Unity are cutting another 600 jobs in search of “long term profitability”. Thought forum users may want to know and couldn’t see anything on here about it
Hopefully this is the last set of layoffs but I doubt it, quite a mountain unity has to climb still
I hope the laid-off people were appropriately compensated and are doing well.
How must the remaining employees be feeling? They’re probably feeling like anyone could be the next to go. That’s really not a good situation.
BTW on another news website, I read the following information:
I would also find it interesting to know which jobs they have cut.
3rd round of layoffs in less than a year.
Fingers crossed everyone lands new roles!
According to this article, they fired (mostly?) middle management.
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/unity-lays-off-hundreds-more-closing-half-of-offices
Its not only middle management roles;
I know engineers, etc in non management roles who have been let go.
I hate how these layoffs are always so opaque, can’t tell which tools are getting shafted so I can course correct accordingly. Sometimes a discord or forum active Unity person just disappears so you can make a somewhat educated guess but that’s it.
You know what they say about companies that lay off a bunch of employees while doing stock buybacks?
There’s still 7k employees, they’re fine. All big tech companies are downsizing and restructuring.
ChatGPT knows:
While I’m an AI language model and don’t have personal opinions, I can provide some insights on this topic. People often criticize companies that engage in stock buybacks while simultaneously laying off employees. The critics argue that this behavior suggests that the company prioritizes shareholder returns over the well-being of its employees. They believe that resources used for buybacks could be better spent on retaining or retraining employees, investing in research and development, or improving working conditions.
However, companies may argue that buybacks are a necessary part of managing their capital structure and providing value to shareholders. They might contend that layoffs are sometimes necessary for operational efficiency or restructuring, especially during economic downturns or when a company faces strong competition.
Ultimately, the perception of companies engaging in such practices will depend on one’s perspective on the role of corporations and the balance between shareholder value and employee welfare.
The gamesbiz article explained that after the second round of earlier layoffs the company posted it’s first quarter of profitability.Worked for a great number of companies across all sectors in my long career. I have never met any middle management that did not make the project more frustrating or take longer than it should have. Middle management are like modern doctors. They make sure they don’t cure so they have continuous business. As a dev, I just want to get to the end of the road and get on to something new and challenging… And their incessant, work interrupting meetings they create to justify their middling management are simply interruptive and rarely constructive. I suspect they are getting rid of those types, the pronoun grifters and from what I read on GlassDoor, their guttersniping HR clique needs a good heave-ho. Musk got rid of 80% of twitter staff and it runs faster, get more engagement, reduced RPC calls by a great percentage. I personally hold the opinion that the number of people working on a project past a given threshold of meritocracy reduces the efficiency of the best talent working on the project. Software engineering is not ditch digging. You don’t get better sofware/a deeper longer ditch by simply throwing more people who can “hold a shovel” at it.
Please, leave this giant bullshit at home. After the layoffs he literally begged the remaining staff to do overtime (and belittled people who said no). That SoB is not a great example of a runner of a successful business.
if your business model is built on exploiting people, you are doing it wrong.
That is the facts pal. No social justice warrior lens involved. I would think that calling a man who runs companies that put rockets into orbit, bores tunnels thru bedrock, fields constellations of communications satellites, engineered the Tesla factory while sleeping on the floor (and in the library of twitter when overseeing it’s turnover to him) makes the worlds most popular EV, helped put together the team that runs OpenAI and consistently ranked as the world’s richest, or in the top few a bad businessman is really stretching reality beyond the breaking point… I despise vulture capitalists as much as the run of the mill socialist but Musk is not a vulture capitalist. He actually produces goods that the marketplace needs. But this is not about Musk./ It is about managing a company to profitabilty in Unity’s case. A couple rounds of layoffs put them into profitability. If that meant cutting deadwood and they don’t have a regular paycheque they can count on. Well welcome to the club pal. Your paycheque now depends on your merits., Enjoy the marketplace. As a user I want Unity to be lean, mean and profitable.That means the engineering dept should be merit based…not touchy feelie.
Let’s please not make any assumptions about the people affected and why they are involved, and let’s please keep it friendly. This isn’t a good day and we’ll all have a better time if we just steer the thread in constructive directions.
I want Unity to be profitable, but I want that long term as well as short term. Large layoffs combined with stock buybacks is purely short term mindset.
Unity has serious long term challenges that affect game developers, and game developers are the core customer base for Unity. There are lists of unfixed bugs that have been known about for years. There are new features that took far to long to get production ready (like DirectX12). And there is very real competition from other game engines at this point. Unity has not even announced a plan to try to compete with UE5’s Lumen and Nanite tech.
As a full time Unity user who relies on Unity working effectively so I can create products for work and income; the layoffs worry me and send a message of instability in resources.
@timsibiski Would Unity share publicly which specific departments/features/systems were affected so us users can pivot if something we relied on being developed or bug fixed is now less resourced?
A specific example; my current project uses and relies on Cinemachine and Splines; its worrying not knowing if these two features are impacted and if I need to look into 3rd party solutions instead because bugs are not going to be solved or they are being deprecated.
Yes please, I’m now wondering if Graph Tools Foundations and Visual Scripting rework are pushed even further back. I was hoping for Unity 2024 to be the prophesized release cycle that finally includes these, but now I’m wondering if I should invest in something else right now such as writing my own graph framework in UI Toolkit like Databrain asset author did.
I’ll ask if someone would supply that info, even if it’s in the form of a blog post. I empathize with wanting to know, but I personally don’t know enough to answer.
well i hope this helps in any way to create more “up-to day” features, Unity needs it, since 3 years ago and sadly this year is not exactly “amazing” either
When Unity layoffs happen, it’s more than just a number to many Unity users, it’s often much more personal, they’re often hearing from friends, former colleagues, and social media acquaintances who were amongst the culled.
You’ve got to wonder whether the savings from the staff cuts can possibly outweight the damage done to confidence in the future of Unity’s products/services, confidence that already seemed to be at a pretty low point.
I do wonder whether Unity needs to develop a separate ‘Unity Next-Gen’ engine, in which they can strip out huge amounts of legacy systems and platforms and not have to worry about backward-compatiblity or existing projects for a few years, to enable more rapid development within a much more streamlined codebase, a one-off chance to undo anything that with hindsight is now seen as a poor decision.
Unity has become vastly complex, with so much duplicate functionality (multiple renderers, physics systems, UI systems, input systems), and with so many projects relying on functionality not changing, that it’s not surprising that progress feels painfully slow, and often comes in the form of ‘yet another entirely new system for X’. Feels like it needs some sort of fresh start?
A fresh start seems too big of a job. But maybe they can make the next LTS version last 4 years instead of the usual two, and for the tech stream they can start removing the legacy stuff.
The problem to me seems that Unity is trying to bite more than it can chew, it’s trying to please everyone but at the end of the day it’s pleasing no one.
Unity’s path has seemed a little lost with their recent acquisitions and trying to portray themselves as much more than just a game engine, while simultaneously letting go of the Gaia team, which was disappointing. Share price dropping from $195 two years ago to $25 today.
I’m not going to pretend to know better, looking forward to the better days to come.