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Unity to lay off 8% of its workforce
- sremani 3y agoDidn't PE guys or some one buy Unity. With high interest rates you get reality into business models and squeezing efficiency. I do not know but the next decade does not look like workers' paradise like some have envisioned.
- TheRealDunkirk 3y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32081051 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32081051
- pavlov 3y agoUnity is a public company since September 2020. They did merge last year with a mobile adtech company called IronSource (which had also been public but became a part of Unity).
- photochemsyn 3y agoThe only way workers get any say over corporate decisions about things like compensation, layoffs, stock buybacks etc. within the investment capitalism model is if they are organized and control voting seats on the corporate board. Don't worry, implementing this as the standard in the USA will not result in "Marxist Communism" - it's the norm in Germany today, e.g. VW is controlled by a 20-seat supervisory board where unions control half the votes. The result is neither a shareholder's nor a worker's paradise, but a reasonable compromise.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- TheRealDunkirk 3y agoI'm sure the Twitter exjerks will claim it's due to "AI."
- berkle4455 3y agoUnity doubled their headcount across ‘21 and ‘22 by adding ~3500 employees.
- giobox 3y agoIsn't this the third time in a year they've announced layoffs?
- mcraiha 3y agoYes it is. "a new round of layoffs--its third within a year" https://www.gamespot.com/articles/game-engine-company-marketed-as-behind-50-of-all-games-faces-more-layoffs/1100-6513789/ https://www.gamespot.com/articles/game-engine-company-market...
- moosedev 3y agoThe second half of the news, not mentioned in TFA, is that they are going to close around half of their offices worldwide "in the coming years": https://www.gamesindustry.biz/unity-lays-off-hundreds-more-closing-half-of-offices https://www.gamesindustry.biz/unity-lays-off-hundreds-more-c... No info on which offices might be at risk.
- ChuckNorris89 3y agoProbably not the main Copenhagen office as I expect Danish employee protection rights to be off the chart.
- suddenclarity 3y agoIn what way? Here in Sweden most fired employees gets a couple of monthly salaries. It won't stop them from shutting down a full office. The union can go on strike but seems rather pointless if they are shutting down anyway.
- giobox 3y agoA pattern I've observed at international companies who have done multiple layoffs in the past 12 months is that the European offices are rarely hit hard in wave 1 due to the additional statutory protections in many European countries. However, that seems to fire the starting gun on the preparations needed to then carry out layoffs that require longer statutory processes in Europe, which then get included in the second or future wave of layoffs. Meta for example appeared to follow this pattern, and I've heard as much from people with direct knowledge of events. This is Unity's third round of layoffs this year.
- mtzet 3y agoOff the charts? Compared to completely at will maybe. You generally have to pay 3 months severance + 1 month per 3 years of employment for a maximum of 6 months severance after 9 years of employment. That's it.
- oblio 3y ago
- soperj 3y agoI'm betting some people wish they had a union now.
- HideousKojima 3y agoUnions don't prevent layoffs though
- slg 3y agoIt really depends on the specific union and what they push for in negotiations. Some unions will prioritize layoff preventing policies that make layoffs a less desirable option for a business. At the very least, a union will probably get you a better severance package than you would get out of a company with no union. And if severance is more expensive, it shifts the economic incentives and might make a company more hesitant to lay people off.
- hourago 3y ago> I'm betting some people wish they had a union now. 100% this. Unions help employees to negotiate better even in a layoff situation. Engineers and other software related jobs, are just that jobs. Unions are specially designed to help employees better deals whatever the industry.
- qwytw 3y agoUnion isn't going to save them when the companies goes bankrupt and everyone losses their jobs. It was a very stupid for Unity to hire as much as they did over the last two years without having a clear path to becoming profitable.
- xutopia 3y agoI don't hear of smaller local shops doing mass layoffs like this. It seems the companies that paid more than local average and overextended themselves during the pandemic are the ones most affected by layoffs.
