Unity is laying off staffers

Truth is the people that were on Gigaya aren't exactly engine level folks. They were artists, creatives, designers, tutorial folks. They also didn't really know how to optimise it at a level that would benefit the community and users, so everyone would be getting something that made a 3080 slow down sometimes. That's not super useful.

Edit: could've been CPU but I heard it was tested on a rig with 30xx card etc. Maybe a laptop? Still - quite surprising to me as I'd have wanted it to be a good performance example.

This does not make the staff bad. This simply means it wasn't as useful a project as people believed. I'm talking from a data POV here, not a personal or emotional one.

I'd much prefer Unity to buy an actual AAA studio like Meta, Sony, Epic, Microsoft etc all do. They all bought battle tested existing studios to dogfood and develop further. That's what you do.

There was no scenario where this team could ever transform into that. Sorry.

 

i thought the point was they discover the problems regular developers face so that can be passed on to the people who fix those issues at engine level?

 

The problems regular devs face are all performance problems. All of them. Usability is not a problem with Unity. That's actually a selling point. What is left is performance.

I hate sounding negative, or cold. I'm not. But the fact is you want Unity hitting AAA notes sooner, not later. That is what benefits you as a developer.

 

Exactly!
Arguing "they weren't up for the task and had to be disolved for that reason" is twice ridiculous if you consider that it was gonna be a free game!

Sony etc. make acquisitions to make money with the products that new staff output.
Gigaya was supposed to showcase how well someone can work
with the existing engine, so Unity can make more money by providing an even better engine product.

It would actually be even of benefit to not have people with 20 years of game dev. experience on it, because only a fraction of Unity's users do either.

You can learn a lot about the state of your software when you let someone relatively new work with it.

 

I disagree, I've never played the demo so I can't speak about it's performance, but I assume it would be good. They seemed to know what they were doing and it wasn't anything crazy that couldn't be done in a performant way imo.

It would've been immensly helpful, at least to me -- from level design, pathfinding, animations, and everything else that I've seen during streams.

The issue isn't simply the removal of gigaya, it's that unity once again pulls the same old moves.
They promise something and then disappear. Except this time it's even worse.

Everyone here complained about unity not dogfooding it's own engine, some agree/disagree and there's a lot to argue about the benefits it would actually bring but in the end unity 'listened' and promised it's what they were doing with gigaya.

I quote unity themselves:

It's learning material would be immense, both to new and experienced users just now moving into SRP.
You will see a ton of custom shadergraph materials, camera/animation magic and some nice pathfinding/AI.

Most of all it's made with SRP, the new 'unity' -- nothing exists for SRP. You will see shadergraph/VFX in action.

The visuals were also nice. I was happy to see a game like that made with URP, it's not photorealistic and much of it was carried by good material artists but imo even photorealism needs a bit of style to it, otherwise it's hard to make it look interesting. (be it post processing or texture editing).

You can't just promise something like this, hype it up to 11, streams, blogs and you name it, and then just cancel the whole thing and call it quits, then expect all the people who became invested in that project and the vision it brings to just shrug it away 'things happen, they weren't that good anyways'.

Honestly maybe I'm a bit heated over this more than usual because I was genuinely looking forward to this.
When I started unity a few years ago one of the thing I studied the most was the 3D template, and that one was _ancient_ and had a ton of issues. Clunky animations, camera, and others, but it was still impressive and exciting.

Performance really isn't any dark magic. Handle your draw calls, good LODs, and if that's not enough -- custom culling. Manual culling would be immense and it made games like firewatch possible, it would help here too.

I would suggest umbra but it comes with high CPU overhead.
Culling might not be as helpful since it the world isn't that big, but I bet it'll still help.

The game really didn't look anything hard to do performance wise, in fact it looked quite achievable and realistic.

 

@hippocoder
i'm not sure i agree with that but you would probably know more than me.

 

Definetly pink shaders between SRP versions is a big selling point of usablity.

This apologetic stuff is ridiculous.

 

The downsides:
• Games are extremely expensive to produce, especially tentpole style games that typically bring in a lot of money
• New IPs generally increase risk severely when it comes to game success
• The marketing budget alone would be a massive financial cost
• Game production takes literally years
• Games by newcomer developers often completely flop and Unity has experience making roughly one game from 2005

Even if they go for a mobile game, these things are all still factors, but with smaller budgetary requirements at the risk of having an even more difficult time finding an audience.

