12 ms·
Unity Software cutting 25% of staff in 'company reset' continuation
- minimaxir 3y agoThe company reset after the failed company reset, anyways.
- hinkley 3y agoI'll be curious to see if this more resembles an 'undo', or running down a flight of stairs, trying to regain your balance, after having tripped on the second step. I don't know which it will end up being, but I can say that I have a bag of microwave popcorn on standby.
- MichaelTheGeek 3y agoNot good.
- shrimp_emoji 3y agoGreat.
- fwsgonzo 3y agoThey've fired so many employees that they (the employees) may as well band together to create a new game engine.
- mdev23 3y agohttps://godotengine.org https://godotengine.org
- rplnt 3y agoVery much depends of what kind of employees they fired.
- ebiester 3y agoIf more than 25% of their employees were that bad, then they had bigger problems before they got to that point.
- StreetChief 3y agoAre you assuming the people laid off were poor performers? That is a massive assumption.
- ebiester 3y agoI am assuming that the comment I was responding to was making that assumption and was dismissing the thought - I may have misread it and he instead was questioning what percentage of the layoffs were programmers instead.
- pixelesque 3y agoAs someone who was laid off by them last month as part of Weta Digital, not all of us were working on games stuff... (and I do if I think of it as an 'impartial' observer think it's probably a 'good' thing for Unity to get back to its core business, however they shouldn't really have started swimming outside their lane in the first place to such a huge degree).
- EA-3167 3y agoI'm rarely in favor of a company self-destructing, but Unity absolutely inflicted this on themselves. It's just a shame that the first to pay the price are the furthest from that sort of demented decision-making.
- hinkley 3y agoYou know the cartoon meme where the guy shoves a stick into the wheel of his bicycle? I'm now imagining a second cartoon where he picks up the bike, and before he gets on, looks back and sees the stick on the ground. The last frame is him riding with the stick balanced across the handlebars.
- TillE 3y agoThe industry needs Unity, for the sake of competition and diversity of options. It needs a good, well-maintained Unity. Maybe they'll be able to refocus, maybe their new licensing scheme is good enough. If not, I really hope they get acquired quickly by a company that cares about games. Probably Microsoft.
- __loam 3y agoI don't think the industry does need unity. Godot is quickly becoming the engine of choice for smaller projects and Unreal exists for larger and more complex ones.
- gkedzierski 3y agoUnfortunately the founder has some particular opinions on game engine performance https://gist.github.com/devshgraphicsprogramming/faa1f98f65661c54a960b45ed1d450ea https://gist.github.com/devshgraphicsprogramming/faa1f98f656...
- frfl 3y agoCan you provide some context here for those who aren't familiar with the founder or what this link article is about?
- BLanen 3y agoRead Godot's response
- johnnyanmac 3y agoyou mean the: >If you read my text above, you will see why this approach is not wanted. It's fantastic for AAA games, but Godot being a general purpose game engine has different requirements. That does seem to exemplify what the GP means in terms of trying to aim for performance. I am not at all reassured of "CPU driven renderer is very performant" mentioned in the same post I'm reading. I'm sure these days you can run 90% of 2D games on the CPU with zero issue (outside of maybe not having a potato for a minspec if you utilize heavy VFX), but that sounds like a recipe for performance issues on anything more than the most simple 3D games. Comments from the founder here happened consistently over the years and is part of why I decided to pursue another open source engine instead in the end, as someone looking to make a medium-scale 3D game. I don't mean this as a slight to Godot; it is in fact much better to focus on one audience than be a swiss army knife, and I'm sure many game devs are right at home in Godot. But I can't help but admit that these rigid responses of "this way is good, you're wrong" instead of "this way is a compromise to provide design convenience over raw performance" rubs me the wrong way.
- afhfah834 3y agoSeems like they overextended the company back when the metaverse hype was happening
- atoav 3y agoDo they also cut 25% of the top-brass salaries? You know, as a result of the responsibility these people always refer to when asked why their wage needs to be so high.
- cyanydeez 3y agoeven if they did, these cost cuts are typically designed to increase stock prices.
- missedthecue 3y agoThat makes no sense. No one would do a major corporate restructuring, (like laying off one in four people) just to get a 3% bump in the stock that can easily be taken away by any downish day in the market next week.
- anonymouse008 3y agoProbably don’t have to if they aren’t 174s
- yebyen 3y agoI hate this. You're talking about S174 tax code changes, right? I'm here making a hard decision about whether to remain in a field of work that could be classified as either R&D or Maintenance, whether to move out of the country, or both – and we are talking about the same thing aren't we?