- synergy20 3y agothe big guns also sucked up talents from small shops with high pays quickly, and they probably over did it, by a lot
- gk1 3y agoIt's not news when a 50-person company lays off 4 people (8%).
- raincole 3y agoUnless your job is specifically to investigate local businsess, what you hear or not depends on media, not what is happening.
- derjanni 3y agoThanks for sharing this update. It's always sad to hear about layoffs, but it's important to stay informed about what's happening in the industry. I hope those affected by the layoffs are able to find new opportunities soon. Unity is a great company and I'm sure they'll come out of this stronger.
- kypro 3y agoJust 8%? The company is valued at $9.5b and is burning almost $1b a year... For every $1 they do in revenue they're currently losing about $0.66. I've been expecting this for sometime and I'm guessing they'll be forced to cut more.
- smbullet 3y agoThat sounds a lot like profit, no?
- mucle6 3y agoMaybe I misunderstood, but I took that to mean expenses are $1.66 for every $1 of revenue
- kypro 3y agoNo lol, I don't mean for every $1 they do in revenue they have $0.66 in costs, I mean for every $1 they do in revenue they're spending $1.66 and losing $0.66. These kind of numbers might be okay if they were a new startup growing sales 100%+ YoY, but they've been around since 2005 and have a mediocre growth rate of about 25-30%. There's just no excuse for this level of mismanagement.
- smbullet 3y agoI see, thanks for the clarification.
- MuffinFlavored 3y agohttps://www.google.com/search?q=unity+vs+unreal+engine https://www.google.com/search?q=unity+vs+unreal+engine https://www.google.com/search?q=what+video+games+use+unity+engine https://www.google.com/search?q=what+video+games+use+unity+e... How much does/did Unity charge for the top games that use their engine? How else do they generate revenue (and profit)? How do they compete with Unreal? Is Unreal more successful of the two?
- GartzenDeHaes 3y agoIf I remember right, Unity's largest revenue source is their asset store, followed by mobile in-game ads.
- amitmathew 3y agoThat's not correct. They don't even mention the asset store in their annual reports or shareholder letters any more, but in 2020 the Asset Store revenue was part of a category that was less than 8% of revenue. Their main revenue drivers are their ad solutions and engine licensing for large studios.
- lockhouse 3y agoThe thing with Unreal is that it doesn’t really even have to be very profitable. Epic would need a game engine of their own anyway. As long as their own games that use it make money, everything else is just extra gravy. Unity’s only revenue streams are their game engine and their advertising platform. Edit: I forgot they also have an asset store.
- vaughnegut 3y agoThey also have a services product line for gameserver hosting (Apex Legends uses it), voice/text chat (Riot Games uses it), and a few other things. https://unity.com/solutions/gaming-services https://unity.com/solutions/gaming-services
- raincole 3y agoIt makes me sad that Unity (almost) became an industry standard for indie and mobile games. It's almost as sad as Adobe and Autodesk's relevance.
- bathtub365 3y agoWhat is the industry standard for indie and mobile games?
- kriro 3y agoMy guess is they are cutting glut, realizing that the free money times are over and not that there's fundamental issues (apart from relying on free money too much of course). I'm a bit nervous about them turning profitable eventually but there's enough technical merit and niche that they should. I remember they grew headcount by a lot but maybe I'm misremembering. Maybe this sounds a bit cynical but 8% actually feels low. I only have so much time and it's all hobby projects but my heuristic is "multiplatform, 2d focus -> Unity; 3d -> Unreal". The two "big ones" seem to have interesting enough niches carved out (Unreal is also big in the simulation area and in movies). Sadly I haven't had the chance to try Godot or any other engine really.
- djmips 3y agoWhat do you mean by glut?
- kriro 3y agoGreedily overhired because "money is free" and now cutting down to a workforce size that actually represents what they need (as opposed to forced to cut people even though they would provide value due to severe cash flow issues). Glut is a bit cynical of a term I suppose.
