Discussion I am concerned about the future of Unity.

Unity Technologies has been having financial issues and now they are doing another round of layoffs. Sorry if this was asked before, but what will happen to Unity (the game engine) if Unity Technologies goes bankrupt?

 

The tech stack would be bought up by some other company. They just had an unsolicited offer half a year ago or so.

Note that most IT-related companies had lay-offs the last half a year and all in total by Unity are only about 10-13% of the workforce.
A PC case company recently laid off 80% of their people. Even Meta will soon lay off a higher percentage (about 11000 some time ago and another 10000 soon of ther 86000 in 2022) and we don't worry about Facebook, do we?
It's an up and down.

 

What financial issues? The stock price rarely reflects reality. Unity is profitable and has never had financial issues. All big IT corps are downsizing and restructuring right now, as DragonCoder mentioned. Do you think Amazon and Microsoft are in financial trouble as well?

People confuse financial problems with expansion and growth strategy. Companies often go public to raise funds for expansion or to acquire other businesses. Unity used the funds raised through the IPO to invest in new projects, marketing, acquisitions, which initially impacted profitability. But that doesn't mean Unity is in financial trouble, they just chose to rapidly expand the business for higher profit yield in the future.

 

They've laid off another 600 people and they only started turning a profit in Q4 2022.

 

Microsoft just laid off 10'000 people, Amazon is laying of another 9000 at a time when these companies report record profits. What's your point? All big IT corps are restructuring now. I'm sure there is pressure from shareholders for these performative actions to align with the rest of the industry. They're saving about 120mil a year from these layoffs while they paid out 96mil to the top 6 Unity execs. Short term they aren't saving much of anything.

And if they were really in financial trouble then they wouldn't spend billions on acquisitions. It was a choice to expand at the cost of short term profitability, doesn't mean the company is not viable.

Another layoff so soon is rather indicative of leadership problems, they should do it once and be done with it. But no one could expect Unity ads team F***ing up the data leading to ironSource merger to save their cash cow.

 

My point was pretty clear. Those companies are posting record profits while Unity took almost three years after going public to post a profit.

"It's just restructuring" doesn't really hold water here because this isn't even Unity's first round of layoffs. They also laid off hundreds of people less than a year ago when they were still, again, not turning a profit.

Plenty of companies in financial trouble buy out and merge with other companies. This was actually a super common thing during the Dot Com Boom.

 

Unity don't need record profits to align with the rest of the industry. Layoffs like these are in favor of shareholder interests. If the rest of the industry is doing it, Unity will too. It's neither here nor there.

It's not the first time for Amazon either, they layed off 18k people earlier this year before this new round of 9k more. Meta also had multiple rounds of layoffs with tens of thousands of people let go but that's another whole S***show. Unity is not somehow unique in this and one of the layoff rounds was Unity firing their internal ads team for F***ing up the data, it wasn't exactly planned.

Sure, but plenty of companies also opt in to aggressively expand and grow as much as possible right after IPO at the cost of short term profitability to gain market share, enter new industries, expand on services and numerous other reasons. There's no game engine bubble that's about to pop, it's an actual product with many use cases.

 

Except Unity didn't post their first profit until less than half a year ago.

Amazon has over 1,500,000 employess. Meta had over 85,000 and was imploding due to multiple bad choices across the board. Microsoft had over 220,000 employees.

Unity had just over 7,700 and didn't start turning a profit until, again, less than half a year ago.

Yeah and that isn't a guaranteed pathway to success or profit, as we've seen.

 

That was a non-GAAP profit. Unity is not that far off from GAAP profitability I think. Worse case they need to right-size around 5,000 employees.

 

With a company as acquisition heavy as Unity, you want to use non-GAAP.

 

So they are profitable and OP's worry is unwarranted.

Total amount of employees is not that relevant, not all of them are programmers or otherwise employed in the corporate structure. Microsoft laid off 5% of their corporate workforce, Dell 5%, Spotify 6%, Amazon around 7-9%, Meta around 20%, Shopify 20%... Unity is somewhere in the middle of these. Not the best case scenario, but far from the worst.

Time will tell.

 

Lol what now you are just making stuff up. Non-GAAP is literally worthless.

 

Software comes and goes. In my job I end-up abandoning one software platform for another every few years and have to learn everything over again.

 

Sounds expensive. Can't imagine studios retraining staff every few years and rebuilding established pipelines and tooling.

 

This situation isn't unique to Unity. Every company has been having layoffs. Amazon laid off 9,000, Cognizant laid off 3,500, Facebook laid off 1,500, etc. We're in a recession. Laying people off isn't as much about financial status as it is about business strategies. It always happens during recessions and often multiple times.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/tech/article/here-s-many-meta-layoffs-hit-bay-area-18074814.php
https://www.geekwire.com/2023/amazo...offs-read-memos-from-execs-sent-to-employees/
https://www.livemint.com/news/world...decline-lay-off-employees-11683169375876.html

 

Most likely scenario is that case of unity's demise the engine will go public domain, or it will go opensource or will be reacquired by another company. In both cases it'll remain available for a decade or several. So, frankly, this is not your concern. The code won't evaporate overnight, and while you might feel sorry for laid off people, you are unlikely to be affected.

Also, bankruptcy wouldn't be the end of unity, as far as I'm aware.

