Unity is laying off staffers

Let's not forget bitsquid/stingray.

 

IMO they'd buy unity, make nothing to it for a year, and then discontinue it. Which is why you don't want to be acquired by Adobe.

The reason why I'm using VS Code and not Visual Studio is because Visual Studio has insanely annoying problem with auto-formatting that is driving me nuts (it is not possible to disable automatic insertion of space in certain circumstances). It would probably take an hour to code in a checkbox to disable the behavior, but microsoft does not care, because not enough people are affected. The problem persisted for years.

Reminds me of a reddit anecdote. "The new guy came today, he spent ten minutes fixing problem that bothered him as a user, commited it to the main tree, and once commit has been accepted, he smiled, sighed happily and immediately resigned"

 

I'd be happy to see Unity being invested in by Sony and MS in a joint venture. That would be an interesting precedent because they'd a) satisfy the mandate of continuity b) push a lot more focus back into games and future tech.

Unity provides most of the end products for their platforms, after all.

 

It says a lot about gamers and how out of touch they are. It was a community vote and no sane person is going to believe EA’s DLC policy at the time had bigger influence on the world than some of other companies, some responsible for people’s death or world’s financial crisis.

 

Having just returned from doing other "stuff", and coming back to making games, I am curious. I am still using built-in and I do not get what is better about URP. Performance?
Yeah, that is good, I need that. What about lighting?
I actually miss the lighting in Unity 5. I feel like I was left behind in the dark ages.

 

I am not certain that's on topic my dear

But if you are not going for mobile, then HDRP is the best option, especially if you watch the videos regarding lighting and know how to do the dynamic res stuff. This means everything looks nice without baking or more work. I may be biased though, or just tired of URP and built-in being a bit dated. Don't need plugins then.

 

I am honestly just pissed off about the Gigaya team being fired. It was the one (and only) thing that gave me hope for the future of Unity. Getting rid of this is literally holding a giant middle finger in front of everyone who was looking forward to any kind of improvements with the Editor.

This entire debacle is sending a message loud and clear on what Unity actually prioritizes. And it's definitely neither the engine nor the community. I honestly can't believe this decision. It's absolutely mind-boggling.

 

Oops, sorry

 

I do not think HDRP is a good idea for our game. Thank you much. Nice to see ya again

 

Everything that happened to EA is now slowly happening to Unity. I'll give you one guess as to why.

 

I'm going to say a few things here.

John Riccitiello is a brilliant CEO but only when it comes to one side of managing a company. That is when the company is ready to expand and branch out to other areas and grow substantially. He achieved this exact same thing when at EA and did the same for Unity.

John Riccitiello's skills though fall down when it comes to the maintaining the company he has helped to to grow for the long term. He dreams big, he specialises in growth management and is an expert at increasing a companies revenue via expansion. Those are his skills and those are the reasons why EA and Unity hired him. He's not good at long term management of a company that has grown huge. This is evident from how managed previous companies and what he did to try and keep them in the game. What he did was bad. Look at EA etc.

John Riccitiello should have been given a fixed term contract as CEO to only manage expansion and growth. After that he should have been let go and people more capable of managing big companies long term should have been hired.

EA made that mistake, so did the company he previously worked for and now Unity have done it too.

 

Yes?
They make money by cutting costs, not by hiring the best and using the best methods. These studios are revolving doors of engineers who only have experience in Unreal. They all use the same methods, same software, same workflow. All tech industries are only interested in creating an army of easily expendable worker drones, and "software suites" like Unreal help them do that.

"Efficiency" is not something an industry based around making games and art should care about. You guys are trying to admonish Unity for "being an out of touch soulless corporation", and the reasons you're doing so are because they're not being corporate enough lol

 

lol, i love crazy people.

 

I don't think adobe is really known for that.

 

Microsoft is much more hands off these days if the way they treat game companies they buy is any indication.

 

As far as minecraft goes, they certainly breathed new life into it. Unity is about 7-8 times larger than Mojang Studios of course. What they do with Blizzard will be more of an indicator, if we really wanna hypothetize about such a thing.

