John Riccitiello, CEO of Unity Technologies, has nearly 7 million developers for the Unity 3D engine.
John Riccitiello, CEO of Unity Technologies.
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John Riccitiello interview — Is Epic buying Unity’s developers?

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 15 min

John Riccitiello, the CEO of Unity Technologies, has always liked Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Epic Games, and the healthy competition between the game engines that both companies make. Unity rose from the low end, capturing mobile game developers and then pushing its way upward.

Epic Games started at the high end with games that had outstanding graphics, and it worked its way down so that Unreal games can run on PC, console, and mobile devices. But Epic makes its own games, and Unity doesn’t. Since its Fortnite battle royale mode took off, Epic has been collecting a lot of revenue from its players, who now number about 250 million. And that has enabled Epic to create a $100 million fund for game developers.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.