 

There's no way Unity can't be a profitable company, even currently they have been operating at a loss. But Unity has a humongous user base (2 billion?) And thousands of them paying for the pro version.

They of course need to reduce costs. The competition is fierce and of course there has been huge investments made. But not all investments translate to profit.

 

Ain't no way there are 2 billion engine users. Players of games made with Unity perhaps, but not engine users. Since there's no revshare, even the biggest hits on Steam only bring in a few pro licenses for Unity, which is why they're pushing into other industries.

 

Aside from the absurdity of two billion Unity users (more than 25% the population of the planet? Come on), Unity doesn't make most of their money off licenses.

 

Operating at loss means not being profitable.

2 billion is impossible. We're probably looking at a hundred thousand users at best.

A thousand of pro licenses is only 2 million per year. That's before taxes. Unity spends 2 billion per year on operating expenses.

Meaning they'll need over a million pro licenses to stay afloat.

 

Unity's technological innovations and services possess a value in the billions. Regardless of profitability (which it currently enjoys), this immense worth is not easily diminished. In the most unfavorable circumstance, a larger company may potentially acquire Unity.

Moreover, numerous alternatives are readily available. No organization is entitled to your loyalty or apprehension. Use whatever tools at your disposal to accomplish your goals.

It would be more beneficial for you to focus on developing your game rather than concerning yourself with the financial matters of a sizable corporation.

 

Hi GPT-4

 

Mike Acton just left Unity.
https://twitter.com/mike_acton/status/1654169432598478848

basically anything can happen at this point. I’m disappointed in how Unity couldn’t solve their engine issues for years.

 

I still think Unity is the best Game Engine that exists, even if it got reverted back to 2018 features and we only had built in render pipeline, IMGUI, traditional Input System and threw all the new packages out the window, it would still be a great engine. Not to mention 10+ years of after market support.

There's really no better way right now to build an application that can run on an Quest 2, an Iphone and a web browser all in one.

Unity went public, was massively overvalued, and has been correcting itself. Even today it's still worth 9.4 Billion Dollars.

In some ways it actually might be better for us if Unity became a smaller company, rather than chasing NFT's, AI or trying to be an entire platform, they'll just go back to focusing on making a great game engine.

I'm worried about the future of specific features. Will UIElements ever be compatible with VR? Will UI Input System ever be performant enough to use in VR? Will ECS become feature complete and continue to be supported? Will they continue improving WebGL support? Will they implement WebGPU support?

Still disappointed Project Tiny died off, and the reality is that any other package might do so as well. However that's just losing a nice to have, as opposed to the entire engine.

 

That's certainly possible. The road to get there is pretty rough, though, especially for the people left on the wayside.

 

He may have been laid off but he may have just decided it was time to move to the next project which is very normal to do in this industry.

 

A shift is already happening in indie space:

Spoiler

While Unity is still dominating the markets, it's losing its reputation amongst smaller developers very rapidly. A viable open source alternative with none of the baggage or bad corporate overlord decision making is an easy pick.

 

I call it lost opportunity. Instead of chasing Hollywood and never delivering anything even remotely ready moviemakers would consider using they could have focused on polishing existing features so they don’t feel like being abandoned right after release.

 

I recommend not to overestimate importance of events and individual opinions.

If someone's immersed in all the social media nonsense, they may end up thinking that they're, I don't know, in the middle of things, some battle of the middle earth, where their opinion is accounted on a scale deciding the fate of the world, where one must make t heir choice in glorious battle between the Good and Evil. Where Good, obviously, is the side they picked.

In reality, in many cases, it is all a thunderstorm in a glass of water.

Trends are long term. Even in software, things change slowly. You'll see their effects in 10 years. Maybe in 20 years. A cutting edge technology everybody thinks is the future may be irrelevant. And some tech people think is obsolete will quietly continue trudging on.

The tweet you linked is not a sign of things to come, it is not a divine revelation. It is an opinion of one guy. What would you believe if the guy said "I like burgers" instead?

I recommend to focus on your things that needs to be done, and ignore the noise. The noise well pass, the future will become the present and we will see what it brings. In time.

 

As much as I would like any company to stay away from the IPO, Unity won’t unmake it. Their leadership is not confident enough to stir the ship, they will sell the whole boat to a no name publisher company that will eventually just deprecate the engine and that’s it.

 

An open source engine's usage outpacing Unity's usage in one of the best known gamejams globally is not a subjective statement on the level of "I like burgers", though. It's not an opinion, it's a fact.

But what that fact signifies could be interpreted in many ways. The engine that shall not be named of version 4 came out recently, so perhaps people are checking out the new kid on the block. Or perhaps that engine lends itself well to gamejams specifically but not full blown productions. Still, the adaption and growth in general is there.

You're right that trends are long term, no one's catching Unity anytime soon. By their own projections, it'll take them 7 years to catch up to Unity in games released per year on Steam. Personally, I consider that a very optimistic view on their part.

 

For some reason the professional space takes a lot longer to shift. In my country there's currently 10 Unity Jobs, 3 Unreal Jobs and 0 Godot Jobs. Indie Devs moving to Godot is still a big step, as Godot developers will eventually start creating Godot products in the market that need to be maintained.

Phase 2 transition will be having a handful of Godot job postings.

 

But, as you stated, perceived significance of that is not a fact, but an opinion.

Also, how many of those games were full 3d?

 

There is already a discussion here:
https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-to-cut-another-600-jobs.1432438