 

I'm optimistic. The CEO that was at the center of the controversy is staying around for now but the company has to report to Microsoft and I wouldn't be surprised if he were removed post-acquisition. Microsoft is allowing unions to form at the company.

https://www.videogameschronicle.com...ion-blizzard-ceo-after-microsoft-acquisition/
https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/13/tech/microsoft-activision-union-agreement-cwa/index.html

 

How about you stop worrying about this crap, and wasting time on posts like this, and get back to work on your current project?. If you have to pay more attention to the damn stock market, or inner workings of Unity, then your not a game dev, your a butt hurt worry wart. Enough of this BS, get back to work!...

 

Well some ppl may be concerned about future and quality of Unity considering which ppl were let go. You know the tools u use to make games. Would not be nice if ur hammer top would fall off each time u try to hit the nail

 

How about you take your own advice?

 

Does it matter at all?
People want to be loud when things get closed, or staff reduced. But keep quiet, when new staff is taken on. I don't recall you being such vocal like in this thread, when GIGAIA thread was active.

You should grab a tool which is functional right now, to do a Job. Not something tha MAYBE will affect your project in two, or 5 years.

In two years, you will be probably starting another project. Then reevaluate if Unity 5, 2020, or 2024 is best tool for your need. Not Unity 2050. If anything, alternatives are available on the market.

 

Is beeing active in a thread a measurement of being interested in the project?

I agree that use what works for u know, but its normal u try to also plan ahead.

 

I had to read this a few times to try and figure out if this is sarcasm or not.

 

It does. No one can swap the engine and the whole pipeline that's built on top of it with a snap of a finger. Who even can afford to spend significant amount of time evaluating alternatives, then retraining staff and rebuilding the pipeline? That time investment could already cover half of the next game's development.

 

I think the folks let go were not the engineers. More than likely the water cooler gossip brigade, the harpies in HR and surrounding depts.. glassdoor speaks of them.. sales guys who ain't cutting the mustard.. lazy support people..like the clown told me a dozen times to reinstall DX11 to stop a PhysX based crash.

Seems to me you need a core of competent senior engineers with knowledge of the guts of the engine and deep knowledge within their specialty domain along with the mid-level departmental/domain engineers who flesh out the boilerplate and test. Hiring should be by department/domain managers as they understand best the talent they need and knowledge gaps to be filled. Can HR. Humans are not resources. If yer job makes you whine go get another one. Your emotional state is of concern to you and not the company's bottom line. Folks gotta be paid. Two or three competent personnel could handle the accounting for and issuing of paycheques for several thousand folks with today's software. Sales/support for their services should be tightly coupled with the engineering domain/department so each hand knows what the other does. Don't make engineers attend meetings where non-coders toss ideas around. It will only piss them off and waste time they can spend on the engine. Have someone summarize the relevant points the engineering team needs. Encourage engineers to spend time on the forums on company time. Keep the company's nose out of political agendas. Fix the engine before trying to fix the world. If someone is writing six interfaces to control three sliders in an API..fire them. They don't know WTF they are doing.

 

The article linked in the OP literally states engineering and AI departments were hit the hardest. Therefore, anything following your first sentence is meaningless.

 

Yup -- including the entirety of the productions team (which is now confirmed, no more guesses).
which means the entirety of the gigaya team (Programmers, Artists, VFX, etc), and the team that worked on the HDRP FPS sample are gone.

And since we still don't have an announcement about gigaya, I think it's a foregone conclusion that it's canceled.

 

You guys still believe everything on Kotaku? And why did the harpies in HR fire themselves? The plot thickens as popcorn supplies run low.

 

My reply wasnt meant to be mean or negative, hell even i have fallen prey to some news a few times. Layoffs and other probs happen with any company...

 

They just fired a bunch of people? Wake me up when the inevitable implosion happens.

 

We don't have any confirmation because it's Sunday. You will have to be patient with their PR team to dodge the topic with a wall of text. My guess is somewhere between Wednesday - Friday next week at best.

Also, on the topic, It seems like no one was fired from the team responsible for the cinematic. Either the company is waiting for them to finish the current cinematic, or they think these short movies are more important than games for the company customers. Not sure what's worse.

 

Kotaku's better than whatever info ipp is pulling out of his backend.

 

Thats my important take away, a little pretty demo is so much more marketable than improving editor usability and updating features beyond the first announcement.