- anonymouse008 3y agoI’m sorry you’re going through this it’s bonkers for everyone Yeah my working theory is that Trump thought he would still be in office to use this as a negotiation token to bring big tech to the table.
- mamidon 3y agoCan you elaborate on what this 174S is? I've never heard about it.
- boeingUH60 3y agoReminder that Riccitiello wasted $1.7 billion on Weta Digital, which Unity recently all but abandoned, and sold $400 million+ of shares before getting fired [1]. It’s good to be CEO! 1- https://www.secform4.com/insider-trading/1193857.htm https://www.secform4.com/insider-trading/1193857.htm
- anigbrowl 3y agoThis is starting to remind me of the Bed Bath and Beyond saga.
- hinkley 3y agoThey already did one reset, which has triggered this one. What do they expect to come from this?
- imblacknigger 3y ago[flagged]
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoI was wave one in June 2022 and they have consistently done this every few months terrorizing the remaining staff further. This time it’s even worse, announcing waves of layoffs which keeps everyone scared of their job for months. Unconscionable but what else would you expect during this period of enshittification and bb&bing
- johnnyanmac 3y agoOh hey, I was wave one as well! Yeah, I still have a few contacts there and morale (based on a sample of 2) just sounds dreadful. There's definitely been a bit of brain drain from some of my former co-workers before and after the first wave. Felt really bad hearing about the ad revenue drama because I 110% know several channels in the Slack would have been lit ablaze before that went public. For others, keep in mind that I don't think Unity is dying. They still are worth billions and can replace most of the talent that left. it's just a real shame to see how quickly everything can turn to shit in my local circle of the company.
- tracerbulletx 3y agoWhat's the best evidence on how companies should do layoffs these days? These instances where people announce they're going to be doing them over the coming few months seems so crazy to me because the culture goes to extremely depressed survival mode, and presumably everyone including the people you want to stay start looking for work?
- wilg 3y agoIs that what they did here? Article doesn’t say it.
- makeitdouble 3y ago> everyone including the people you want to stay start looking for work If you're laying off a sizeable portion of your employees, there's absolutely no way to tell a specific subset to not think hard about their options and what they'd do if they're next. In many places you can't just fire thousands of employees the next day without heavy penalties, so doing it as transparently as possible (which also means months in advance), with clear paths for people to get out is probably the best approach and will let the remaining people understand they can trust you not screwing them over if/when time will come.
- johnnyanmac 3y agoIronically enough, Epic did it the best. It's sudden (which I guess is for "security reasons" or whatever) and devastating mentally. But at the same time, you give me 6 months severance and I'll happily pack my bags. 3 months severance should be the expected amount, since that seems to be around the amount of time modern tech interviews take (4-6 rounds over 5-8 weeks. Plus some wiggle room). I don't think there will ever be a "good layoff" strategy. Just make it less stressful to move on, either by making the interviewing process faster or the severance larger than 1 month (the amount I got on 2/3 occasions I was laid off. First layoff didn't give me squat).
- omershapira 3y agoTo those who use Unity currently: • Has the engine improved in any capacity in the past 5 years for your usecase? (IL2CPP is the only example that comes to mind) • Are workflows faster or more reliable? • Has any AI tool become available for your projects? Weta Digital tools? • Have you benefitted in any way from the company's efforts to penetrate the AAA market? I'm talking about DOTS and HDRP primarily.
- CaptainFever 3y ago1. I would say probably better C# support? The Phone Simulator and Play Mode Options are nice too. But other than that most of the improvements come from 3rd party libraries. 2. No, it seems to be getting slower. 3. No. Any AI tools that I use are external, such as Copilot, MidJourney and ChatGPT. 4. No, I'm working on mobile, and DOTS is still really disconnected from the rest of the ecosystem.