You don't just will a good game into existence, even if you have a "good team." Games of any significant size require lots of things to develop and launch effectively. You need good leadership, good team communication, good community management, all sorts of things that exist outside of "well the art teams and coders are good at what they do."

I'm forced to wonder if you've ever actually developed a game with a team, or been involved with the release of a game, because this sort of specific advice is optimistically tinted to the point of being severely naive.

 

Speak for yourself man

 

You are very wrong.

I speak for the thousands of released games and how practically anyone with no skill can ship a title on steam or mobile. And they do.

If you don't, perhaps it's a case of biting off more than you can chew? That's a problem I see all the time in Unity. I am guilty of exactly that. But I have come to see what it was my problem, and not Unity's.

You can solo cook a banquet for 100, it doesn't mean you should, and it wouldn't be your tool's fault.

 

Thats not the point, the point is Unity consistently has problems that stem from not using the tools they made in an actual project.

If the gigaya team has trouble optimizing a scene then maybe thats a solution for the Unity engineers to solve and make easier to use or learn how to inform people what to do.

Nobody expects Gigaya to be a AAA game they expect the issues they have with Unity to be revealed through Unity's own development efforts, or the "proper" way to do things to be demonstrated in an actual project rather than a simple demo that lacks the complexity of a full game, or a pretty tech demo that doesn't need to be playable.

It's one thing if something "works" it's another if it's actually usable when things scale up.

And for me the news of Gigaya gave me hope Unity's image might turn around, and the problems many people have had with the engine for years now could be resolved. Benefiting in the same ways Blender film projects help improve Blender, and Unreals many game project brough Unreal to what it is today.

EDIT:

Yes, to an extent, a lot of issues are also usability issues. Mostly issues with using tools provides by unity that many consider significantly incomplete, or lacking functions that make using the features in a game not viable.

Like how cinemachine overrides post processing effects to the point making graphics settings is a more complex problem than it should be. Everyone complains about incomplete or confusing features, or fragmented features.

 

Gigaya seemed realistic to me, feature wise. It looked more than possible to achieve and complete that project in a performant manner, and if there's one thing I'm obsessed over it's performance since I started using unity.

I believe a sensible authoring of LODs, some GC considerations, and an eye on the GPU is enough.
It's not AAA, it's not photorealistic, it's not open world, nor does it have a large amount of AI.

It's not made with HDRP, it doesn't have expensive volumetric fog, shadows and so on.
It more than sure is possible with unity. Games that are much bigger in scale have been done.

 

Did you try the demo? Have you talked to the team about any performance issues they were facing?

What part do you think would be difficult? The game is low in poly count(fairly stylistic), not big in world size, with low numbers of AI, and thus less pathfinding and logic.

I'm honestly finding it hard to envision how this would even be a challenge performance wise.
It's nothing out of the ordinary.

 

You mean thousands of asset flips ?

 

Obviously I am not a AAA developer, but I try to put a lot of polish on my work.

Honestly, my major gripes with unity was a ton of simple editor things that amount to ergonomics and useability. Stuff like inspector user entry fields auto-selecting after committing. That's just some example off top of my head, its been a long time since I opened unity. But I have used pretty much all of the major game dev and 3d apps and to me, Unity's useability was alwyas a sore point. I made plenty of rants about that back when I was working in unity daily though.

I dont disagree engine performance isn't a problem, but I think useability is a low hanging fruit where many improvments can be made for less effort.

And does Unity need to be AAA level engine? I thought just making it the most polished tool for "indie" type games would further imbed it into its already carved out niche? Do you believe there is any chance unity is competing head to head with unreal? Wouldnt it be better to moer narrowly define its own niche?

Like my next project is probably gonna be pseudo 2d - just the sort of game unity is most popular for. But I like unreals ergonomiucs and art/level design tools so much more, it is going to be hard to make a case for unity for myself. I mean I have to look closer into other areas, but to me, I just want a tool that makes work faster and easier. Don't need any tech that didn't exist 10 years ago.