- qwytw 3y ago> I remember they grew headcount by a lot Yeah, by 2x between 2020 and 2022...
- cptcobalt 3y agoUnity is a broken company that sells a critically broken engine. Sure, it's a great engine for rapid prototyping & releasing indie titles, but not great for getting to the finish line. I know of teams that have had to take out source licenses and edit the engine to fix & work around bugs so they could actually ship their game. Unity also don't build and release with their engine, like Epic does with Unreal & Fortnite, or Valve does with their games. And, when they tried to finish a whole game self-produced in-house, Gigaya, it was too hard for them to complete with their own engine. https://forum.unity.com/threads/introducing-gigaya-unitys-upcoming-sample-game.1257135/page-2#post-8278305 https://forum.unity.com/threads/introducing-gigaya-unitys-up... > It served its purpose as a source of product feedback during its active development and will continue to provide value as an internal resource. Any further learnings would have been minimal during the additional required time to get it to the finish line and would have been disproportionate to the necessary investment. Gigaya was conceptualized as an internal production to generate first-hand product feedback, as well as a learning resource for our users. To release it as a sample project would have required a thorough cleanup and optimizations in its current stage. Do you really think Unity will get better if Unity can't release a game and support its whole release lifecycle from production, release, ongoing support, and next console generation uprevs? Heck no. When I pick an engine for my next project, it's going to be Godot or perhaps Unreal, not Unity.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago>when they tried to finish a whole game self-produced in-house, Gigaya, it was too hard for them to complete with their own engine. I'll correct this statement and say that the dev team was perfectly confident working and eventually deplying Gigaya, and it did in fact help discover some bugs and features that went into the roadmap for the engine. It's just that management suddenly laid off most of the team and diverted the rest elsewhere. There was no one left to work on the project. I assure you those decisions were not ones made by engineers nor artists due to a lack of confidence. Simply another victim of the coporate churn.
- raincole 3y ago> Unity is a broken company An ad company that is extremely good at selling the idea of it being a game engine company. Unity has a massive ecosystem around it. Well, I mean life support. And it'll not last forever.
- Entinel 3y agoUnreal and Godot seem to be doing a number on Unity from both ends. The higher end of the industry is going Unreal while the indie games and hobbyist are going Godot. I imagine this is also why Epic is a Godot donor.
- suddenclarity 3y agoHave there been any well-known games made in Godot yet? When I started with my first proper game which was released a few months ago I went with Unity because I couldn't find any successful examples and the knowledgebase was lacking in comparison with Unity.
- amitmathew 3y agoDepends how you define well-known. The Godot showcase lists some of the popular ones: https://godotengine.org/showcase/ https://godotengine.org/showcase/. I believe Dome Keeper did $1m+ in sales with a 2-person team and I assume Brotato and Cruelty Squad are probably in 7 figures as well. So far, the hits have definitely been on the smaller side, but I expect things will change with Godot 4 being released. Another big factor is that most of the games released so far have been developed by tiny teams.
- iFire 3y agohttps://www.cassettebeasts.com/ https://www.cassettebeasts.com/ launched recently. I liked it.
- Entinel 3y agoSega did Sonic Colors in Godot, Dome Keeper and Cassette Beasts as other people have mentioned.
- djmips 3y agoApparently it was a remastered version, Sonic Colors: Ultimate - It's interesting this came out on the Switch since I'm pretty sure there is no official Switch support in Godot.
