11 ms·
Unity Software to cut 3.8% of staff in 'company reset'
- dagmx 3y agoMost notably, this is laying off their entire acquisition of Weta Digital which was an audacious $1.6B purchase. After which Unity did nothing to take the proposed products into the marketplace.
- nithayakumar 3y agoJust Weta FX - those were the guys and gals that used Weta tooling for producing films and such. Not Weta Tools - those are the guys and gals building and maintaining the Weta tools
- qwytw 3y agoBut it seems that 265 is pretty much the entire headcount of Weta Digital’s 'tools department' they have acquired back in 2021? From their announcement: "Unity welcomes Weta Digital’s world-class engineering talent of 275 engineers that are known for architecting, building, and maintaining Weta Digital tools and core pipeline." So it just seems they have just thrown away $1.6 billion. If they were unable to commercialize any of their tools while they still had the people who built them it will be entirely hopeless now.
- bhouston 3y agoI think they were not easily commercialized. I was a VFX software developer and internal tools are both very advanced and also fragile foot guns if you try to do anything that isn’t exactly down the golden path. VFX devs are not the usual product guys, they are usually either R&D/math guys or hackers, with little in between. The way to commercialize WETA stuff would be to make new product teams and basically redo much of the work with professional software devs and figure out where the original VFX R&D had gaps - and it always has massive gaps. Unity just went nuts with wacky acquisitions the last couple years and this was one of them.
- Narann 3y ago> internal tools are both very advanced and also fragile foot guns if you try to do anything that isn’t exactly down the golden path. HT: That’s also an important point explained when we talk about internal VS commercial (or build VS buy) in the animation/VFX industry. Internal softwares does less than 5% (or less) of commercial products, but they are doing it in a straight, fab compatibility way. No effort is made in making the tool working with your fab, the tool is shaped for the fab from scratch. That’s the value of internal tools. Converting those is viable product is very risky.
- MrScruff 3y agoYeah, you could see this outcome a mile away. While there are examples of in-house VFX software being commercialised (eg. most of the Foundry's offerings) it's generally not built to the same spec as commercial software. There are plenty of good developers but the teams are smaller and resources are focused on bang for buck.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- immibis 3y agoWait, Unity owned WETA FREAKING DIGITAL? My goodness!
- starkparker 3y agoAlso notable: > Unity will shut down offices in 14 locations such as Berlin and Singapore, pending employee consultation in some countries, and significantly reduce its office footprint for the remaining offices, including in San Francisco and Bellevue, Washington. > Unity will no longer mandate that employees work from offices three a days a week and will reduce "full in-office services" to three days a week in most locations, the company said.
- seattle_spring 3y agoNice! It's nice to see a company make an employee-friendly movement here, as opposed to many of the other big players forcing their employees back into the commute rat-race.
- dsgnr 3y agoIt seems more like its to save money on office real estate and the fees that come with that like cleaning services, security, etc than it is about being employee friendly.
- lmm 3y agoWhatever their reasons, the end result sounds good for employees.
- dylan604 3y agoif you're not part of the staff being let go
- johnnyanmac 3y agoUnity is a worldwide company and while the HQ is now in San francisco, the origins lie in Copenhagen. There's physically no way to reasonably make everyone RTO because there are multiple big bases, and Unity was adjusted to telecommuncations well before the pandemic due to that. So I'm not too surprised it chose to size down physical locations when push came to shove, compared to other tech companies in SV doubling down on their billion dollar real estate they built.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago>and end an agreement with a digital video effects company [Weta Digital] Man, what did I even get laid off for if they were gonna cut off their billion dollar acquisition anyway? Thought they'd at least leverage that talent and tech to properly compete with Unreal in the Film space. But alas. More unfulfilled dreams.
- CaptainFever 3y agoI was intending to join Unity as an intern, only to realise that the entire office had closed.
- btbuildem 3y agoDo these layoffs include any of the C-suite / execs / upper management? You know, the people directly responsible for the company's situation? Accountability? No?
- jibe 3y agoThis started with the CEO being removed, so I think, Yes!
- yorf89 3y agoExcept he's still getting paid until April. I doubt the employees getting the sack because of this will be extended the same sweet deal. Pretty messed up that you can fuck up and make hundreds lose their jobs, and get paid for several months afterwards to do literally nothing.
- johnnyanmac 3y agoWasn't as nice as what I hear from Epic, but Unity layoff did have severance. 2 weeks of pay per year of tenure. Probably below average for tech, above average for games. But yea, golden parachutes for me but not for thee.
- wddkcs 3y agoThere's one CEO, and n employees. The one will always receive preferred treatment, over the many. Is it pretty fucked up that 1+1=2? Both are constants in the universe. Whether he did a good job is irrelevant, he did a job and got paid for it. It'd be pretty fucked up if the board hired him, then didn't pay him per contract.
- yorf89 3y ago> Whether he did a good job is irrelevant LOL! Well, at least you're not trying to hide the fact that the ridiculous compensation isn't commensurate with performance.
- 3y ago
- djinnandtonic 3y ago[flagged]
- capableweb 3y agoAnd what Claude reviewed it, said OK and validated it?
- add-sub-mul-div 3y agoI didn't think it was that bad, but can I say that I love how thoroughly bad content has become synonymous with generative AI?
- scq 3y agoMore discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38452493 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38452493
- dboreham 3y agoThe other 3.2% goes in a second round?
- bfrog 3y agoHow about cutting 100% of the idiotic board who cost them their business?
