https://www.reuters.com/technology/unity-software-cut-38-staff-company-reset-2023-11-28/
- no more Weta Fx deal (part of the layoffs - 265 jobs)
- office closures (Berlin, Singapore, 14 offices overall, that’s a lot of jobs)
- more remote work
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The recent Weta Tools re-brand of Ziva and Speedtree is a bit awkward now.
They still own everything, just the WetaFx support ends. All the tech they acquired stays. So I don’t see why it would be.
Sounds like a minor nothing burger. The SEC filing says.
“On November 25, 2023, as part of the Company’s previously announced plans to focus on its core businesses, the Company amended certain of its agreements with Wētā FX Limited (“Wētā FX”), under which the Company terminated its obligations to provide certain services to Wētā FX and also amended certain intellectual property rights between the parties. The Company will recognize deferred revenue and additional consideration in connection with the amendments of approximately $114 million, and will expense the recorded cost of a related contract intangible asset of approximately $131 million, which will occur in the fourth quarter of 2023.”
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And who will develop and maintain all that technology (we haven’t really seen yet)? They acquired the tools development studio of 275 engineers for $1.625 billion dollars and are now laying off 265 of those engineers with a statement they will do less things now.
I doubt we’ll see much more if anything from Weta past that one Maya hair grooming plugin, if it’s still a thing. It’s been two years already and laying off the majority of the actual studio is unlikely to deliver Weta anything.
EDIT: Although, perhaps it’s not all of those engineers they’re laying off. It’s hard to tell. The numbers are awfully similar though.
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By my maths, this is their 5th round of layoffs in 1.5 years.
Utterly awful for all those folks absorbed as part of the acquisition and then laid off right before Christmas. 
Fingers crossed they land new jobs soon!
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This acquisition never made sense. Weta never specialized in runtime assets, and this was the exact result that was expected.
Weta was the one thing in Unity I was holding out hope was having a positive, unseen impact inside their walls, oh well.
Why was this acquisition made in the first place? What was the thought process?
The recklessness of such a costly acquisition with no tangible goal of returning cutting edge runtime features is so bizarre, and many of the current ventures mirror this in AI and cloud services.
They’re starting with the monetization and wondering “how can we make this useful?” rather than creating incredible tools and then asking, “How do we monetize this?”.
Not blaming the employees for being put in a position where their expertise had no chance of creating anything of value in the Unity environment.
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Unity wanted to get into realtime movie production nonsense, just like Unreal. If Unreal jumped off a bridge, Unity would follow.
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And if you have a RUDIMENTARY knowledge of runtime graphics you would know you don’t try to shift baked pipelines from external software packages to realtime and would seek to jazz up runtime graphics that work with your Engine.
A few fancy volumetric VFX at runtime (they already have runtime clouds), some nice fancy lighting solutions and post processes that work out of the box, and Unity could have so much excitement for their future.
WTF were they thinking!? This is one of the most boneheaded moves one could imagine. These tools should have been built from the ground up in Unity, trying to combine these assets is like poison to your employees as they burn out chasing waterfalls. Simply put, look what Unreal is doing with their animation tools, great example of how to get RESULTS that are EXCITING.
Beyond these layoffs I can’t help but think this means that all their current animation tools that were in production for years are now defunct. Are they simply null and void now? What’s the future of this engine?
Everything’s kinda gone dark as of late, not sure what’s going on any more with this forsaken engine, but the more that’s revealed the more our suspicions are being proven true.
So sad to see all the wasted potential. Years wasted, so much ambition and passion squandered for crazed monetary schemes.
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Purely optics to make the stock price go up. Technically, it worked for a little while but the whole price crashed after; and in hindsight they should have invested that $1.6 billion in the existing tooling/products/teams that need the resources.
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I can sort of get why Unity acquired them. Unity was growing at the time, and Weta had prestige and talent. When companies are growing, buying smaller companies is more effective than hiring.
