I just finished reading Ben Thompson's interview with Matthew Bromberg in the latest Stratechery newsletter, and I can't stop thinking about it. Not because of Unity specifically (though that story is fascinating), but because Bromberg has accidentally stumbled into something that feels almost like a life philosophy disguised as a career path. Here's a guy who has become a serial turnaround specialist without ever planning to be one, and his approach reveals something fundamental about how systems fail and how they can be fixed.
He studied literary theory at Cornell, went to Harvard Law School, and somehow ended up as a professional fixer of broken video game companies. If you'd told him in 1995 that this would be his specialty, he'd have looked at you like you were speaking Klingon.
But here's what's interesting: his background in literary theory, specifically structuralism, turns out to be perfect preparation for turnarounds. Structuralism is all about understanding how systems work, looking for deep patterns rather than surface content. And that's exactly what Bromberg does. He doesn't get caught up in the specific details of what's broken. He looks at the underlying structure, the system itself, and asks: why is this system producing these results?
He described his career trajectory with an almost zen-like clarity: "I had been feeling a little bit frustrated in my career up to that point. I'd done a few different things and I was reasonably successful, but I thought, 'Gosh, I thought this would be going better.'"
Then he took a job trying to save Star Wars: The Old Republic at Electronic Arts. The game was, in his words, "one of the worst things in business I've ever seen." He literally thought the company might have another 30 to 90 days before it went under. And that's when something clicked.
Finding Your Sweet Spot in the Wreckage
What Bromberg realized was that turnarounds offered something unique: the scale of a big company combined with the urgency of a startup. As he put it, "Nobody's suggesting that we don't need immediate and complete change, so I don't have to go around convincing people of that fact, which is just mind-numbing and I don't have the patience for it."
I love this because it connects to something I've been thinking about in my own work with lean manufacturing. When things are running smoothly at a big company, suggesting improvements can feel like pushing a boulder uphill. People get defensive. They want proof. They need six months of data before they'll even consider a pilot program. But when the house is on fire? Suddenly everyone's ready to grab a bucket.
Bromberg has this personality trait that he describes almost casually: high degrees of chaos and uncertainty are "cool with me." He doesn't find them upsetting or stressful. In fact, he finds the puzzles interesting. And here's the critical part: "Fear is the thing that ruins your judgment, especially in those circumstances, but it's really true in any circumstance. You're trying to protect something, and so you're afraid to do the thing you know you have to do to make it better. I just don't really have that bone in my body."
Reading that, I immediately thought of the shisha kanko experiments I've been doing. The whole point of calling out and pointing is to overcome our natural tendency to skip steps when we're familiar with something. Fear works the same way in business decisions. You know what needs to change, but you're afraid of the consequences, so you hedge. You compromise. You pick the safe option that satisfies no one.
The Social Connection Insight
The most interesting technical insight from Bromberg's turnaround of Star Wars: The Old Republic wasn't about better graphics or more content. It was dead simple: "The only way to move mass numbers of consumers is community and social connection. It's always the only answer. If you want 10 or 20 or 30% more people to do something, you have to connect them to other human beings."
This runs counter to what the team had been obsessing over. They'd spent hundreds of millions of dollars creating fully-voiced cinematic story content. Players burned through it in a month and wanted more. The model was fundamentally broken because they were trying to solve the wrong problem. They were fighting churn by creating more single-player content when what they needed was to create more reasons for players to connect with each other.
There's a parallel here to something I've written about before regarding lean manufacturing and this idea of focusing outward rather than inward. BioWare was focused on their own capability (we make amazing story content!) rather than on what would actually create sustainable engagement. Once Bromberg shifted the entire company to focus exclusively on social connections between players, everything changed.
According to research from places like MIT and Stanford, social connection is one of the most powerful drivers of sustained engagement in any context, not just gaming. We're fundamentally social creatures. A 2010 meta-analysis published in PLOS Medicine found that social connections are as important to longevity as quitting smoking or exercising. If that's true for life itself, of course it's true for keeping people engaged with your game.
