By the second quarter the digital twin’s team is expected to be leaving Unity and are being hired by IT outsourcing company Capgemini.
This seems to be part of the wind down of Unity solutions.
“Today’s agreement will extend the reach and scale of Unity’s software through Capgemini, allowing more organizations to further push the boundaries of this technology through the acceleration, adoption, and application of RT3D to build and scale immersive experiences.”
Not the entire digital twins team, just the professional services arm. They are the ones who work on 3rd party projects.
This is a great outcome. They can keep their jobs doing what they do with a company that’s dedicated entirely to this business specific digital twin stuff.
Unity can get back to building up ergonomic and powerful tools to make digital experiences of all types… hopefully.
Edit: pure speculation ahead: I did a little looking into this digital twin stuff, and it looked like Unity was really big on integrating AI to integrate with digital Twin. I saw some videos where developers were creating software use cases with chat GPT code and you could tell what the end goal was. Simplify the experience with digital twin so anyone could generate digital twin use cases for every single business in every conceivable way, from monetization avenues to product testing. They wanted to put their hands in the pockets of every single business in the world in various ways.
Huge gamble. Reckless, greed levels off the charts.
The problem here was when you invest in this AI stuff… the AI doesn’t actually make your pipeline better, it doesn’t’ start automating the improvement of the Unity engine. You could see the allure for the C suit. You don’t want to get caught behind emerging tech AGAIN, AI is obviously the future… RIGHT?
It actually DESTROYS forward progress, because now you’re locked into this hellish new system of automation. You can’t improve the engine because it breaks every single venture capital setup you’ve got going that you’re planning on taking over the world with. A lot of competent developers could have seen this coming from a mile away, this entire ordeal really speaks to the hubris of leadership at Unity during this time.
The DOTS/ ECS fiasco is starting to make more sense now. It likely wasn’t playing nice with their plans for AI driven business software and so it was shuttered. It could entirely be because it was another system that wasn’t working out as well as they wanted, but who knows… we’re in the dark about all this stuff.
Anyway, all this stuff is starting to tie together and painting a picture of a company that was spread thing, hamstringing itself, and becoming increasingly obsessed with ventures that were poisoning the well while costing every conceivable resource: Money, time, and most importantly talent and ambition.
Damned shame what these ultra greedy, monopolistic moves cost this company, and the negative effect it will continue to have on its loyal user base who never voted for this crap in the engine that champions “Democratization of gamedev”.
DOTS/ECS has not, at any time, been shuttered.
Poor choice of words on my part. True the performance gains are there for those that want to utilize them. What I meant to refer to was the engine defining gains that were once talked about in lofty keynotes.
Just lamenting that more inspirational period a few years back when dots was going to revolutionize the engine and power lots of key features. Trying to sort out why everything unfolded as it did with the little clues we have surrounding all the shakeups and changes of the past several years. But I should make note in the post this is purely speculative.
2:40 second mark
Joachim the once driving force of DOTS gone. Lots of the excitement and optimism gone… Sad to see how much this place has changed in such a short period of time.
I dunno. I guess more than anything just bummed to see all that buzz and cool things on the horizon gone. Those “performance by default” enhancements.
Maybe I’m not remembering things correctly but I recall all the DOTS and ECS stuff was going to be really core to all future features and enhance performance in the engine across the board. Maybe that’s still ongoing, not sure of anything any more.
It’s still ongoing 
I do miss Joachim 