Unity To Axe 25% Of Its Workforce As Part Of "Company Reset"

If you won't pay, people get fired. It's almost like they want us to feel guilty!

Is this the AAA bubble thing, or just a consequence of the rotten actions before it and every jumping ship because of that?

Seems like a lot of companies are going into 2024 as lean as they can. I hope those laid off land on their feet and hope profits improve for Unity so they can keep remaining employees employed.

Major layoffs are going to be a common theme over these next few years. And not just in the gaming industry.

Heartless CEOs and shareholders who expect infinite growth on the same trajectory it was on during the pandemic when many people had more time and more disposable income. Moronic assumption and always has been, in any industry. And as with any industry, it's the hardest workers who care most about their trade who are suffering.

Sad state of affairs when I look at this and think "well at least these layoffs reflect the obvious and inevitable decline of the company itself" because some companies will in fact do this after being MORE profitable.

Honestly Unity?? What the ****? Nearly 2,000 soon to be unemployed thanks to their poor management and outright greed. Nice.

@JohnnyC Moronic assumptions are the bread and butter of every single CEO, it seems. That and the endless growth mindset, which CLEARLY makes no sense if you constantly have to lay off staff.

I'm sure those employees were less important than the CEO pocketing an extra million on the side this year. I can't imagine how one could live with less than 5 yachts!

Losing that many staff will surely have a negative impact. Devs seeing this will be thinking that future enhancements to the software will be impacted and customer/dev support etc. It makes Unity even less appealing.

The only winners are the shareholders who literally couldn’t care for this industry or company and are only in it for money.

To be fair, Unity had gotten too big for its own good. Sad to see all of the people getting fired, though.

@DiamondCore They did.

@garfreek a lot of tech companies over hired during the pandemic and there's been a steady reset since then. '21 was called the great resignation in smaller companies as bigger companies hoovered up staff. We lost nearly all of our dev team for quite stupid wages offered by other companies and it seemed even then it wouldn't be sustainable.

Turns out it wasn't. We've taken the some of the good ones back already.

@Ryu_Niiyama as I said it my last comment it's because a lot went extra fat during '21. Also people got greedy and went for big wages rather than job sustainability

What else do Unity produce apart from Unity? According to Wikipedia, before these layoffs they had more employees than Nintendo.

Hmmmmmmmmmmm… where have I seen this before?

Maybe pretty much every poorly managed big business?

I have a friend caught up in this. The people telling management it was a bad idea are now the ones who will pay the price.

@garfreek It's because they are having trouble making money. Unity has been way in the red for a long time and losing tons of money. They have way too many projects going on simultaneously that probably will never result in them making money.

Unreal is also a huge money pit for Epic. Epic is fortunate to have Fortnite though. Unity doesn't have something like that.

I hate to see it. Geez unity, what happened to you? Oh right…money.

Yes it's sad that people lost their jobs but people lose their jobs everyday. If we all got mad at every job loss, it'd be an angry world.

@Daniel36 Not every CEO. Reminder that Unity tried "going public". So now they don't have full ownership over themselves and the line must go up to please investors.

Not surprising. Rapid expansion almost always leads to rapid contraction in the future. It's never a good thing to be hired in a hiring frenzy, only careless short-sighted companies act that way.

Seems to me, taking all of the Unity news over the last many months, that they've been in trouble for a while. The controversial runtime fee was meant to pass their money problems onto the developers, but once that failed to fly, the workforce gets hammered.
Business degrees strike again.

I switched to Gamemaker for 2d projects and Godot for 3d, and will never look back

@Samalik Right, investors. Even worse.

Unity going public seems to have been a huge mistake... or at least, the previous CEO did everything wrong trying to make it work.

Fortunately, that CEO is gone.

This sucks for those losing their job, and it's too big a number for the layoffs to apply to only the "right" people, unfortunately (I mostly doubt there is some sort of retribution for speaking out against the horrible initial installation fee plans, there are far more important factors to consider when deciding who to keep and who to let go).

The "reset" was, by all outside indicators, really necessary, though. The size of the international company was massive in numbers and it was always unclear — to me, at least — how all those multitudes of employees were boosting the revenue from the core product and services.

Services are the biggest problem, too. A couple of unfortunate (for them) industry changes, like restrictions on user tracking, made their ads services suffer — and that was their big gamble, I think.

For someone who uses the engine to build games and teach how to make games, I can envision a refocusing of the company that actually makes the engine itself better. But, I have to admit that it's a toss up on whether it goes in that direction.

The new CEO has said all the right things and comes from a background of helping Linux succeed using an open source business model as CEO of RedHat. That helps me lean a bit towards optimism.

Really can't know until after the next big release and the subsequent roadmaps... so, I'm giving it one more year before abandoning ship and... well, that's the other problem.

From my perspective, teaching game development, nothing really beats Unity, at this point. Godot is still learning to walk; Unreal is a bumpy ride for new learners; GameMaker is good, but only 2D; everything else is libraries and frameworks, many of them fantastic, but made for people with extensive coding experience.