 

Quoting from this article, Riccitiello said - "Instead we designed these reductions to sharpen our focus, eliminate projects and initiatives that were not supporting priority areas, and reallocate teams to where they could add the most value."

It's sort of been clear for a while that Unity is looking at the non-game market, i.e. industrial applications, training, simulation as their future, which would not be unheard of. Even though artists love Maya, I've heard it's a tiny revenue generator for AutoDesk compared to their industry-focused applications.

That said, a project like Gigaya was going to improve and inform Unity like no other project even though it's 'just a game'. I'd compare it to auto companies that have racing teams, they don't make the bulk of their revenue off racing, but it helps tremendously to drive innovation. I'll be very sad if it's true the Gigaya team was laid off and the realization that it was not seen as a 'priority area'.

 

And if it is a performance issue thats almost certainly engine development related, or a result of a lack of information? That something that looks like what many indie devs want to make failed to perform at an acceptable level is alarming!

All the more reason the team shouldn't be dissolved. Why is it so difficult with base Unity tools?

EDIT: Or why does it seem so attainable to some devs but not theirs? What's missing?

EDIT2: Also one thing I do want to say, everyone knows indie devs want to play on a AAA playing field, it's why Unreal became so popular even though it has it's own issues.

We want to look to the future and aim higher, and learn the tools and methods to do so.

But even then, losing Gigaya would be a blow even if Unity's technology catches up to AAA and the new standards on the horizon.

 

If anything unity developers can do the more difficult demos, they have direct access to URP/HDRP developers, and I'm sure a good portion of the team are experienced. You have employees that have been there for decades.

gigaya seemed the opposite of difficult to achieve.

I mean DX12 developer himself said some changes in DX12 made a massive improvement to gigaya CPU wise, just like that -- so much that they switched to DX12.

 

I have no idea what Gigaya is

 

There is literally a thread titled "GIGAYA" in all capital letters on the first page of this forum.

 

Gigaya, sample game - What you missed at GDC 2022 | Unity - YouTube

 

OK but that isn't something Gigaya actually helped solve or even identify. But an AAA team rapidly would, as they need to do a LOT of cutscenes.

 

What data are you talking about here? I've seen low level Unity devs mention on here about how useful Gigaya has been for them.

And regardless of Gigaya they shouldn't have got rid of these people anyway. I've noticed their YouTube content has been lacking recently, people like Ciro Continisio were some of the most useful Unity staff IMO.

 

If this is true in such a way that not even a Unity-employed team which would have contact to the engine-devs can do it (what I don't believe), that means effectively none can. The logical consequence of this would be Unity is useless if you want good performance in workflow, tools and streaming. Yet at the same time you claim AAA would foreseeably doable by a different team? How does that fit?
Massive usage of source code access?

Also I have to agree with others, even if they claim tomorrow that they begin a AAA project, none would believe them that they bring it to an end

Btw. kinda the only thing that could redeem Unity as a whole now is if they actually change the engine part of their business model to one based on opennsource...

 

The core of Unity (C#, component system, the editor in general) is still a masterpiece of user friendliness, and the ability to write editor tools is just the icing on the cake. However the new stuff that is tacked on via the package manager is in all kinds of states - I've said before that although the package manager is a cool idea, in a way it heavily damaged Unity's identity. Everything used to be clean, reliable and well documented, now it's often not, stuff gets released way too early because hey, it's just another package right?

I don't know what the layoffs are about, maybe it's just the coming recession. But Unity's acted in recent years like a company that really doesn't know what it is or wants to be, spending money all over the shop and taking half-steps in 100 different directions. I'm not surprised to see a course correction of sorts.

I don't want to turn this into an Epic vs Unity thing but I have to say that Epic's moves in recent years have fed very strongly into its identity - it's all about 'next gen', whether it's lighting, rendering, characters. Basically if you thought 'I want to make something that looks so good people's jaws would drop' it's obvious what you'd use to make it.

On the other hand Unity seems to have delved into a misty landscape of AI possibilities (incidentally, or perhaps not so much, one of the departments targeted for layoffs). Acquiring companies that do nifty things rather than very useful things. Like there was that company in the UK that did all sorts of 'cool' AI stuff - but the only thing I could clearly understand about its utility was that it could make terrain textures look like they didn't tile. OK maybe they do a lot of other cool stuff - but is it stuff I need? And to make matters worse, instead of tightly integrating the stuff into the engine, they simply continued running the other company like a third party, and not for free either.

