Damn maybe the sole janitor left after all of this will be able to remote into work. Good stuff.
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Those positions were laid off way back, if there was ever that position at unity. Corporation usually have subcontractors that use migrant workers and pay them scraps.
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The main issue is not the layoffs, it’s the braindrain due to people leaving on their own terms. We actually need a leaner Unity - less middle management, less fragmentation, less gamedev unrelated sales employees, etc. The bloat has to go and it’s going now. The question is if key people are also leaving. And many have left already.
Either way, I don’t have other options besides Unity for my specific tech stack. Maybe that’ll change in the future, maybe not. Time will tell.
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This forum literally has one active volunteer mod at this point, so I don’t know where these Unity-loving moderators are hiding. There was two but one left because they were happy in Unreal land. The rest of the forum is moderated by Unity staff.
And I never said “official thread” I just said “thread”. A user has generally always made a post about layoffs.
And then it turns into random commenting and bickering and gets locked because nothing productive is coming out of it. There’s no conspiracy or anything nutty going on.
I was just wrong and I’ll admit that, I wasn’t lying. But what’s your angle? He retired, not given the flick. He’s totally entitled to be paid during the transition period.
I’m not taking anyone’s side here, but you just seem to want to find any reason to be mad. It’s not healthy mate.
That’s sarcasm, isn’t it? Definitely sounds like sarcasm to me.
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Except these layoffs aren’t making Unity leaner with less middle management and less fragmentation and more related to gamedev. I swear, people say this every time there’s a round of layoffs and then it turns off that said layoffs are either affecting every department or they’re outright affecting people working on the game engine side of things. The only exception to this has been the Weta situation.
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Who knows what the future holds, you may have specific intentions and then things don’t quite unfold as you expect, that’s life, part of the human condition, especially with a massive venture like Unity that has many hands on deck and influences.
There is reason to believe the people at Unity DO want to course correct, but obviously there are unsavory elements in this world that muddle that course.
I keep thinking back to this part of the Unite Keynote:
(Timestamp: 1:01:20)
This seemed pretty earnest, and it’s coming from one of the cofounders. He reminisces about being just a handful of people and not being able to pay the catering bill. That sounds to me that they want to get back to that, getting back to basics, listening to the community and wanting to make tools that make great games again. Better workflows, better tools, less bugs, better usability.
Maybe i’m getting off topic and rambling, but I think we as a society at large have kinda seen the error of our ways as of late just chasing the dollar signs and over indulging in markets and monopoly and investments. We’ve kinda lost sight of just being good at the task at hand, and when every organization chases intangible things, the tangible things of the world start going to crap.
We can’t do much being on the outside looking in, but one thing we CAN do is try to be a bit less bitter and engage in a way that benefits the engine. Will Unity end up being a disaster anyway? Maybe. But if ever there was a glint of hope for things to get better, now’s that time, so now’s the best time to have a little more optimism and try to influence some positive change than we’ve had in these parts in a long time.
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We can extrapolate what the future holds by observing past trends and the past trends of Unity have shown that this is a company that has no vision for its own future.
Well, if you wanted to rectify that issue… how would you go about it? You would change leadership from the top down and do a “reset”.
They’re 20% of the way there at this moment in a relatively short period of time.
I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt, don’t really have other options to be honest. We can either be optimistic or pessimistic. Been working on my current project for many years, choosing to be optimistic, it improves my work output.
I like this Whitehurst guy from what I’ve seen so far, very optimistic guy with a great amount of experience herding cats in the tech industry.
The biggest hurdle in my view is getting over this current slump. So many years of stagnation. They gotta reignite their fire out of the gate and be pumped to do cool things again.
I imagine we’ll know sooner than later if things are shaking up for the better.
Worst case scenario we still have a great engine to last us for the foreseeable future while Unreal and Godot become more approachable, or who knows what other engines may pop up.
Oh well if the interim CEO said positive things that changes everything.
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I didn’t say that the interim CEO was blowing smoke up our asses. I said he had a solid background and seems a good fit with a positive attitude. Old and existing leadership has expressed with some sincerity it is committed to going back to their roots.
What more do you want? We can’t expect much communication during this transitory period, if you’re hoping for a return to form from Unity, this is exactly what it would look like. Time will tell if they pull it off.
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Also “the lean corporation” is a myth, a dream many seems like to share. But I seriously doubt the “concentration on the core business” means anything at all. It’s a marketing BS to make investors drool, nothing more.