Unity is my only reasonable choice, for now. And frankly, it's fun to build games with it. So, once I'm in it, I forget the flames consuming the building around me and just sip my coffee.

Did I read that right? 1,800 employees was 25% of their workforce, so Unity employed 7200 employees. That's an incredible number of employees for a software company.

@aaronsullivan " teaching game development "

As the parent of a kid w/ $20k student loan debt and a B.S.* in game design and development who hasn't been able to find any job since May and will be working for the school for free doing their 2nd coop the next 4 months may I suggest you suggest to your students not to go to a $70k/yr school to make video games. 🤑 (Our other kid is going to the same school for a more general CS degree, hopefully they'll major in making AI before it can make itself.😜)

@rjejr Oh no! Maybe in the meantime, look for wider interactive software or motion graphics jobs. I've been told by people who have the experience, that those jobs have been easier to find in more places and often pay more. Game studios are spread out in little clusters, still, unfortunately. Moving to them is often necessary.

If your child is super passionate about making video games, I recommend they get involved in a local game dev group and start building something, sharing it, etc. They can show their strengths and network and find others to work with. Helps immensely as one or the other gets a job or starts a promising project.

Of course, I don't have the details of what you all have already been doing, so sorry if it's not helpful. This has to be a stressful time.

Still, it's a solid degree and they should be well-prepared for many types of jobs, so it might take some time, but options should come up. Just might not be a dream job for a long time.

I'm not looking forward to the job search. I have a child starting college and who knows what it will be like in 4 years or so.

I hope all goes well! (And unfortunately, I'm less help than I could be if I dealt with the last half of college, I'm all on the foundations and intro classes in the first two years).

Unity?

Maybe they should change their name to "Separation", AMIRITE?

Thank you, thank you. I'm here all week.

@aaronsullivan You're always a big help, you make sense, on the internet. 👍 I don't think my kid wants anything to do w/ making games, they'd rather be writing scripts for the new X-Men cartoon, this was the fallback plan as they tried to make it as a writer. In their defense I picked the school and the major, they just sort of went along w/ the plan. Oopsie. They're trying to get web design work now, which is mostly piecemeal temp freelance stuff, but they still need the coop in order to be officially graduated and get their diploma in the mail, so that wasn't cutting it. Kind of a good news - they graduated in only 3 years saving us all tens of thousands of $, bad news - they still need the 2nd coop which usually takes place during year 4. So the school is letting them work for 420 hours for free, so we don't sue them. 😜 They've been keeping themselves busy learning some new languages and making games w/ their friends, and job hunting of course. Bunch of interviews, no takers. 🤷‍♂️

So much for "unity."

Changing the rules last year made them seem untrustworthy. Sacking lots of people due to a poor leadership decision is the same mistake. The people that need "resetting" are the ones that made that decision.

@Jacket_p never knew this, but it makes a lot of sense!

Latest news is that the higher ups from the ad group (IronSource) Unity acquired is being excised from the company. Yep, more of the executive c-suite people that were ad revenue focused are going away. Plus, the new CEO is talking about taking out the middle management layer and rebuilding the culture. It is starting sound surprisingly good, if you care about the game engine itself being good for developers and gamers. Optimism?

@rjejr They should make a game that can be a conduit for their favorite story ideas. Those exist. Of course, that means the story has to be good, too. Hope it starts getting clearer and congrats on the 3-year thing, that is amazing!

@aaronsullivan Thanks. It was great at the time, though sitting in their room the past 9 months my wife and I had wondered if they would have been better off still on campus. But $30K is still $30k so...🤷‍♂️ They are online most nights watching anime and playing D&D over Discord, covid prepared them for life via Zoom. Would be nice for them to get a paycheck though, and not having the fear of losing their B.S. hanging over their head. Even w/ a job and a paycheck they may never leave their room, even after moving out. This whole generation of teens is weird.😂

@rjejr That is a lousy situation having to complete the unpaid co-op. I guess the only way to have made that work was to get a paid position that counted? Frustrating.

Teens are weird but they are just more malleable against the societal trends. Don't get me started on social networks, silos, people only comfortable with people if they agree on everything and being susceptible to anyone telling them what they want to hear, leading them to dismiss experienced or knowledgable people who might not do that for them, etc.

@aaronsullivan " having to complete the unpaid co-op. I guess the only way to have made that work was to get a paid position that counted "

That was the goal, paid. In fact the school requires them to have 2 paid coops in order to graduate, w/ a degree in game design, which you should be able to get in 6 months online at Sail in Florida, but they will let you work for them for free for 1 of them if you can't find 2, but they caved and let my kid have the 2nd, probably as a face saving move for them. $72k a year they want those graduation numbers up.🤑

Sorry I got you started. 😂

@rjejr Well, nuts. And yes, "don't get me started" really means, "well, here I go..." haha.