- 3y ago
- zackmorris 3y agoI want to love Unity, but as a low-level and backend developer I find it incredibly frustrating to use. I deal mostly with automations, so rarely do things directly anymore. I'm always thinking in terms of: how can I record this and play it back, can I get at the underlying data structures (hopefully standard like JSON or CSV), can I do multi-file search and replace with shell tools like grep using regexes, can I exercise the thing with a different tool like curl instead of a GUI, etc etc etc. So when I have to do something more than once, I often copy the text into something like BBEdit and run text filters on each line or use rectangular select on tabular data or format it as TSV (tab separated values) to copy/paste data into spreadsheets. But in Unity, I have to do everything the bare hands way with cookie cutter tools. I realize that's by design, but please, give experienced developers the means to access the underlying data structures so they can automate their work. For example, I was setting up the controller button mappings for my VR rig. At first it was great, until I tried to copy and paste rows in their GUI and found that it didn't work. I get tripped up constantly by the simplest tasks because Unity evidently doesn't run its GUIs by new users, the way that Apple might when they're designing a new interface. And then there's missing functionality in their standard libraries. For example, the GL_LINES primitive from OpenGL is simply missing, and there's no metaphor that replaces lines within their renderers. This isn't really their fault, since such basic functionality has been stripped from the underlying drivers on most platforms. Instead, they provide an over-engineered line mesh tool, which is fine, but many orders of magnitude slower, and we can't just use it as a shader on an existing model. There's no separate stop button. It doesn't save what I do in play mode automatically, or even ask me whether to make some of the edits I've made permanent. Their version control tool is atrociously bad compared to standard ones like git. The shader graph GUI runs many thousands of times slower than it should (unusable on my daily driver Mac Mini, I have to bust out the gaming PC). Times everything. A beginner mind outside of the Unity ecosystem sees these hindrances immediately. But experienced Unity users become blind to them. My very good programmer friend thinks I'm simply crazy and using it wrong. But see, that's his answer for everything. To criticize me instead of to consider ways that the tools could be improved. Which is the antithesis of computer programming (in fairness, he's much more of an artist or craftsman than an engineer like me). Then I run into problems with their opinionated stances like composition over inheritance. Or various friction in C# that I never hit in languages like PHP that I chose specifically to avoid the manual management of C++-inspired languages. Which is its own can of worms, because developers cling to advantages that suit them rather than seeing the advantages that other paradigms could bring. Again, this is very anti-programming in my book. So my advice to Unity would be to take a year and stop chasing Unreal. Implement the low-hanging fruit. Fix the bugs. Update the documentation. Consider allowing a large list of languages, especially Javascript/Lua/Python. But I think that the odds of any of this happening are so low that I regret taking the time to write this comment.
- Moneyyyyy 3y agoUnity sold it's soul when doing this Deal with this shitty ad company. So...
- sylware 3y agobad omens for elf/linux support. Wait, unity is 7000 people??????
- lionkor 3y ago*after these layoffs
- ezekg 3y agoThat was news for me, too. I thought they were a much smaller operation. I always thought I was rooting for the underdog vs Unreal, but apparently they're the giant.
- giobox 3y agoTheir largest business is largely mobile ads in mobile games, as I understand it, and has been for a while. As a business, they haven't really competed all that effectively with Unreal for AA/AAA games. If you like ads in mobile games, root away! > https://unity.com/products/unity-ads https://unity.com/products/unity-ads
- sylware 3y agoWith that many people, the engine should be coded in assembly, x86_64 and arm64 and risc-v :)
- ImprobableTruth 3y agoThey ballooned massively in size after covid (when their IPO occured), in 2019 they were still smaller.
- nailer 3y agoYep. Those people are read write execute for the user and no special bits.
- jpeter 3y agoFor comparison, Epic Games has 2,200+
- Laaas 3y agoPerhaps it wasn't wise to use so much money on a malware company [0]. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32096371 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32096371
- johntiger1 3y agoPedantics, but it's actually "company who made a malware installer"
- rcme 3y agoWhat is the difference?
- serf 3y agoone can feign ignorance to what they were distributing to such a degree that they get bought by a real company and experience a payday. morally and ethically? nothing at all.
- nailer 3y agoPedantically, the correct English would be “company that made a malware installer”.
