GB: Speaking of the Dreamcast, Peter Moore [EA’s former chief competition officer] is off to run FC Liverpool.
Riccitiello: I talked to Peter yesterday. I’m so happy for him. That’s incredible. I think he’s done his tour of duty in the game industry. He’s done enough years. It’s time for him to go on to something else. The thing about Peter, the name of his conference room at EA was Liverpool. This is not like, suddenly he woke up and decided he doesn’t want a job in the game industry.
GB: Does the overall game industry look healthy to you?
Riccitiello: When you get to looking at the game industry in general, you have something that’s getting a little hard to track. You have this underlying growth trend overall, with ups and downs by whatever given sector. Right now we’re entering what I believe is going to be the decline of the current generation of consoles. You’ve seen those graphs a bunch of times before. There’s nothing surprising about that. Mobile is now the biggest business out there, and nothing suggests that’s going to slow down.
There’s a massive rise in ad revenue. Unity reaches a quarter as many consumers globally as there are televisions in the world. Not in the United States, but globally. The numbers are getting pretty amazing. Advertisers are starting to realize that there’s an opportunity there. That’s going to be another growth driver, a revenue driver. It’s hard to get much more penetration. We only have 3.4 billion smartphones in the world, and a lot of them are so low-end they don’t count.
GB: Your 16 billion downloads number is pretty impressive in that regard. How much bigger can that number get?
Riccitiello: Well, we’re currently trending to blow way past 20 billion this year. I don’t know. It wouldn’t surprise me if that number is 50 billion in four or five years. Never before has there been a single global medium. All these things have been geographically split, historically, and very different. Unity is in a weird position. We aggregate up to a footprint comparable to Google or Facebook. We’re not one app, but we’re also no SDK and you can reach them all. It’s a different sort of notion.
GB: I was curious as to why you needed all the new capital you guys brought in a little while ago.
Riccitiello: Generally the notion is you raise money when you can, not when you need to. When you need to, you can’t.
GB: How many employees are you now?
Riccitiello: About 1,200. You see 1,403 on that screen there, but that includes contractors.
GB: Are any regions of the world priorities, or otherwise very interesting to you as far as where you need to get more people or hire more people?
Riccitiello: China remains a really interesting market, because it’s the world’s biggest. It has a lot of impediments where Unity can make a difference for our customers. Pretty much since I was a boy, India has been the next big market, and I’m still waiting for that to happen. Our product is well-regarded there, but it seems early. Latin America is doing really well. Eastern Europe is doing really well.
It’s interesting, because due to the nature of our product, we don’t really need a sales force to sell it. We have market leadership in something like 180-odd countries.
GB: Are there any areas you see disruption happening? Like the desire for the instant game people to disrupt the app stores?
Riccitiello: We’re a tool for the instant game business. I think a lot of the things around — one thing you have to sort out is what’s lasting from what’s not lasting. Usually the things that are created in order to step around another party’s business rules are not lasting. As best I can tell, the instant game phenomenon is largely a reaction to the dominance of app stores and the fact that there’s a prohibition against a downloaded game app that doesn’t come through the app stores. Other people want to eat into the market.
In that world — look, we’re massive fans of Apple and Google. We’re partnered deeply and closely with them. But at the same time we’re Switzerland. We’re not here to tell you that you should make shooters or RTS, or that you should work more with Google than Apple or vice versa. We’re here to say, “If you’re going to build a game, we’ll give you the best tools to do it and we’ll help you monetize it.” Not necessarily to tilt toward one platform or another, one form of delivery or another. It would be inappropriate for us to try to plow through there.