But, what always made me wonder was why Jackson would sell Weta to them in first place? If they were sold to Sony or Disney/LF or WB or whatever that would make perfect sense. It seems like a Hail Mary, like maybe their future (ability to be profitable) was in jeopardy or something. Or… maybe it was being overy positively speculative about the real-time vfx in tv/movie production. (It was right after Mando and other tv shows using AR type tech.)
Yea, beginning to end, it seemed odd.
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I think they were definitely pioneers at one time, but now most pro grade packages can do that stuff, and also back at that time skilled folks were very rare, now (in part at least due to the stuff they did), there are tons, and tons of good vfx artists.
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It kind of makes sense if you look at it from the CEO perspective, if you forget everything about the technical limitations of Unity and AI tech, and animation tech. It really just looks like the absolute worst leadership one can imagine chasing market trends.
If there’s any silver lining here, it’s that things are at least shaking up and they’re saying they want to get back to basics.
But how much damage is already done? How many people who are intimate with the Unity code base and used to making improvements to the core of the engine are gone? How many years will it take to foster a new workforce that’s comfortable improving these tools and is that even possible without burning them out?
If you look at any amazing piece of tech, it doesn’t exist because some CEO thought it was going to make a lot of money alone, it exists because their workforce was fostered over years and they developed cuttin. You have to respect the developers.
What Unity was guilty of most of all was just taking for granted that they could throw money at things and get amazing tech. That’s not how this works, you gotta find the right people and put them in the right places where they can excel. A reckless thirst for money alone will only destroy everything of value at the company.
Once tech is realized, absolutely they should monetize it and market it, but again, Unity just seems to be putting the cart before the horse.
People’s livelihoods depend on this engine. This isn’t like some car company going under, we can’t just pick a different brand. These poor decisions are negatively impacting tens of thousands of developers and by extension Billions of gamers the world over. It’s frustrating to no end that we’re footing the bill for the terrible gambles that were made with this engine and it’s workforce.
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The Weta thing happened like a year and a half after Unreal made a big splash in the news cycle with the production of The Mandalorian TV show.
Yeah, that’s the bull-crap part. Whenever a company wants to reason why they are laying off a bunch of people, they will pull this shit out of their ass. And people buy it every single time.
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Yeah, I didn’t say they WERE getting back to basics, and in my post above I question if unrecoverable damage is done. We’ll see what the future holds. I like Unity in its current form, it’s still a great engine to make games in.
The question is, is Unity a living engine that will grow into the future? Does anyone at Unity genuinely give a darn about the tools any more or is it all just posturing to milk the existing cash cow as long as possible?
I would be so happy to see Unity bring back developers who left or were let go, but is that even possible? Are those bridges burned? Where do they find a passionate hard working group to rebuild this vision of an open game engine?
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Then unreal pull the string of his backpack to deploy a paraglider, to take updraft wind it had mapped prior to jumping.
Unity would continue freefalling because it doesn’t have a plan and didn’t even brought up a parachute.
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It’s nice to take a dig at Unity and all, but apparently people needs a reminder that Epic is also laying off people left and right and isn’t doing so well with their decisions… so… it’s silly putting them up as examples…
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Bear in mind Unreal is competing with an arm tied behind their backs as many products like apple devices hard gate them off of the storefront. In the current market it’s not so simple as “making bad decisions”, there are so many factors clouding what companies are profitable and not in this day and age where quality of product is no longer a driving factor in earnings. If that changes, then Unreal will be in a FANTASTIC position to dominate the entire market. For now companies like Apple can bully them, but if the product continues to improve and the competition continues to stagnate, they’ll be the only game in town in INCREDIBLY lucrative industries.
I used Unreal as an example because their tools are incredible and they’re working as I type this at runtime in a game engine, which was the hope of the Weta tools.
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Unity try to reduce cost. I can understand that. They would back to ficus on game engine once again.