The only reason I'm still here is because at its core, Unity is still a game engine built for indies to get stuff done. I'm at home opening C# scripts and writing stuff, going back and forth to blender, substance designer, and audacity, and generally making stuff move around and look good. All the 'hey look!' stuff shoveled into Unity's basement lately is blissfully out of sight and mind. To get my first game out, I'm like a horse with its blinders on, I only want to see what I want to see to get where I want to go.

After that, it's anyone's guess where I'll end up.

 

No, just pressure on the relevant parts of Unity. For example above I explained to someone who claimed Cinemachine would be improved by this... it wouldn't.

This isn't about source, it's about the fact a handful of people can't do more than slow Unity down or expose performance problems. If you want them to improve tools, you need a project of sufficient scale enough to even reach those tools...

 

As an actual CTO of a company, i wholeheartedly disagree. Unity at least trying to start listening and dogfooding is of big importance to technical decision making, because at some point you need to justify your tech choices in regards to competitors, who actually seem to give a F*** about your needs as a client...
Working around insufficient featuresets costs us money and we are not using Unity for the "love we feel about it" but because it is earning us money. That's how tech decisions are being made and this is, why proper, focussed technical direction of a an engine is important.

 

Gigaya felt larger than the average game that's made with Unity...

 

- said by one of the developers working on gigaya, a while back.

And yet, here we are. Trying to give unity an excuse on why this is okay and not a big deal.


--------
Some of the things gigaya was tackling:


It was also possibly going to be a test-bed for future features, and test implementations with DOTS.

 

Yeah, and what about this?

 

Gigaya would have been a boon for beginners!! It had all the necessary features which a game would require for performance and gameplay in one place to make it successful, and would have showed us best practices and workarounds for problems in unity!! I really hope that the internal technical team continues to use the project internally for dog fooding purpose and release it !! It was just a start for gigaya!! Even though the start was small it provided invaluable direct feedback to the technical team and as the time would pass it would have shown some positive changes inside the engine by addressing those pain points/issues and slowly the scope of the project would have also increased, addressing more bigger issues
Its not me saying this, the blogpost promised all this

 

Do not get me wrong but thinking about leaving the ship is "acting like an adult" or maybe being realistic. The users has been loosing their faith in this software (including me) because of the slow and weak development of unity and its tools in recent years, lets be clear here man, these rants are not new, so, when unity finally makes something with sense (gigaya) they make decisions that affect negatively that project "for the long-term growth" in other words for money, there is nothing good in this event, nothing, so, add another layer of disappointment. I'm very ignorant on this subjects and i'm thinking this way, is that bad or good for the company? I know you guys are tying to chill the thing out but it is what it is and there is also background story so...
I really hope i'm wrong because i loved unity years ago and i'm trying dude, i'm trying to see potential...

 

that has been proven not to be true, right now is a trend for lumen stuffs and that's it

 

Sauce: https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7v...ad-and-stressed-out-amidst-unexpected-layoffs

To those curious about the reason behind the decision, here are words from the CEO himself.

For now we can only look forward to what that priority area truly is.

 

"To eliminate projects and initiatives that were not supporting priority area, and reallocate teams to where they could add the most value."

If their priority is no longer building a game development tool, they should probably make that clearer to the users...

 

If anyone here is hiring; I am more than happy to pass on details and info of some incredibly talented senior artists, animators, designers, producers, programmers, vfx artists that are looking for new roles to apply their skills. Most have AAA experience and are some of the most clever and passionate people I have ever worked with. I will happily give a glowing reference for each and every one of them! Slide into my DMs!

 

I did not mean to imply this would be fixed, it was merely one example of a broad problem.

Obviously the fixes depend on if and how they features are used.

EDIT: Hm, I guess Andy isn't allowed to say?

EDIT2:

If somehow this is the point and the purpose, my god this is still a massive flub, finish the project, release it as promised, THEN say it's not good enough.

Wasn't things like steam releases and post launch updates a factor?

