John Riccitiello of Unity Technologies on stage with the ESA chief Mike Gallagher at GamesBeat Summit 2016.
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Why Unity’s John Riccitiello loves mobile ads and fears VR’s gap of disappointment

At Unity Technologies, chief executive John Riccitiello sees a sea of games and game startups streaming through doors. Unity was founded in 2003 to “democratize game development” with easy-to-use game engine tools. In the last quarter, 220,000 games were made with Unity, and those games were downloaded 4.2 billion times in the first quarter on 1.7 billion devices.

Riccitiello, the former CEO of Electronic Arts and a “lapsed investor” in game startups, has seen a lot companies and has a lot of observations about what makes a company and its game stand out. He spoke about this topic with Mike Gallagher, chief executive of the game industry’s trade group, the Entertainment Software Association, in fireside chat at our GamesBeat Summit 2016 conference last week.

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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.