Unity bosses sold stock days before development fees announcement, raising eyebrows

3 years ago by geosoco to c/games

Unity executives sold thousands of shares in the weeks leading up to last night's hugely controversial announcement it …

Unity executives sold thousands of shares in the weeks leading up to last night's hugely controversial announcement it will soon charge developers when one of their games is downloaded.

The company has subsequently softened its stance slightly on a couple of aspects - but fury across the industry remains.

Behind the scenes, CEO John Riccitiello shifted 2000 shares last week on 6th September, as noted by Yahoo Finance, which noted this move was part of a trend over the past year where the exec has sold more than 50,000 shares in total and bought none.

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Fjaeger 87 points 3 years ago

This isn't insider trading?

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ShadowCat 57 points 3 years ago

My friend told me about this earlier and that's exactly what I thought. They knew this wouldn't be popular and would drop the value so they sold before the announcement, that's got to be insider trading

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Aux 59 points 3 years ago

Now the share price will drop and he will buy his share back at a discount. Then they will revert the policy and share prices will rise. Boom! Free monies!

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mean_bean279 30 points 3 years ago

They probably have automated sell of dates or automated sell of prices.

This is part of a consistent pattern over the last year.

He probably hasn’t bought any stocks due to receiving stock as part of his employment contract.

It could be insider trading, but considering how companies have been doing pricing structures and rapid shifts from free to subscription based and then seeing sales/profit increase I imagine it’s worth it for them to simply keep the stock long term, but an initial sell off was put in place at a certain price. Sometimes there’s smoke and there’s fire, and sometimes it’s just simply the fumes of capitalism creating a system that’s uniquely imbalanced for everyone else, but isn’t really insider trading.

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IWantToFuckSpez 14 points 3 years ago

Not if it is an automated scheduled sell and reported to the SEC.

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EnderofGames 9 points 3 years ago

I feel like a scheduled sell shouldn't mean insider trading investigation is off the table.

Does it really matter if they decided to sell just before they devalue their company, or they devalued their company right after a sell? They knew about both before hand, and they can have the same intent either way.

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BlazeDaley 7 points 3 years ago

According to the Form 4 filed with this sale, the trade was planned at least as of May 19 using a 10b5-1.

The sales reported on this Form 4 were effected pursuant to a Rule 10b5-1 trading plan adopted by the Reporting Person on May 19, 2023.

https://www.sec.gov/...

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Ajen 0 points 3 years ago

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TimLovesTech 1 point 3 years ago

I think the part where they had a trend of selling over the course of a year makes this not insider trading (or harder to prove if they were playing the long game).

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Anticorp 1 point 3 years ago

Yes.

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