Why would anyone trust whatever new thing they're doing will come to completion? This is that common problem of pulling the trigger before priming people for it.

 

There is nothing true in this statement. Most professional teams have to buy dozens of assets because the ones built into the engine aren't as usable. Sometimes they can't be used in production even If they are marked as production-ready.

The point of making gigaya should always be to look into all the existing issues no one cares to report though they plague everyone.

 

I don't think its about game development not being prioritized, I think he meant focus will be on actual engine features development instead, such as DOTS. Instead of other projects.

 

capitalism does not incentivize honesty.

 

Fully agree. Sad that he's been one of the people who got laid off.
I found this thread of his interesting: https://twitter.com/CiroContns/status/1539390830162677760
.

 

I think this is a classic mistake engineering driven companies make - let's just focus on the features and not worry about how people access or use those features. The whole field of UX is trying to get the higher ups to focus on what is consumer facing and not just the back-end engineering process.

Gigaya was a step in that direction, forcing an internal team to do what its users are trying to do, all the way up to releasing on Steam. The end result would have been (hopefully) a treasure trove of best practices for game developers to pick apart.

Unreal has an appeal to developers because so much is already done for you. I get, and prefer, that Unity is more open and does not dictate a game style to you, but in lieu of 'doing it for you', they needed a robust example of how it could be done to attract new-ish developers and show the way to more experienced teams.

 

"And then we'll see"

Man if this is true it seems like no one saw this coming

Exactly, I work with programmers, the ideal way to do things code wise and the way to actually use the tools in a non-painful way are a constant discussion.

EDIT:
Is PR/Marketing just a lost art in modern society?

 

sorry but i don't buy it.

why they were the team in the first place then?
is unity going to stay in the same place? making amazing demos that just unity devs will understand, where you need to be a professional or very experienced dev to make games like that? with custom things and unreachable for small teams? i have been thinking that unity is the tool for make game dev easier finally, even for "artists, creatives, designers, tutorial folks" Will gigaya be a "you need a AAA dev team to make this" demo? again? i was hoping something different

Is that bad? i mean, i thought unity's vision is to make game dev easier for everyone, including creatives guys ¿no?

...well yes, you said it

Like the lightmaper -.-"

looks like you (and we) are wrong, it would have been a boon for AAA, that is what they need to make it work

 

The context is that all tech stocks are down, but:
- did epic had any layoff?
- why Godot has been hiring lately, while being non profit?
- Gigaya is usability QA, we all know qa aren't important and priority, look at anthem, fallout 76 and cyberpunk 2077.

There is a saying: "when accountants takes hold of the restaurant, they think serving frozen food is a good idea, because it's cheaper and generate more money".

The reality is that unity is a publicly trade company with operating losses. So the new chef is like maybe frozen food aren't that bad after all.

 

one thing has nothing to do with the other

 

Beancounter mentality is a sin.

There's such a huge issue with modern companies lately where customers/users just feel like the company hates them or doesn't care, which just causes resentment.

Simple good will goes a long way...

 

Let's hope so in every case!
Sometimes you do have to do things - even if they are slow - that polish the "old stuff". DOTS and co. are definitely great and I love what they did with things like the Burst compiler, but putting the existing tools to thorough test in-house with a significant, yet not over-ambitious game project would still help a lot with polishing of tools and features.

 

Yeah, I get that but on the other hand you could justify staying with Unity because you want to be focused and changing tech costs time and money. I don't think many companies would consider switching to Unreal Engine because of Unity layoffs which are also aimed to increase the focus of the their product. That's the official story at least.

 

Moving technology comes with marketing benefits, it's why all these companies use buzz words like metaverse even though they have no real clue how or if it will make them money.

Unity lacks a lot of production ready marketing features.

Not really related to Gigaya. But I feel like Unity doesn't understand why these marketing features are important to a game release. And why a developer using URP might want the option to use raytracing, and HDR, and DLSS.

Gigaya to me was a slow move to Unity hopefully realizing these things are important beyond a games visuals.

EDIT:

Or maybe more specifically Unity understanding things from a developer or even publisher perspective. Even if Gigaya was a failure of their initial objectives, why the layoffs? Keep trying. Learn the suffering of a sequel.