It’s all change at the top of Unity – chief product and technology officer Marc Whitten will resign on June 1, and leave the company at the end of the year.
Whitten will serve as a strategic advisor to Unity between his resignation date, June 1, and his departure on December 31 2024. He will continue to receive restricted stock options, and lump cash payments that total ~$815k, as per the related SEC filing.
Whitten has worked at Unity for nearly three and a half years, and has previously served as Amazon VP for entertainment devices and services, CPO at Sonos and corporate VP and CPO at Xbox.
Unity announced Whitten’s departure a little under a fortnight after it appointed its new CEO, ex-Zynga, EA, and BioWare exec Matthew Bromberg.
Bromberg takes over from the last permanent president and CEO, John Riccitiello, who left the company after a fiery few months overseeing Unity’s runtime fee fiasco. The company had announced a controversial set of pricing policy changes that would charge Unity customers every time their game is installed.
Developers were furious, and told us that behind the scenes Unity account managers were offering a waiver on the fees if they used Unity’s LevelPlay ad products. This was widely interpreted as a move to try and leverage its huge customer base to take on UA rival AppLovin.
Developers later organised and began a Unity boycott, switching off all Unity ad products in their games in protest.
Unity later apologised and dialled back some of the pricing policies. It was Unity Create boss Marc Whitten, rather than Riccitiello, who announced the part-reversal, and later tackled questions from the developer community about the policy changes. We later reported that the Unity boycott had worked, with its ad network and UA business taking a hit.
Sources from inside Unity and around the mobile games business also told us that the Runtime Fee policy was “rushed out” and driven by Unity and IronSource’s intense battle with AppLovin over the mediation market.
One major partner apparently said “Fuck you, we’re not paying” to Riccitiello in a meeting over the fee.
