Unity to cut another 600 jobs

It's entirely possible that for some of the investors getting into the game engine market was similarly chasing a fad. And, to be fair, investors often chase "fads" because occasionally one turns out not to be a fad, and I suspect that the investors know what their chances are on any individual one paying off.

When catching up with one of Unity's "Evangelists" (not sure if they're still called that) some time ago, he was saying that there are big studios using Unity with source access who basically hide from the world that they're using an off-the-shelf engine. I of course can't verify that, and it was ages ago, but that does line up with exactly what their demos at the time (and still even now) seemed to be targeting.

Ability to create our own SRPs does put a lot of additional power into our hands compared to back then.

 

I don't think you can hide something like that. It is really easy to ID a released Unity game. I can believe it for unreleased projects.

 

You could mask it if you had access to the source code (eg by scrambling the names and layout of the files the engine looks for).

 

I guess you could with obstruction and C++. I doubt that is happening. What is happening is studios not mentioning Unity because of its bad image.

 

I modified my post to be more clear. I'm talking about changing the names and layout of the files and folders. With source code it would be a trivial thing to do. You could probably even go as far as combining individual data files into one giant data file.

 

If you decompile C# you will find Unity API which is the first thing a hacker will do.

 

With source access you could theoretically strip out C# and build everything in C++.

 

That would be stupid.

 

There are companies out there that have purchased licenses to engines and made heavy modifications. Amazon comes to mind with their Lumberyard engine that was based off of CryEngine and they didn't even finish any of their games. What makes sense to an indie like us won't necessarily make sense to a AAA and vice versa.

I could very easily see a company purchasing Unity for the purpose of having a starting point for their own game engine rather than using it as is.

 

Or on platforms where you can't look at the files anyway.

Or branched from some version, potentially in the dark ages, which was just used as a starting point. It's certainly happened with other games / engines.

 

Does the source license allow that, though? I mean, Unity EULA forbids development of competing products.

Source code is one thing, but being able to fork would be something entirely separate. And a price tag would have a lot more zeros in it.

 

I'm talking about modifying it solely for internal purposes. You would still have to pay for the source license too.

 

So anyway, the topic...

 

I see your point --> basically, a private fork.

<insert gloom and doom here>

 

Prove it.

 

Yeah, with the reports of some of the most talanted tech people getting booted, I don't really buy into the 'middle management' layoffs. And I think I'm already distrusting enough in order to expect the savings to go to shareholders or to higher-ups' bonuses instead, with claims of 'record-breaking revenue' in the next financial report.

 

The "it was only middle management" thing was attempted when the round of layoffs hit a while ago and axed a huge chunk of the Gigaya team too.

 

More than you think. You can always take a look at the better-looking games among the creator spotlights too, and ReCore and Escape from Tarkov are among the more popular games made in Unity that do not look like “a Unity game”.

My bad, I was trying to say that Unity only seemed to have made some marketing because Unreal had such big announcements. I do have to say, whenever Unity comes out with some high-fidelity demo that Unreal does better, it does feel kindof like the Mac-era pre-post Steve Jobs chasing after Windows. I was much more excited for DOTS, which was Unity doing its own thing rather than chasing clout. I guess Unreal isn’t doing AI-creator assist tools so points there, but is anyone at Unity actually working on that?! I thought that was just one of those showcasing Kejiro-demos.

 

In my experience Unity's marketing doesn't reflect that strategy. I don't know about you guys, but I often feel like I've outgrown Unity, getting frustrated at unpolished features or all the desperate Emails trying to sell me services I don't need because I already have a better solution.

A solo dev like me should look at these services dreaming to become big enough to need them, not getting annoyed that he's being pitched beginner's products, or worse, features that are just a double of what we already bought from the Asset Store.

My theory is that Unity is targeting hobbyists with flashy features that look great on trailers. A similar strategy than targeting disconnected decision makers. The problem is that hobbyists will buy plenty of stuff from the Asset Store but don't finish their game and never earn money to reinvest in Unity. They're easy targets but not returning customers.

A confirmation of this theory is how Unity limits your invoice history to one year max. A very strange choice for a company targeted at professionals who needs these documents. Unity doesn't even have a "download all my year xxxx invoices" feature.


I'm not surprised that Unity is going through a rough patch right now. Since they went public, they stopped producing value in favor of looking like they do. It's becoming a Potemkin engine.

 

As a Unity dev I feel so utterly disconnected from this company. Why were these people let go? Who's calling the shots? What are their goals and ambitions? We have to sit here in the dark and hope these massive corporations sailing the ship have some semblance of interest in the product or know WTF they're doing.

Corporate bull mixed with years of mismanagement and apathy, a lord of the flies corporate structure where everyone's been reduced to just trying to survive, not doing their darned job. Why even try? People are years past giving a damn. A singular note of wasted potential drones through the halls of these deflated tech giants. Try? Don't try? Just lay low and don't rock the boat. Do the mundane shmoozing, nothing matters.

