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.

    • ShadowCat@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      52
      arrow-down
      3
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year 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

    • mean_bean279@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      29
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 year 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.

    • Whirlybird@aussie.zone
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      9
      ·
      1 year ago

      No, as the article says they’ve been doing it all year. Many execs and important employees often get paid a big chunk of their wage in stock. To get cash they need to sell stock.