- loeg 3y agoA company that makes malware is a malware company.
- nugget 3y agoI'm surprised the malware origins weren't scrutinized more in the press when the deal was announced. Ultimately it seems like the Unity CEO was trying to buy his way to profitability, without realizing that the two companies were a total culture clash.
- kyawzazaw 3y agoThe executive team of 5 did get paid $97mil in 2022. https://twitter.com/gergelyorosz/status/1653798663917826048 https://twitter.com/gergelyorosz/status/1653798663917826048
- yunohn 3y agoUnity stock peaked during the ZIRP COVID phenomena, looks like it’s only been downhill from there.
- pavlov 3y agoIt was an excellently timed IPO because the insiders’ lockups expired in 2021 while the stock was above $100. I know someone who had >$5M worth of Unity stock (employee grants). He sold it all in 2021. Had the IPO happened a year later, his stock would have been worth 80% less. I’m assuming a lot of these Unity insiders sold. Fortunately genius fund managers like ARK’s Cathie Wood were buying hand over fist.
- tester457 3y agoAnticipating another exodus with unity devs joining the Godot community.
- naillo 3y agoI would hope people just go back to writing engines from scratch. It's really not that hard and unlocks being able to do unique non cookie cutter things which in the end games are supposed to contain.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago>It's really not that hard Famous last words of a software developer. If you're making a small 2D game and are willing to make some tools for artists, then sure. You can get away with slapping together a few frameworks. But we are far past the days where you can make some decent 3D game at scale from scratch, unless you yourself are some unicorn of a "full stack" graphics engineer.
- naillo 3y agoIf you're willing to go for graphics as good as minecraft (best selling game of all time mind you, even in 2023) it's just as feasible as in 2011, in fact it's a lot easier (and hardware a lot more forgiving). People care much less about graphics and much more about gameplay, and building things from scratch makes making unique experiences much more feasible.
- HideousKojima 3y agoWriting your own engine requires a far stronger knowledge of math, rendering, audio, and networking (just to start with) than the median dev has, probably by a few orders of magnitude.
- naillo 3y agoSure but learning a framework like unity or godot is it's own massive investment (which can be taken away from you ala this article), and doing game dev isn't a part time job you do so if you're gonna spend your life on it better just learn that stuff anyway.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Animats 3y agoRoblox is hiring. And they pay Silicon Valley salaries, not game dev salaries.[1] [1] https://jobs.roblox.com/careers https://jobs.roblox.com/careers
- racl101 3y agoFor the longest time I thought being a game dev was a cool job where you made lots of money and got to do what you loved. The more I read about it the more sweatshop-ish it sounded.
- paxys 3y ago"I want to work in this field because I am passionate about it" is always a license for employers to exploit their workers. Video gaming, fashion, entertainment, even social service – all new entrants into such careers quickly get a dose of reality about how glamorous they actually are on the inside. My advice to smart CS students looking for jobs always is – find a nice company that makes business software. The more boring the job, the better your salary and work-life balance will be. You can work on your passions on the side.
- racl101 3y ago> My advice to smart CS students looking for jobs always is – find a nice company that makes business software. The more boring the job, the better your salary and work-life balance will be. You can work on your passions on the side. 100%.
- sgt 3y agoHow dare they? By doing this, they can snatch all the really great developers earning standard game dev salaries. /s
- CodeWriter23 3y agoI’m a father of a then-little girl who was molested by one of her 2nd grade classmates. What came out of the safety investigation, the boy who molested her was taught that behavior through unmoderated sexually oriented user generated content on Roblox. I am stunned to see you recommending people should actually work for this groomers cesspool, with said content persisting to this day. The only reason I can imagine is you work there. And if you do, then fucking do something about it. This had grave consequences for my daughter, the trauma, the PTSD, and a year of therapy.
- mailund 3y agoThis makes me a little sad, unity was the thing that got me into programming in the first place, and planted the seed that in the end became my career