The Unity Disaster and the Runtime Fee
Which brings us to Unity. When Bromberg arrived in May 2024, the company had just imploded spectacularly. The previous leadership had announced a "runtime fee" where they would charge developers based on how many times their games were installed. The gaming community revolted. Developers threatened boycotts. The whole thing was a disaster.
What's fascinating is Bromberg's diagnosis of what went wrong. It wasn't that the idea itself was necessarily evil. It was that it came from "a deep company-wide insecurity about its ability to deliver excellent product." Unity didn't believe they could build better tools, so they tried to change the business model instead. As Bromberg explained, they were "looking to business models and bundling and tricks to fundamentally change the nature of the economics of the business we were in because we didn't like it, it wasn't working."
This is the kind of insight that only comes from someone who has been through multiple turnarounds. Most people would look at the runtime fee and think, "Bad idea, bad execution, let's just reverse it." Bromberg saw something deeper: the runtime fee was a symptom, not the disease. The disease was that Unity had stopped believing they could win by building better products.
His solution was almost comically straightforward. He called the big customers. All of them. And you know what they told him? "We are happy to pay you more money. We understand that you are delivering more value than we as a community are paying you, but I will not pay you this way."
How often does that happen? How often do your customers volunteer that they'd be willing to pay you more if you'd just ask in a reasonable way? That's not a pricing problem. That's a trust problem.
So Bromberg did something radical: he repealed the runtime fee and just raised prices transparently. Same net effect on revenue, completely different impact on trust. The customers had literally told him they were okay with paying more, they just wanted it done in a predictable way that didn't feel like Unity was reaching into their pockets after the fact.
But the deeper work was about rebuilding Unity's actual product capabilities. Unity had fallen behind AppLovin in the advertising technology space, particularly after Apple's App Tracking Transparency changes disrupted the market. While Unity was fiddling with pricing models and trying to bundle products together, AppLovin was building a completely new machine learning stack based on neural networks.
Unity responded by building Vector AI from scratch, a modern self-learning neural net system that could actually compete. This is classic Bromberg: stop optimizing a broken model, rebuild the foundation, then everything else becomes possible.
The Competitive Advantage of Authenticity
Throughout the interview, Bromberg kept coming back to this idea of authentic communication. When Star Wars: The Old Republic was struggling, he didn't try to spin it or use corporate jargon. He told players: "I understand where we are, I understand why you're upset, here's what I'm going to do about it, and I know you're not going to be really happy with me right now, because you don't trust me because you think I've done a terrible job, but here's what I'm going to do."
Then they just ground it out. Every day, every week, giving players something better than they had before. No grand promises. No roadmaps projecting 18 months into the future. Just consistent, visible improvement.
Research from the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business has shown that authentic leadership correlates strongly with employee engagement and organizational performance. But I think what Bromberg demonstrates is that it works with customers too. When you've screwed up badly enough, the only currency you have left is honesty.
The Structural Advantage of Turnarounds
There's something almost counterintuitive about what makes turnarounds work. In a healthy company, suggesting radical change requires convincing everyone that the status quo is broken. In a turnaround, that battle is already won. Everyone knows things are broken. The question isn't whether to change, but how.
This reminds me of what I've learned studying Japanese manufacturing. Toyota didn't invent the idea of continuous improvement because everything was going great. They invented it because they were desperate. They didn't have the capital to build huge batches like American manufacturers. They HAD to figure out how to make small batches work. Their constraints forced innovation.
Bromberg's career is a case study in the power of constraints. When you take over a company that everyone thinks is doomed, you have a kind of freedom that successful companies don't have. You can throw out the playbook. You can admit that the emperor has no clothes. You can focus entirely on the core problem without worrying about protecting sacred cows or managing internal politics.
As he describes it with Zynga: "If someone says to you, 'Here's a billion and a half dollars and 2,000 people and some really great, but maybe dinged up, but really great gaming properties,' and you don't think you can build a great video game company out of that raw material, you are doing the wrong thing for a living."