Corps can and do make great things even if they are doing other things at the same time since those things aren’t done by the same people.
And on the top of that we all know mobile ads are the core business, not the game engine.
Unity doesn’t need to be leaner to make the engine great again. It needs cultural change. And that doesn’t come with these layoffs, because those people, who has the wrong culture (still about business culture) remains, who had the appropriate one are laid off or being laid off.
The users first attitude, when Unity doesn’t screw up UX-decisions just to satisfy some marketing-honcho somewhere who thinks the Unity Hub is a Unity marketing tool as opposed to a tool for devs to manage projects for example…
Since every decision Unity makes is about to sell some crap to users as opposed to how they can make user’s life easier and more productive, and those, who make this decision remains, and those who oppose it are laid off constantly, it’s easy to see where it is going.
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“Time will tell,” “it’s a transitory period,” “we can’t expect much” are all hopelessly naive statements. Time has told, Unity has had terrible communication with its users for over a decade, and people have been saying we can’t expect much for just as long. These are not new problems, they are problems that have plagued the company and the engine for years now and they’ve given literally no indication that’s going to change. Even this is the eighth round of layoffs over the past two years, well before this “transitory period” started.
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It is a transitory period, and we can’t expect much communication right now, and time will tell. You’re framing my words into an argument that I didn’t make. We will know sooner rather than later if things are going well. I imagine within the next couple months. We either start hearing from movers and shakers within Unity and they’re firing back up to do cool sh*t, or it’ll be a long slow decline. I don’t believe I’m being naïve here, maybe a tad foolishly optimistic given the track record of the past 7 years, but again, I’m making a conscious decision to be optimistic because the alternative just doesn’t help anyone in any way.
The path ahead for many of us in the short term remains the same, we finish up our current projects and see how things are going when the time comes.
We already know, IMO this many layoffs and monetisation partnerships with Walmart are a clear indication of where things are going, especially when there hasn’t been a single positive indication of anything in the meantime. (well, apart from random Unity people saying “oh yeah the vide is totally different now” or whatever)
I didn’t say it before. And previous layoffs were by ol’ Johny boy. This is somewhat new leadership with a different vision and goals. The Weta layoffs were also initiated by the new leadership. Comparing Riccitiello layoffs and Wurst layoffs is not productive. One was covering his ass after overextending, the other has come onboard to make Unity profitable and restructure.
I’m not “framing your words into an argument you didn’t make,” I’m saying that the things you’re saying aren’t magically absolved by the fact there’s a new interim CEO and that pretending that’s at all the case in the face of a 25% staff cut is absolutely absurd. These are not normal behaviours. This is not well thought out restructuring.
It’s extremely unlikely this is true at all. Those same layoffs were probably planned months in advance because Unity finally realized that the Weta acquisition was haemorrhaging money since they made no meaningful in-roads into film production. This was something everyone said when the acquisition happened.
Ricciotello also came on board to make Unity profitable and restructure.
Thoughts go out to the 1,800 families who are effected by this. There is going to be alot of talent entering the tech industry and I hope they all land on their feet soon! I hope those affected know its not by their own individual doing but by the actions made of a dozen people in a boardroom looking at spreadsheets.
Looking at it from a short-term business strategy; its potentially a very good move in it forces the company to focus on fewer things and do them better. Unity spread itself far too thin when trying to fatten itself up for the IPO and many of the initiatives started in non-games industries have either been canned or pivoted too many times. The question will be what they focus on more; game engine is what they are established for but mobile ads is where they make all the money.
From a human worker perspective; its a corporation disaster and will have repercussions for Unity in hiring and acquiring customers. Studios will be cautious to do business.
I hope its not revealed that the execs took home another $150 million in compensation when the full 2023 earnings is revealed.
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All I’m saying is let’s give the new guy a chance, they can’t all be cut of the same cloth, otherwise all companies would be failing similarly to Unity.
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Except here’s the thing that people keep ignoring here. A new CEO, even an interim one, doesn’t just spawn out of the ether. They’re specifically selected by the board of directors, the same board of directors that are just as responsible for what’s happened with Unity as Riccitiello was. Restructuring is more than just firing people and it’s more than just a new CEO. There’s an entire upper level structure that serves a very specific purpose that maybe runs parallel to what the customer wants if the customer is lucky. The specific goal they do have is to make money, and that doesn’t necessarily make for a good product. In fact, it often means the opposite.
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