How many years of technical innovation have we squandered as all talent is sucked up by Meta, by Unity, by all these sterile entities who have resoundingly sh*t the bed under the veil of NDA's and their sh*tty corporate culture of hiding their pedestrian incompetence?

What even is the underlying structure that drives these companies? Because it has utterly f*cking failed all of us, top to bottom. Why are we as a species so f*cking bad at getting talented people together to do their thing? It's remarkable the number of underhanded crooks, liars, and cowards that infiltrate these tech companies and destroy everything. Say what you want about the competitive and cutthroat industry of yesteryear, at least it produced things of value. Now we just lay down and await our inevitable failure.

Silence is not a sign of strength, it is not a sign of giving a darn, it's not a sign of conviction or purpose. All these companies have gone silent. It's shameful. But, each passing day we hope the bleeding is going to stem, we hope for some signal of hope, and then we see news like this.

There was SO MUCH potential 4 years ago, the DOTS stuff, ECS, the engine was going to be revamped by passionate visionaries. Unity knew what it was and what it wanted to be. Modular, performant, innovative.

This post about the Job cutting is so corporate, nothing to the notions of creating better games, creating a better toolset, doing any of the exciting innovations we were excited for years ago. That spirit is dead, and will be for the foreseeable future. An optimistic company culture takes years to foster, and it must be fostered under competent leadership that is allowed to pursue a goal that fits the purpose of the engine, not distracted by these waves of new age nonsenses.

THE MOMENT your company loses sight of the prime directive of delivering a quality product, everything goes to the wayside. All these distractions snowball and have dire, compounding consequences for years to come. This is going to be a long road to recovery if it ever happens.

We aren't frustrated that Unity has hit a speedbump. We are frustrated that that Unity doesn't even know what it is any more, that the fantastical dream is dead, and that no one even has the conviction, or means to come out here and say WTF is going on. The usual lunacy we've all become accustomed to.

Are we ever going to get back to making good sh*t again in this mad f*ckign world?

There's this dirty thought some are having, hoping these firings are a step in the right direction, as if by some miracle a force of productivity and competence with the sole goal of making Unity better stepped in. That's not how any of this modern day madness works. This crazed machine has taken over and everyone is just trying to keep their position, the last thing on anyone's minds is putting your neck out to effect positive change lest you end up on the wrong person's sh*tlist.

Posting anything these days you gotta walk on these egg shells trying your best not to express exactly what's on your mind and frame it in a way that's palatable to this soft parade. Wish we could go back in time back when it was just a bunch of annoying neckbeards running the shows who wanted higher FPS's in their video games. There's this malaise that's gripped the entire industry, it's all corporate, it's all political, it's all back stabby and back scratchy among suits who get off on sh*tting on the product for profit.

Future will likely be more of the same, no one with any power or conviction will do anything to recapture the optimism and drive to create a great engine like we had in the past. No one will communicate any problems, because the only people of any competency retained are pawns on their knees.

I would love to be proven wrong, but the silence is deafening. This is the bed our tech giants have made for us, a bunch of cowards sitting quietly at their desks as the fires rage. Too scared to speak any truth against the cindering madness.

So we'll sit here in this dying forum in this d*ck measuring thread of who can be most upset that some people lost their jobs in this tired trope of neckbeard circle jerking. No one of any importance will say sh*t because everyone's just trying not to rock the boat as it glides into the glacier.

All the wasted potential as the suits, the cowards and the backstabbers sail into the distance, the once bright future bobbing bloated in the wake.

It's all so damned tiring.

 

@IllTemperedTunas

I think a lot of people here sympathize with your frustration. My disappointment has gone to the point where I've felt more or less forced to become indifferent, because otherwise it just upsets me.

At the end of the day, I still enjoy working in Unity (for now). It does some things great. There's no other game development tool where I feel as free to organize my project the way I want, and where the APIs are as featured and well documented (although that last part is becoming more questionable). The amount of readily available resources is helpful, too.

That being said, the energy and community around the engine feels more and more dead each passing day. That's what I miss the most - the energy and enthusiasm. The whole corporate-y feeling surrounding Unity is extremely off-putting to me. I miss the old days where it was all focused on indies and democratizing game development, not whatever we have now.

In a way I understand the road they've chosen, but that doesn't mean I have to agree with it or feel like I belong here anymore.

There's alternatives that keep growing in attraction, so that's positive. The ones I find somewhat interesting still have quite a long way to go before they'd be real contenders however.

I think my current project will be my last in Unity, which means I will still continue to use it years from now, but it's not without some sense of melancholy that I will look back on the golden days of Unity and what we used to have. Hopefully, that feeling will return in some shape or form. If not here, then maybe somewhere else.