 

If kokatu wrote said article and hippocoder says it's a click bait site I did not read the article. However they should implement the solution I laid out for efficiency if that was the case. Didn't mean to trigger you so badly you couldn't parse the second section of my post and immediately scorned and dismissed it before mischaracterising it. Cheers

 

Are u sure about that?? Most unity's income comes from games and even if they laid off more people from game engine department, doesn't mean the available workforce isn't sufficient for its proper development... Kotaku only mentioned that those were engineers and AI researchers which are very broad terms and that can mean "engineer" from any department, which includes cinematics as well!!
There is no use of accusing the internal management and CEO and discussing about acquisition of unity as it isn't helping anyone and we cannot do anything regarding that, we also don't have any information about how complicated the problems are and the sources of those problems, all you guys are just wasting time in speculating stuff... this is going to do nothing but damage your mental health, there are enough people at unity to solve this and think about it...

All we can do is explain and vote here how gigaya is important to us and unity's future and dogfooding and shouldn't be abandoned, till unity gives us some more information about it!!

 

So to summarize - you didn't read the article the thread is about. The reason for that you cite another forum user said it's possibly clickbate which might or might not be true. Then you came up with random assumptions based on the thread's title and nothing else. And finally, you offered a solution to a problem you yourself came up with because it has nothing to do with the news in question. Did I get all of that right?

You didn't trigger me; you quoted me and then went off a tangent. Please don't quote me.

 

I asked Cio Continisio (who was working at giagaya and got laid off ) whether its cancelled and he said that he doesn't know and its up to unity of what to do with it

 

So far, we know that the company has fired the most communicative and active developer related to gigaya, Andy-Touch. You can also find on Linkedin that the manager of "Internal productions" has left the unity the same day. There is somewhere rumor that the entire team behind gigaya has been closed.

The purpose of that team was to internally playtest the engine and related toolkit. Now you will be playtester so expect the next LTS to be almost unusable. Also, this should mean the research will be significantly slowed down, and anything they publish will be lower quality.

And about moving that kind of project (or responsibility in general) to anyone else. It will take months to find new people for that and even more months to get fully productive in a new job. All this considering there will be someone willing to take that responsibility (there won't be).

 

Not a rumor, Ciro confirmed (on twitter) that the entire production team for game samples (gigaya, HDRP FPS) were laid off.
There's a chance gigaya will be handled by a skeleton crew, if that happens the end product will suffer greatly and I doubt it'll be used to push feedback to other teams, but at least It'll still be released.

 

While that's true, a decently received Game on Steam that utilizes a large number of current features and with source access would have been well marketable too.
A game engine company should have both: Videos showing the cutting edge that's not really feasible for their average users, and samples that are made for those average users.

 

We already know gigaya was extremely helpful for DX12 developers, and it led to a large performance improvement.
It was also supposed to be a test bed for newer unity versions and features. (You can find more about this on the gigaya thread).

The developers also stated they have given a ton of feedback and suggestions back to the unity developers of certain packages/features.

Most of all it can be seen as a best practice sample for URP. Utilizing SRP features such as VFX and shadergraph.

The team was experienced, with many of them having past AAA experience. (source: blog & stream).

 

Come on guys at least get Anby's name right :/

 

"Joachim_Ante was last seen: Jun 24, 2022"
Never see CTO left the forum for such a long time.....He was always wondering around DOTS sub forum.

 

You mean Andy?

 

Amel Negra, Chema Demak, Ben Mclimoyle, and some more are still there in the staff list... Did they chose to stay back after being fired??

 

Unity had to let him go, nobody can hold on to Anti Touch

 

The thread is not about the article but about news it mentioned, that's because Kotaku writes garbage.

The useful news are "people were laid off", the rest is the usual manipulative garbage that tries t o make you feel in specific way and often cannot be verified.

For example, from the article:

Does that anonymous source actually exist? We'll never know.

 

Why would I read click bait to get myself all riled up about something that is mere rumor? Makes no sense to me. If it cranks your cookies go for it. I will await facts as they appear from reliable sources. My apologies if that as well triggers you to respond vehemently and again mischaracterize my lack of interest in click bait as essential criteria to commenting on the thread.

 

They read a murgilod reply?

 

Kotaku's inside gamedev as a business article work has, generally speaking, always been their only reliably good work. While the rest of their stuff is basically the embodiment of all the worst parts of games journalism, their investigative work is second only to Eurogamer. There are rare notable exceptions, but not to the scale that it diminishes their work on that front.

Incidentally, if you've ever worked with any journalists before from an anonymous source perspective, either vetting or talking to them, there are verification processes that are followed before a source will be used. Identity is always verified behind the scenes.