Unity to cut another 600 jobs

Unity are cutting another 600 jobs in search of "long term profitability". Thought forum users may want to know and couldn't see anything on here about it

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/busin...in-search-of-long-term-and-profitable-growth-

Hopefully this is the last set of layoffs but I doubt it, quite a mountain unity has to climb still

 

I hope the laid-off people were appropriately compensated and are doing well.

How must the remaining employees be feeling? They're probably feeling like anyone could be the next to go. That's really not a good situation.

BTW on another news website, I read the following information:

I would also find it interesting to know which jobs they have cut.

 

3rd round of layoffs in less than a year.

Fingers crossed everyone lands new roles!

 

According to this article, they fired (mostly?) middle management.
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/unity-lays-off-hundreds-more-closing-half-of-offices

 

Its not only middle management roles;
I know engineers, etc in non management roles who have been let go.

 

I hate how these layoffs are always so opaque, can't tell which tools are getting shafted so I can course correct accordingly. Sometimes a discord or forum active Unity person just disappears so you can make a somewhat educated guess but that's it.

 

You know what they say about companies that lay off a bunch of employees while doing stock buybacks?

 

There's still 7k employees, they're fine. All big tech companies are downsizing and restructuring.

ChatGPT knows:

While I'm an AI language model and don't have personal opinions, I can provide some insights on this topic. People often criticize companies that engage in stock buybacks while simultaneously laying off employees. The critics argue that this behavior suggests that the company prioritizes shareholder returns over the well-being of its employees. They believe that resources used for buybacks could be better spent on retaining or retraining employees, investing in research and development, or improving working conditions.

However, companies may argue that buybacks are a necessary part of managing their capital structure and providing value to shareholders. They might contend that layoffs are sometimes necessary for operational efficiency or restructuring, especially during economic downturns or when a company faces strong competition.

Ultimately, the perception of companies engaging in such practices will depend on one's perspective on the role of corporations and the balance between shareholder value and employee welfare.

 

The gamesbiz article explained that after the second round of earlier layoffs the company posted it's first quarter of profitability.Worked for a great number of companies across all sectors in my long career. I have never met any middle management that did not make the project more frustrating or take longer than it should have. Middle management are like modern doctors. They make sure they don't cure so they have continuous business. As a dev, I just want to get to the end of the road and get on to something new and challenging.. And their incessant, work interrupting meetings they create to justify their middling management are simply interruptive and rarely constructive. I suspect they are getting rid of those types, the pronoun grifters and from what I read on GlassDoor, their guttersniping HR clique needs a good heave-ho. Musk got rid of 80% of twitter staff and it runs faster, get more engagement, reduced RPC calls by a great percentage. I personally hold the opinion that the number of people working on a project past a given threshold of meritocracy reduces the efficiency of the best talent working on the project. Software engineering is not ditch digging. You don't get better sofware/a deeper longer ditch by simply throwing more people who can "hold a shovel" at it.

 

Please, leave this giant bullshit at home. After the layoffs he literally begged the remaining staff to do overtime (and belittled people who said no). That SoB is not a great example of a runner of a successful business.

if your business model is built on exploiting people, you are doing it wrong.

 

That is the facts pal. No social justice warrior lens involved. I would think that calling a man who runs companies that put rockets into orbit, bores tunnels thru bedrock, fields constellations of communications satellites, engineered the Tesla factory while sleeping on the floor (and in the library of twitter when overseeing it's turnover to him) makes the worlds most popular EV, helped put together the team that runs OpenAI and consistently ranked as the world's richest, or in the top few a bad businessman is really stretching reality beyond the breaking point.. I despise vulture capitalists as much as the run of the mill socialist but Musk is not a vulture capitalist. He actually produces goods that the marketplace needs. But this is not about Musk./ It is about managing a company to profitabilty in Unity's case. A couple rounds of layoffs put them into profitability. If that meant cutting deadwood and they don't have a regular paycheque they can count on. Well welcome to the club pal. Your paycheque now depends on your merits., Enjoy the marketplace. As a user I want Unity to be lean, mean and profitable.That means the engineering dept should be merit based..not touchy feelie.

 

I want Unity to be profitable, but I want that long term as well as short term. Large layoffs combined with stock buybacks is purely short term mindset.

Unity has serious long term challenges that affect game developers, and game developers are the core customer base for Unity. There are lists of unfixed bugs that have been known about for years. There are new features that took far to long to get production ready (like DirectX12). And there is very real competition from other game engines at this point. Unity has not even announced a plan to try to compete with UE5's Lumen and Nanite tech.

