indie game was much, much, much more of a barrier and distributors/publishers took more than 30%.