 

What is so mind boggling is how in lockstep all these huge corporations are. The failsafe of a capitalistic structure, is if one company fails, others will rise and turn a profit. But because of all the cut throat monopoly and predatory hiring practices, we have this one overarching culture and financial machines that have gobbled everything up, and are now falling apart in unison.

And it's all done in darkness, it's all the culmination of all these terrible things compounding on each other. Secrecy is only one biproduct of this machine, it's ubiquitous, it's everywhere. And all we do is sit here and moan about these waves of firings and the slow decline.

Again, just feel so disconnected. Everything is falling apart and we don't even know the problems, have no say in fixing them, just watching on the sideline as everything fails.

 

Perhaps open source is the long term answer. Full ownership of the product you use, transparent development practices, public discussions on direction and direct access to developers/contributors. Nothing is hidden, it's all in the open. And there are no corporate overlords sucking the blood out of the product for financial gain.

In fact, a lot of other industries are already largely open source based, it's only gaming that has stuck to proprietary, closed source engines for so incredibly long.

 

What is falling apart? The virtual value that's called stock market?
Don't forget that it never represents true current value. What you trade in form of stock is the future since everyone buys so they can resell. That means the value is strictly dependent on how likely it is that the company has even more success in the future.
Or to be exact the value is dependent on the prospect that the company will have the prospect of an even birghter future, IN the future. Reason being that only then you can expect that people in the future buy the stock so that it increases the market value it has right now.
Does this make sense? =D

 

The reality is that what the stock market wants is not what people who use the tool every single day want. This goes for any publicly traded company.

Stock market wants to see things like spending a $billion on an industry leading company (IE: Weta) or a C level person talking in the press about the latest trends And buzzwords. Whereas people who use the tool every day just want less-sexy stuff like compilation times to be cut from minutes to seconds or sealed API being publicly exposed or being able to shave off a some unwanted ms here and there through an upgrade.

In my eyes, a company needs to do both types of output to make both ends of the customer spectrum happy. Because if one end is annoyed then it does eventually have a knock on effect to the other end.

 

"The tech and video game industry is currently experiencing a wave of layoffs, with major companies such as EA, Meta, Google, Riot, and more cutting thousands of jobs collectively in recent months."

Stock values are only one small metric of a company's health. We are speaking to a broader company cultural problem that affects how far reaching decisions are made, who is promoted, who is managing these companies, what the goals are long term. The DNA of these corporate organisms that allow them to produce products of value.

 

Employee morale is something that plays an incredibly important part in the culture too. Frequent and recent layoffs result in remaining employee's mental health being impacted and fear they will be next; people typically do not deliver their best work under pressure and stress. If I was at a company that had 3 rounds of layoffs in under a year, you can bet id be building as much job security as possible to survive the next round and also be sending out resumes. Especially if I lived in a country or location where I had to rely on having employment for healthcare, visa, cost of living, etc.

A company can't build industry defining and future-thinking products if the employees are spending all their energy trying to cover their ass in case their name is on the next layoff spreadsheet. There is a reason why Iwata refused to layoff any staff when Nintendo took a dip in revenue; whilst they were creating the Nintendo Switch.
https://www.polygon.com/2013/7/5/4496512/why-nintendos-satoru-iwata-refuses-to-lay-off-staff

 

Wise man says
https://news.stanford.edu/2022/12/05/explains-recent-tech-layoffs-worried/
"Layoffs kill people, literally. They kill people in a number of ways. Layoffs increase the odds of suicide by two and a half times. This is also true outside of the United States, even in countries with better social safety nets than the U.S., like New Zealand.
Layoffs increase mortality by 15-20% over the following 20 years.
There are also health and attitudinal consequences for managers who are laying people off as well as for the employees who remain. Not surprisingly, layoffs increase people’s stress. Stress, like many attitudes and emotions, is contagious. Depression is contagious, and layoffs increase stress and depression, which are bad for health.
Unhealthy stress leads to a variety of behaviors such as smoking and drinking more, drug taking, and overeating. Stress is also related to addiction, and layoffs of course increase stress."

also

"Layoffs often do not cut costs, as there are many instances of laid-off employees being hired back as contractors, with companies paying the contracting firm. Layoffs often do not increase stock prices, in part because layoffs can signal that a company is having difficulty. Layoffs do not increase productivity. Layoffs do not solve what is often the underlying problem, which is often an ineffective strategy, a loss of market share, or too little revenue. Layoffs are basically a bad decision.

Companies sometimes lay off people that they have just recruited – oftentimes with paid recruitment bonuses. When the economy turns back in the next 12, 14, or 18 months, they will go back to the market and compete with the same companies to hire talent. They are basically buying labor at a high price and selling low. Not the best decision.