 

As a full time Unity user who relies on Unity working effectively so I can create products for work and income; the layoffs worry me and send a message of instability in resources.

@timsibiski Would Unity share publicly which specific departments/features/systems were affected so us users can pivot if something we relied on being developed or bug fixed is now less resourced?
A specific example; my current project uses and relies on Cinemachine and Splines; its worrying not knowing if these two features are impacted and if I need to look into 3rd party solutions instead because bugs are not going to be solved or they are being deprecated.

 

Yes please, I'm now wondering if Graph Tools Foundations and Visual Scripting rework are pushed even further back. I was hoping for Unity 2024 to be the prophesized release cycle that finally includes these, but now I'm wondering if I should invest in something else right now such as writing my own graph framework in UI Toolkit like Databrain asset author did.

 

well i hope this helps in any way to create more "up-to day" features, Unity needs it, since 3 years ago and sadly this year is not exactly "amazing" either

 

When Unity layoffs happen, it's more than just a number to many Unity users, it's often much more personal, they're often hearing from friends, former colleagues, and social media acquaintances who were amongst the culled.

You've got to wonder whether the savings from the staff cuts can possibly outweight the damage done to confidence in the future of Unity's products/services, confidence that already seemed to be at a pretty low point.

I do wonder whether Unity needs to develop a separate 'Unity Next-Gen' engine, in which they can strip out huge amounts of legacy systems and platforms and not have to worry about backward-compatiblity or existing projects for a few years, to enable more rapid development within a much more streamlined codebase, a one-off chance to undo anything that with hindsight is now seen as a poor decision.

Unity has become vastly complex, with so much duplicate functionality (multiple renderers, physics systems, UI systems, input systems), and with so many projects relying on functionality *not* changing, that it's not surprising that progress feels painfully slow, and often comes in the form of 'yet another entirely new system for X'. Feels like it needs some sort of fresh start?

 

A fresh start seems too big of a job. But maybe they can make the next LTS version last 4 years instead of the usual two, and for the tech stream they can start removing the legacy stuff.

The problem to me seems that Unity is trying to bite more than it can chew, it's trying to please everyone but at the end of the day it's pleasing no one.

 

Unity's path has seemed a little lost with their recent acquisitions and trying to portray themselves as much more than just a game engine, while simultaneously letting go of the Gaia team, which was disappointing. Share price dropping from $195 two years ago to $25 today.

I'm not going to pretend to know better, looking forward to the better days to come.

 

Strange days but appreciate these insights. There are a few finicky things here and there, but Unity is a better engine today than it ever has been before. Lots of little improvements that have been overlooked over the years (recently enjoying the ability to delete assets from a prefab in the scene view without having to open them). Here's hoping everyone lands on their feet and this engine continues to evolve in a sane way, and that hard work and talent are rewarded within the studio so this sort of thing doesn't have to happen again.

 

Sure, but this sort of thing needs to be external as well as internal. If, internally, I strive to be history's greatest scientist but I don't actually externally do anything about this, nobody's going to see me as such, yeah?

 

Someone pointed out on Twitter that the amount of money this would save is roughly equal to the amount in bonuses paid to the top 5 Unity executives this year ($100m).

When are shareholders / Unity board or whoever going to do something about this? They're just going to keep doing this every year unless Unity suddenly becomes more profitable.

 

There goes the other DOD-advocate too...
https://twitter.com/mike_acton/status/1654169432598478848

 

And this is why the Unity users need to know which teams faced the axe...

 

That would involve Unity having a comms department that actually talks to users.

 

quite hostile layoffs,
https://twitter.com/gekido/status/1653848546876231680

 

Mike W is (well, now was) one of the best game developers at Unity, had bottomless knowledge of production and was such a lovely guy to work with. Im really sad he is no longer at Unity. Huge shame how his layoff seems to have gone down; ive heard this happen to other now-former-colleagues too. In fact, during my layoff from Unity I was initially told I wasn't allowed to say goodbye to colleagues (some of which I had worked with daily for a decade) (but I managed to get permission to after contesting it).

 

Another senior engineer: https://twitter.com/FaysalSharif/status/1653939977820987392

Middle management claims do not track.

 

Wow, this has surprised me!

I wonder whats happening with DOTS now that the two main architects of it are no longer at the company? (Well, Joachim stepped down as CTO but seemingly still at the company).

 

You don't pay 26 million in severance benefits to middle management. If it was middle management it would be more like 4 million.

 

I know nothing about corporate business, stocks, whatever...

But is it me or is getting rid of the people who build the products that your company provides a bit counter intuitive when deciding who to let go?

