From Zynga to Unity: CEO’s Playbook for Big Rescues
Unity has been through a rough couple of years: the runtime fee blow up, a shaky ads business, and a lot of devs wondering if they should move on.
At the center of the reboot is Matthew Bromberg. His career is basically a highlight reel of turnarounds: AOL partnerships, Star Wars: The Old Republic at EA, Zynga, and now Unity. Below is a concise look at the key ideas he brings to the table and what they mean for game makers.
Here’s our coverage out of his Podcast with Stratechery.
1. The Operator Behind The CEO
Bromberg is not a classic spreadsheet or pure-tech CEO.
That mix shaped him into someone who is comfortable with:
- messy, complex systems
- high chaos and high uncertainty
- switching between public leadership and deep operational work
Turnaround is not a phase for him; it is his default environment.
2. AOL: Relationships Over Contracts
At AOL, a huge deal with Electronic Arts had gone toxic. Multi hundred page contract, everybody angry, zero trust.
Bromberg read the whole thing and opened the meeting with a simple realization:
no one understood what the contract really meant anymore.
So he pushed both sides to stop hiding behind legal language and rebuild the relationship from first principles. That reset eventually led to his move into games.
Highlight: When the contract becomes the relationship, you already have a problem.
3. Major League Gaming: Esports Reality Check
With Major League Gaming, Bromberg was early on a now obvious truth:
people will watch games at massive scale.
MLG had pros, sponsors, ESPN segments and millions of viewers. The real blocker was structural:
- The league did not own the IP.
- Publishers could step in anytime, claim value, or build their own leagues.
Esports became a set of fragmented verticals rather than a single NFL-like structure.
Highlight: If you sit in the middle and own neither IP nor audience, your upside is always capped.
4. Star Wars: The Old Republic – Fixing A Burning MMO
At EA, Bromberg took over Star Wars: The Old Republic when it was in a tailspin.
Issues:
- Built as a huge, cinematic subscription MMO
- Players speed-ran the story, then churned hard
- Massive investment, no sustainable model
His moves:
- Stopped obsessing over every tiny source of churn
- Switched from subscription to F2P
- Pivoted the focus from expensive story to social play and community
Result: The game stabilized and is now remembered as a long-run success, not a failure.
Highlight: You do not fix a broken model by doing it harder. You change the model and lean into social connection.
5. Zynga: Culture As The Core Product
Bromberg then joined Zynga with Frank Gibeau and other EA leaders, at a time when the market had basically written the company off.
They inherited:
- 2,000 people
- Known IPs
- Cash and infrastructure
- A tired, bitter culture
The real work was cultural:
- Define what Zynga would be going forward
- Communicate values clearly and repeatedly
- Act on those values in hiring, firing and product decisions
Zynga went from “dead” to a multi-billion exit.
Highlight: You cannot turn around a games business if you do not turn around the culture that ships the games.
6. Unity: From Runtime Fee To Product-First Strategy
When Bromberg arrived at Unity, he saw two truths:
- Unity is a generational asset: engine, tools, ecosystem, millions of devs.
- The company had lost developer trust and fallen behind in ads.
His take on the runtime fee is blunt:
- It came from insecurity about Unity’s ability to build a strong business on the existing model.
- Leadership tried to fix economics with clever pricing instead of fixing product and value.
Developers told him directly:
We are willing to pay Unity more.
We are not willing to pay in that way.
The reset:
- Repeal the runtime fee
- Raise prices in more normal ways
- Refocus on making products that are clearly worth paying more for
On the ads side, Unity had also missed a critical tech cycle. While Unity was integrating acquisitions and thinking about bundling, AppLovin rebuilt its stack for the post ATT world with modern neural networks.
Unity’s answer is Vector AI:
- A new self learning ML stack for ads
- Designed to compete properly in a probabilistic, post ID environment
- Built as the foundation for deeper player understanding across create, run and grow
On top of that, Unity launched commerce tools with Stripe, aiming to:
- Help devs capture more value via off store payments and web shops
- Handle the complexity that individual teams do not want to solve alone
Highlight: The new Unity bet is simple. Compete on product, not on tricks. Use AI and data to connect engine, live ops, monetization and UA around one thing: a deeper understanding of the player.
7. The Bigger Vision: From Game Dev To Interactive Creation
Unity’s original mission was to democratise game development.
Bromberg’s upgraded version:
- Keep serving professional teams with better tools and AI pipelines
- Open the door for any creator to build interactive experiences, not just linear video
If that happens at scale, Unity’s addressable space grows beyond “game engine” into a backbone for interactive media.
