Unity CEO: Devs Who Don't Ponder Monetization Are the "Biggest Idiots"

In the wake of recent news that Unity is merging with the app monetization platform ironSource, Unity's CEO John Riccitiello and senior vice president and general manager of Unity Create, Marc Whitten, spoke about the reasons for the merger and discussed monetization.

In an interview with PocketGamer.biz, when asked about the pushback from some developers who are against pondering monetization at the early stages of the development process, Riccitiello expressed an opinion that those who don't think about monetization at all or don't do it during the creative process and leave it to later stages in the development cycle are "fucking idiots."

"Ferrari and some of the other high-end car manufacturers still use clay and carving knives," Riccitiello said. "It’s a very small portion of the gaming industry that works that way, and some of these people are my favourite people in the world to fight with – they’re the most beautiful and pure, brilliant people. They’re also some of the biggest fucking idiots."

Riccitiello also added that "industry divides people" who stick to the philosophy of maintaining distance from the money side of things in favor of creativity and those who "massively embrace how to figure out what makes a successful product." So, according to him, devs, first of all, need to cater to the market.

"I’ve seen great games fail because they tuned their compulsion loop to two minutes when it should have been an hour," he said. "Sometimes, you wouldn’t even notice the product difference between a massive success and tremendous fail, but for this tuning and what it does to the attrition rate."

Elsewhere in the interview, Riccitiello also commented on the recent round of layoffs at the company when around 200 people, or roughly 4% of all Unity workforce, have been fired. 

"Just for clarity’s sake, we didn’t announce anything," Riccitiello said. "That was a leak to Kotaku, and while we said we were eliminating four per cent of our positions, over half of them got rehired within other parts of Unity, so as far as quote-unquote layoff stories go, we’re not much of one."