- jayd16 3y agoIt was finally getting more stable once nested refabs landed. The *RP stuff added an official shader graph which stopped artists from asking for half a dozen different shader stacks/plugins. Build and asset bundle stuff is about the same but with the standard addressables library making things a bit more consistent. My cynical take on DOTS is that because it consumed all the marketing driven feature requests and was such a mess they moved it out of LTS unity. This let LTS Unity become a lot more stable than in the past.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago>The *RP stuff added an official shader graph which stopped artists from asking for half a dozen different shader stacks/plugins. I guess that's one silver lining to the result of having 3-4 different graphics stacks to choose from . I understand it from an engineering perspective (Mobile is a completely different problem space. It can't "just switch to HDRP", and you really shouldn't do that that far into production), but it definitely feels like they underestimated how important migration would be for developers given how lauded Unity is for prototyping. >My cynical take on DOTS is that because it consumed all the marketing driven feature requests and was such a mess they moved it out of LTS unity. DOTS was tackling a very hard problem and got stuck between how they wanted to market it. And they were way too pre-emptive in promising what it could do. It should have never been advertised as ready for production but that's the vibe they gave. It's a shame because the tech truly does feel magical for games with proper data structuring. Burst advertised 10x increases in (CPU) performance and I've heard of increases as high as 25x in the best cases. But 10x for "just flipping a switch" with Burst before interacting with the ECS and Jobs gave so much promise to what it could do to help with game performance.
- tombert 3y agoI wonder if someone could build a hedge fund around trying to predict which companies are going to have layoffs, and make their bets based on that. I think they would be off to a pretty good start just following my career for the last year.
- dboreham 3y agoBut stock prices don't always rise on layoff announcements.
- jakderrida 3y agoThis is an excellent point people neglect. Another one, when I was a FiOs tech for Verizon, is that every strike, workers would discuss the company making money on saved wages. Every time, I'd explain how they're losing money each day we strike and how replacing the whole workforce wouldn't make the stock skyrocket. I even showed workers statements by major banks estimating how much they lose each day. Even wall street has wised up since the 80s.
- polski-g 3y agoJust another 25% more and they'd have almost a sane number of employees for a game engine.
- bradjohnson 3y agoGood news for you then, far fewer than 50% of employees at Unity work on the game engine. The game engine is a small part of what Unity does, especially since IPO.
- spacebanana7 3y agoThis wouldn’t have happened if Zuckerberg was allowed to buy Unity. Unity would’ve been the most profitable (least loss making) part of Meta reality labs. Maybe he’d even have open sourced the entire thing and written it off as a marketing expense.
- RomanPushkin 3y agoNope, they do layoffs in Meta. A lot of them. Moreover, in case of an acquisition, layoffs is the first thing is going to happen to a company.
- spacebanana7 3y agoHave any of the significant Meta acquisitions had major reductions in workforce? Unless they get declared a mistaken purchase like Parse they’ve tended to grow over time. Meta has a phenomenal appetite for funding projects with little direct revenue when they’re getting engagement like Instagram and WhatsApp earlier on. And Unity wouldn’t need to create direct revenue for Meta. The control of the gaming ecosystem would be so strategically valuable.
- johnnyanmac 3y agoProbably. But on the other hand, do you want Facebook to be powering the lion's share of mobile games, as well as a significant amount of indie games on console/PC? I sure wouldn't want to make a facebook account to play Silksong (And that's like, my top 3 most look forward to game). >Maybe he’d even have open sourced the entire thing and written it off as a marketing expense. They did the exact opposite with their VR ventures. Also, I can assure you that open sourcing Unity's core engine wouldn't help a lot for most indies. it's a deeply entwined mess of nearly 20 year old legacy code desperately straining to interop with C#. There's a reason it's a multi-year effort to try and move .NET versions.
- jacquesm 3y agoThese kind of trickled-out layoffs are the absolute worst for morale. You do them all in one go or you do a hiring freeze and then wait it out (if you have the cash to burn). But to do it piecemeal in multiple rounds is a very good way to kill your company. Everybody with alternatives will leave of their own accord after the second or the third round so you'll be left with the people that can't leave. Good luck keeping that afloat in the longer term.
- amatecha 3y agoCoincidentally one of the companies Unity acquired did the exact same thing when I worked for them, many years ago. It was absolutely brutal for morale, something I've never seen at any other job before or since. Layoffs multiple weeks in a row (or maybe spaced out), everyone ultra-stressed, not knowing if they're next.
- altairprime 3y ago(I’m wrong, see below.)
- wilg 3y agoI think you’re tripped up on the difference between gross profit and net income. Their net income has always been negative. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/U/unity-software/net-income https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/U/unity-software/n...
- altairprime 3y agoYup, oops! Retracted, thanks.
- wilg 3y agoNo worries, it's a bit confusing. Really appreciate the intellectual honesty though!
- altairprime 3y agoMy preferred metric is net profit last YoY per laid-off worker, but human error is and always will be.
- missedthecue 3y agoLast quarter Unity lost $124 million on only $544 million in revenue.
- hakdbha 3y ago[dead]