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago[dupe] Some more discussion over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38452493 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38452493
- nextworddev 3y ago3.8% is lower than most required attrition programs at FAANG
- bluescrn 3y agoIt's the 4th round of layoffs in under 2 years
- qwebfdzsh 3y agoThey are still massively over-bloated. Realistically they should cut at least another 30% or so (for some reason they still have about 50% more people than they did at the beginning on 2022). Of course that would turn into a disaster due to obvious reasons (good luck firing the "right" people). So they are kind of screwed, no way can the generate enough income to support 7000 people without massive growth. It's a bit of an apples to oranges but Epic for instance "only" has around ~4,5 employees yet just Fornite alone is reportedly bringing almost 2x more revenue than Unity's entire business... Of course that might just be an indication that you can't really make much money (or even be profitable) from selling a game engine (licensing Unreal is just a side-gig to Epic after all, they made less than $300 mil from it last year).
- whywhywhywhy 3y agoEpic did exist and make money shipping Unreal Engine before Fortnite, although Fortnite became a huge success I'd say that having people in the same building having to actually build a real product with the tools you make in that building is also the right attitude to being able to make tools that are profitable and work for real people. Heard from a comment on here that all Unity tech demos use extreme custom tweaks on the base engine and then when that demo ships it all gets thrown out because it doesn't really function beyond what was demoed in a modular way an end user could benefit from it.
- qwebfdzsh 3y agoBut doesn't change the fact that financially Unreal is a side business for Epic (IIRC even their storefront somehow makes more money..). What's the point in making those tools if you can make significantly more money arguably in a much easier way? This is way Unity pivoted into ads and is/was(?) trying to entire other areas like VFX/industrial etc. stuff. Charging per seat is just a terrible business model for a game engine. > Heard from a comment on here that all Unity tech demos use extreme custom tweaks on the base engine and then when that demo ships it all gets thrown out That's true, they didn't even throw out that stuff, demos were made on a separate branch of the engine by team(s) completely separate from the people working on the engine. That and most of the stuff they were doing in their demos is irrelevant for pretty much all of their users anyway (and obviously they weren't very effective at attracting VFX and AAA clients..). IIRC they canned most of their in house demo team back in 2022. > building having to actually build a real product with the tools you make in that building Honestly I'm not 100% sure about that. It's not like all teams have the same problems and workflows and it's not like Unity is not getting enough feedback from their users.
- initplus 3y agoUnity are spending too much money to develop far too little. New engine features are almost universally half baked (DOTS, UI mess). They acquire in demand features from the community just to let them wither (pro builder). The only thing that's consistent between different Unity features is how unpolished they seem. Notably the mess they have made of DOTS seems to have been partially responsible for sinking Cities Skylines 2. Just points to a mess at the leadership level. Their failed relicensing debacle shows the poor level of judgement of the C suite.
- luaKmua 3y agoNo love for Unity here, their licensing debacle was horrendous, but I've seen no indications that DOTS is responsible for CS2 perf issues. Everything I've seen points to other things lacking in the engine (a decent LODing system for example), general optimization issues that'd be present in any game shipped too early, and inefficiencies in the rendering pipeline.
- initplus 3y ago"Unfortunately a lot of the graphics-related issues are indirectly caused by the game’s use of DOTS" "The cause for unnecessary geometry is both the lack of simplified LOD variants for many of the game’s meshes, as well as the simplistic and seemingly untuned culling implementation. And the reason why the game has its own culling implementation instead of using Unity’s built in solution (which should at least in theory be much more advanced) is because Colossal Order had to implement quite a lot of the graphics side themselves because Unity’s integration between DOTS and HDRP is still very much a work in progress and arguably unsuitable for most actual games" https://blog.paavo.me/cities-skylines-2-performance https://blog.paavo.me/cities-skylines-2-performance
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- danbolt 3y agoI think if a game development team is going to try ECS for gameplay, they need to have the resources to go ensure it’s comprehensive enough for their needs. It can be challenging to “bolt on” a data-oriented design and have it interface with the rest of the code base. Conway’s Law will apply if not everyone’s on board with it.
- DeathArrow 3y agoUnity promised much but never delivered. DOTS is a mess. For AAA you are better with Unreal and for small games Godot might be enough. Unity's only advantage is the huge community and the tons of stuff in their store and the huge number of tutorials. Anyway, I am glad I exited game de few years ago and I am much happier doing web development and microservices.
- whywhywhywhy 3y agoStarting to seem like modern Unreal works well for small games too.
- quit-the-woke 3y agounity is a mess on the inside there are slack channels practically devoted to political bickering i was disgusted with what I saw there (outside of my own engineering team which was actually quite decent with the exception of one person) and left within 3 months
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago>there are slack channels practically devoted to political bickering What kind of political bickering? Internal company politics or government/social/identity politics?
- phist_mcgee 3y agoCheck his username for an answer
- quit-the-woke 3y ago[flagged]
- ClumsyPilot 3y agoPeople in ancient Rome did that too. You think you can control private discussions employees have in the office? I am suresome employees discussed the size of their genitalia during lunch break. Controlling private discussion is a tyranical fantasy.
- all_the_silly 3y ago[flagged]
- stillwithit 3y agoYou’re one of billions of meaningless meat suits is all
- gumballindie 3y agoWill the boards of tech companies ever learn that once founders and key tech people are sidelined they no longer fulfil their core mission of delivering tech? Tech companies need to remain tech focused because thats what people want from them. Unity ticks a lot of chekboxes but as others said are half baked. The only market it seems to serve well is mobile because mobile has few demanding features.
- crunkykd 3y agonow do Ironsource ($4.4B)