People don’t pay attention to the evidence against layoffs. The evidence is pretty extensive, some of it is reviewed in the book I wrote on human resource management, The Human Equation: Building Profits by Putting People First. If companies paid attention to the evidence, they could get some competitive leverage because they would actually be basing their decisions on science."

 

Based on my observations at other companies, I've noticed that after a round of layoffs, remaining employees often start seeking new job opportunities.

Therefore, I would assume that more people will leave Unity Technologies after this round of layoffs.

 

Why do I have to prove anything? People making extraordinary claims need to prove what they are claiming.

 

"Studios don't mention Unity because of its bad image" is an extraordinary claim.

 

I'm sorry but as good as some of the games look/looked in that showcase they do not match the visual fidelity or complexity that the Book of the Dead demos did more than 5 years ago. That's the point, while Unity could achieve such fidelity, the developers using it, even well funded ones still don't have the budget/resources/inclination to match it. Which to me makes all these fancy showreels from Unity rather pointless, unless they show off a specific new available to everyone feature, which is unfortunately what their main competitor does time and time again.

Thinking about it, I feel this sentiment pretty much sums up how I've felt about Unity for some time now. I used to feel much more connected, excited for new features, excited to talk with Unity developers, keen to submit bug reports etc, but over the last 5-7 years that has all dropped off.


Hopefully those laid off will quickly find new employment, but I think it will be a while before we truly understand what if any impact this has on Unity.

 

Referencing the WSJ interview and my own personal workplace experience, there seems to be a large trend lately in the Corpo world on focusing on 'flatter' hierarchies. That is to say, fewer steps between any employee and the C-suite. I imagine a majority of these layoffs were just that: consolidating teams, removing layers of separation (which, in the case of a business, unfortunately means people.) As much as it sucks, having a tighter ship means more efficiency, better focus, and ultimately, a better product for the end user.

Word I've heard is that 100+ of the layoffs were just from the Ironsource teams, which leads me to believe a lot of the number is removing the bloat gathered from the recent acquisitions.

All of that to say, layoffs still suck and no one has a good time.

 

Maybe sakura rabit? is not big budget but his demos are amazing, at least at the same level of BoD

that is exaclty the perfect example for your point.

 

It's more that it was a direct quote from John Riccitiello.

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/unity-lays-off-hundreds-more-closing-half-of-offices

 

When non-tech men take over tech corp, you can not expect any thing good happen for tech.

 

I wouldn't take JR's quotes as gospel. During the first round of layoffs he went on record saying that most of the employees had already been hired back in other roles; despite the fact that none of us had even been contacted by internal recruiters at that point in time (That discussion came like a week later; but was mostly a 'yeah, you can just look on the public careers page').

 

I don't take him at his word at all, I'm simply pointing out that this sort of thing has been used repeatedly in the past to handwave away the nature and extent of layoffs. I'd sooner leave a dog alone in a kitchen full of steaks than trust him.

 

All in all the news this year keeps getting worse and I don't feel that great about unity right now. Haven't for a few years but now it's really getting bad.

I keep waiting for the "plan" that unity have to emerge, since basically 2018 and now we are here and still have no idea what the endgame really is.

As a user of the tools all this makes me do is want to find other ways to make income (and it has, been exploring unreal for more than a year and now Godot also)

It's just a shame really, I love the engine and I used to love the company behind it too.

I guess all good things end eventually.

 

I'm so curious about the entire Virtual Production path. From my view, it seems to have gone stale over the past year. But this makes me wonder if they pivoted away from it entirely as it might not be that profitable? Our company has been using Unity partly in hopes that they expand into this field... but now I'm not sure.

 

I know of a few key people working in Virtual Production that were let go in this current layoff round; people with engineering backgrounds.

Not sure how or if Weta has been affected.

 

What's the direction without Mike Acton and Joachim Ante?

 

Steve knew a thing or two.

 

It is not a claim it an opinion based on evidence. Both from feedback on Steam and other gaming forums.

That is why we never told our customers we used Unity. They still found out on the day of the release and made snide comments.

 

So basically you don't have any proof studios are doing this. Got it.

 

You literally have to pay Unity to remove their splash screen so it cannot be totally baseless. I guess you could do a survey but enough gamers express that opinion that I don't think it is an extraordinary claim.

 

that sounds very accurate at least in my "gamer" perspective...
i always know when a game is being made with unreal or gamemaker, but i never know when a game was made with unity, in fact i was pretty surprised when i found out that SFT, call of duty mobile, elder scrolls mobile game was made on unity, in fact (again) i always need to watch some outdated list on internet to know which game are made with unity xD that is totally true at least in my case

 

You mean that thing that's been a feature of Unity Pro before this reputation even existed? Also people don't even see the splash screen until after they've bought the game. But hey, since you think this is a big deal, allow me to counter with actual evidence.