Getting increasingly worried Unity.

 

I mean who would have guessed *shocked Pikatchu face*. Company doesnt make any sensible profit and shareholders are not fluffy bunnies, they want cold hard money for their investement, thats the bottom line. Once compnay goes public, it goes down fast (look at CDPR the supposed to be saviour of gaming industry...and how they turned to be with Cyberpunk ). Unity made soo many aquisitions, they bloated so much, this ballon had to pop eventually.

I hope those affected will be back on feet soon.

 

Anyone who has followed Unity for long knows they don't have the most efficient organization relative to other companies their size. I think the hiring patterns while going public probably made this worse. Not really surprising to see them consolidating.


Top engineers being booted seems like a sign they had issues with how things are being done. In companies this size you either make compromises to fit in, or you eventually get pushed out unless you see the writing on the wall and leave before that happens.

You can't change the culture of a company from anywhere but the very top. Even Carmack had to learn that lesson.

 

This is like Konami firing Hideo Kojima all over again.

I love Unity. I can't say I don't. But it's that love that makes these disruptions so painful. And while Unreal at GDC knocked it out of the park straight to the moon this year with their many improvements and 5.2 release, Unity has haphazardly come out with some promise of AI driven development that didn't showcase anything and I've seen nobody on the forums excited for (probably because AI-magic isn't tangible in how it can help you develop anything other than some easy YouTube clickbait.)

But I'm getting off topic. It does worry me to see that, as I am trying to build my future upon the Unity engine, it's simply not getting the investments it needs to stay competitive. Improvements take ages (lightmapper, dots, directx12) and Unity will undoubtedly survive for many years to come but on the broken backs of how many I wonder.

 

That's my main issue right now with the engine 5-8 year package release timelines aside. What even is the vision for Unity right now? DOTS was big and then it just... slowly deflated to what it is now, a hybrid workflow with a lot of missing tooling and integration. A job half done. No more project tiny, no pure DOTS runtime and no more focus on DOTS it seems, it's just another thing that Unity sorta has. What is then the vision for Unity going forward if not DOTS?

The public facing roadmaps are pretty useless too, they mostly list things already done and are rarely updated with up to date info. Not only I don't know which teams are affected by these layoffs, including the past two rounds, I also don't know where Unity is heading in general. Communication in this regard is pretty much non-existent.

Maybe Unite 2023 will bring some clarity but Unity roadmap videos in the past few years mainly list things that have already been done, not what actually is coming to Unity in short to mid term.

 

Just a reminder: although it is perfectly possible or even probable that Unity let him go, no information we have for sure that this is the case. It may be his own decision. We simply do not know for sure.

I really don't want to sink in the engine wars in this thread. I'm not sharing the doom-gloom and Unreal and Unity are very different beasts with different pros and cons and people are letting Epic get away with far more BS than Unity.

 

Some articles also mention Unity intending to close half of their offices so it could also be a choice between relocation or going elsewhere, which is also probable.

 

At this point what difference does it make? Either option does not bode well for DOD.

He is in Burbank. I highly doubt that they will close that office and they have job listings for that location.

 

yeah i feel the same, While Unreal is showing amazing features, Unity feels like is fighting to at least be in second place (that is how it feels to me). I know is not good to make the classic unity vs unreal, because unity is kind of cool too, i still like it (or maybe it is my lazyness to learn c++)

 

Gotcha. I wonder though, if they're closing half of their offices, how many people will leave willingly just because no Unity offices remain in their city/country or if there will be further layoffs to facilitate this transition.

It might end up being a net positive though, their internal processes are so damn slow for everything. Fewer offices and a more consolidated company structure could speed things up some for a change.

 

This has been Unity marketing for quite some time now. It's entirely possible that they're targeting decision makers well up the chain in larger organisations, rather than the developers who actually do stuff and want to see practical outcomes. It's also possible that that's not the case.

Even their demos, for as long as I can remember, have always been about stuff you could do if you've a large team and budget at your disposal, rather than about what the average small team using Unity cares about for current projects.

 

that is not a bad thing

 

I agree. It does explain why they often get mixed reception from the broader community, though.

 

I cannot take the AI stuff seriously. It is just chasing the latest Silicon Valley fad. Whether it is the Metaverse or ESG Investing and now AI it is all just a play trying to cash in on the latest trends. When Unity is able to actually make money off one of these I will be eating my words until then it is just noise.

 

Has anyone actually gone and made something with a big budget that even approaches Unity demos like Book of the Dead in visual fidelity? I see Unity chasing that dragon, but I can't recall a single example of someone actually going for it. I might just be uninformed, though.