Ex-Zynga, EA, and BioWare exec Matthew Bromberg is slipping into the hotseat at Unity following the departure of former boss John Riccitiello in October last year.
Bromberg will become Unity president and CEO on May 15, Unity confirmed in an SEC filing today. James Whitehurst, who had been serving as interim CEO and president, will step down to become executive chairman of the board and a senior advisor. Roelof Botha will transition from chairman of the board back to lead independent director of the board.
New boss Bromberg is currently a senior advisor to asset management firm Blackstone, and also serves on the board of directors at Bumble, Monzo, and esports firm Blast. He has also previously served on the board at Fitbit.
From August 2016 to November 2021 Bromberg was COO at Zynga, and before that he held several leadership roles at EA, including SVP of strategy and operations of mobile, and group general manager of BioWare. He also ran Major League Gaming prior to his time at EA/BioWare.
As per the SEC filing, Bromberg’s getting a signing-on fee of $2m and an annual base salary of $850k, though he’ll also get a bonus of 100% of that salary. He’ll also be awarded over 1m shares in Unity which will vest over several years, a package worth roughly $25m in total, based on the firm’s current stock price.
Former Unity boss Riccitiello had overseen a wild few weeks as Unity boss in late 2023 after the company 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.
