Quote: “Jan 8 (Reuters) - Videogame software provider Unity Software (U.N) will target laying off approximately 25% of its workforce, or 1,800 jobs, the company said in a regulatory filing and internal company memo on Monday.”
“We are … reducing the number of things we are doing in order to focus on our core business and drive our long-term success and profitability,” Whitehurst wrote in the memo to all Unity employees on Monday.
While Whitehurst provided no specifics on structural changes to come, a company spokesperson confirmed there will be additional changes coming.
Least they didnt do it just before christmas… Still sad and worry that the 25% who go would be the ones id root for cos they are doing things id appreciate
I’m not positive that percentage is correct as this is the fourth round of layoffs since 2022 and the number back then would have made it 25%. According to every source I can find they had about 7,700 employees in 2022 and between 2022 and 2023 they laid off 1,300. This might be closer to 30%.
Is this still a question at this point? With how laser focused they are now, definitely they’re focusing on core features after all these 7 years. They’ve made this completely clear they’re focusing on UI Toolkit, Graph Foundation, True RTGI, DOTS Animation, DOTS Determinism, DOTS 2D Physics, new Terrain system, SRP-BiRP feature parity, Improved AI Navigation for big open world, Virtualized Geometry, Unity Text Rendering 2.0, and many more.
Oh, they’re also working on AA game to dogfood their engine!
For a company that’s democratizing gamedev, we’ve really been left in the dark as of late.
Hopefully they’re tracking down key talent that left and trying to get them back on board, it would be unfortunate if they end up trying to piece things together and figuring out how this engine works through trial and error. Sure it’s possible they can find new blood to carry the torch that can navigate the current code base, but far less likely.
We’ve been sitting here assuming the worst for a very long time, and that’s all more or less turned out to be true.
What does a “reset” mean to the remaining employees? Can you reset if you weren’t part of the original creators of the engine? What are the short term goals? Become competent with the engine? Build up the foundation to allow for better tooling’s in the future? Are we just going to shutter down to a skeleton crew and milk this aging engine as long as possible? What are the long term goals? How much do we care about this medium?
How do we find the right mix of cool new things to keep people around while tooling up the core to give this engine legs? Can this team even attract top tier talent at this point? How long has it been, 7 years stewing in failures and incompetence? These aren’t just wasted years, these are long stints of festering decay and standards that have rotted the spirit of this engine. How do you salvage that?
You guys at Unity have a lot going for you, but also a lot against you. Here’s hoping you find some people full of piss and vinegar with a vision for what this engine could be to carry forward, and that they take this reset to build things up the right way excited to show us they’ve got the right stuff.
All that said, the current Unity build is the best I’ve seen in a very long time, very stable with few random error messages, so maybe things aren’t as dire as we suspect. Maybe with Jim Whitehurst at the helm, we see a change in attitude and more excitement for the future.
Could go either way, Unity isn’t the only game engine in town any more. Time will tell… what a time to be a gamedev.
Here’s to new beginnings and 2024 being better for everyone in this industry.