That company was valued at basically zero (just the cash on the balance sheet) when Bromberg and his team arrived. They sold it four years later for $12.5 billion. The assets were always there. The potential was always there. It just took someone willing to embrace the chaos and do the unglamorous work of building it back up.
What This Means for the Rest of Us
I don't run turnarounds for a living, and you probably don't either. But I think there's something universally applicable in Bromberg's approach.
First, he's relentlessly focused on understanding the actual problem, not the symptoms. Unity's runtime fee wasn't the problem. The loss of customer trust and product confidence was the problem. Star Wars: The Old Republic's churn wasn't the problem. The lack of social connections was the problem.
Second, he talks to customers. Not in a pro forma "we value your feedback" way, but in a genuine "help me understand what's happening here" way. When you're not defensive, when you're not trying to protect your ego or your past decisions, people will tell you exactly what they need.
Third, he embraces uncertainty rather than fearing it. This is probably the hardest lesson to internalize. Our natural instinct is to reduce uncertainty, to create predictability, to protect what we have. But sometimes the path forward requires walking directly into the fog.
And finally, he understands that the magic isn't in having the perfect plan. It's in consistent execution. As he said about Star Wars: The Old Republic's turnaround: "Before you know it, yeah, you lose some of the people, and gaming communities can be toxic so you always have some people upset, but you can turn everything around just by authentic application of effort and a real understanding of the issues."
The Long Game: Data-Driven Personalization
What's particularly interesting is where Bromberg sees Unity heading long-term. It's not just about game engines anymore. His vision is to unify game creation, live operation, advertising, and commerce around a single insight: deep, data-driven understanding of player behavior.
This connects all of Unity's pieces in a way the runtime fee never could. Developers build games in Unity, which gives Unity access to gameplay data through the runtime. That data feeds Vector AI to understand what makes players engage, transact, and stick around. That understanding improves ad targeting, optimizes in-game commerce, and even helps developers make better design decisions during development.
It's a flywheel where each piece reinforces the others, all built on the foundation of understanding the player. And the endgame? Bromberg talks about "the future vision of interactive entertainment as being personalized on a literal basis, which is to say all of us should have a somewhat different path through a video game based on who we are and how we play games."
This isn't just about games. His bigger vision is democratizing interactive experiences: "enable any content developer to make an interactive experience." Every creator is going to discover that "linear video cannot engage anywhere near the way interaction can." If Unity can provide the tools to make that transition easy, they're not just in the game engine business. They're in the future of all digital content business.
It's ambitious, maybe even audacious given where Unity was 18 months ago. But that's the thing about turnarounds. Once you've rebuilt the foundation and restored trust, suddenly the big visions don't sound so crazy anymore.
The Bigger Picture
What strikes me most about Bromberg's story is how he found his niche almost by accident. He wasn't trying to become a turnaround specialist. He just kept gravitating toward situations where he could have the most impact. The fact that those situations happened to be disasters was almost beside the point.
There's a lesson there about career planning, or maybe about life planning in general. We spend so much energy trying to figure out what we should be doing, mapping out five-year plans, optimizing for some imagined perfect path. Meanwhile, sometimes the answer is just to pay attention to what energizes you and what doesn't.
Bromberg hated the bureaucracy of big companies and the resource constraints of startups. So he found a space where he got the best of both: the resources of a large organization combined with the permission (necessity, really) to move fast and break things. That's not a career path you'll find in any guidance counselor's handbook. But it turns out to be exactly what he was built for.
I'm going to keep thinking about this as I work on my own projects. Not everything needs to be on fire to benefit from the turnaround mindset. Sometimes you just need to be willing to look at what's actually happening, not what you wish was happening. To talk to the people who are experiencing the problem. To admit when something isn't working. And to have the patience and persistence to grind out incremental improvements day after day.
In the end, that might be the real lesson: the art of the turnaround isn't really about fixing broken companies. It's about being honest about reality and having the courage to act on that honesty. And that's useful whether you're running Unity, operating a manufacturing facility, or just trying to figure out your next move.