- Unity Software said Monday that it would lay off about 1,800 employees, or 25% of its overall workforce, as part of a corporate restructuring plan.
- The company said it is unable to “reasonably estimate the costs and charges in connection with this reduction, which it expects will be substantially incurred in the first quarter of 2024.”
- In October, John Riccitiello retired as Unity’s CEO, while former Red Hat CEO James Whitehurst became interim CEO.
Still boggles my mind that Unity has 7700 employees. It’s funny how Godot while having only 10(?) developers is considered good alternative for Unity.
TBF godot is open source and has over 2300 contributors on github. Still less than unity and most of those don’t get paid for their work, but saying that there are only 10 developers is not true and not fair to all of the people contributing in their free time
Not all 2300 worked full time on godot tho. Most contributors either want to add a feature and leave, or bugfix and then leave. But those 7700 unity employees sounds like full time or at least part timer to me.
The 7700 wouldn’t all be in roles that directly contribute to the codebase, either.
I’m curious how much those 2300 contributors have actually added to the repo though. Are they the equivalent of 10 full time devs? 100? 5?
2300? Making a change to the repo is what makes someone a contributor. Sorry if I completely misinterpreted the question.
I was digging into it because that baffled me.
It looks like Unity Software provides a lot of services related to Unity and Cloud usage of the engine. I’m guessing this is a ton of consultants.
Godot is being pushed as an alternative for indie developers who likely weren’t using those services. Those services are likely being used by developers making more mainstream games like Pokemon Go and Call of Duty Mobile.
Most of their employees are likely in that realm and marketing/sales
Game engines had a lot of growth speculation for the past decade. There were a lot of harebrained ideas about how game engine tech could disrupt loads of existing industries and provide the foundations for various new ones. e.g.
- VFX studio offline rendering going to be replaced with modern game engine rendering any day now!
- AR is about to take off and revolutionise every industry at any moment, if only someone can render the overlays!
- The VR metaverse is here, and millennials love renting so much they are going to rent virtual flats and use unity to look at them!
- The military will be desperate to spend their infinite budget on using unity to simulate warzones or something!
- Wow Roblox found an amazing loophole for monetising child labour using a game engine. Let’s steal their idea and scale it up!
And so on.
For every idiot idea there is some large R&D team full of poorly-managed developers desperately trying to apply unity’s completely unsuitable technology to a problem it can’t solve, on the off chance that one of them turns into a money printer. There’s also probably a bunch of marketing people, sales people and suits trying to get past regulatory barriers, etc.
Whenever reality hits on one of these hype bubbles, a lot of people get fired. It just happened to VFX, for example.
Hoping it’s not a mistake but I’m early enough in my career I’m still prepping for my first indie game and I’m currently pivoting to godot. I want to make pc and mobile titles, and I was already upset over how unity treated their customers and now they’re laying off 25%… I’d rather try something else while I have time to learn
Doesn’t matter, Unity is a dead man walking.
It’s great to see the majority of workers paying for the mistakes of that big pricing fuckup that was approved by a minority of people in power. Just a normal day for capitalism, nothing to see here.
How do you expect a business to run? Every major business decision go to a vote? Or should a company that is bleeding cash not lay off anyone until the company shuts down and everyone is out of a job?
The second one. It’s funny that people think this is an absurd suggestion, too.
Actually there’s a hidden option C!
The execs take a fucking pay cut for fucking up their company instead of subsidizing their wealth on the suffering of those who earned them that wealth.
I know I’m a little liberal on this one but anything over like 200k salaried should mean “I’ve done an amazing job helping the company grow”
Or should a company that is bleeding cash not lay off anyone until the company shuts down and everyone is out of a job?
Y. E. S.
This isnt as absurd as you think, its not the goddamn employees fault the execs suck ass. If there are performance issues from an employee that is different, but in general these moves are wholely driven by failure at the exec level.
So because the execs suck ass, everyone should lose their jobs instead of a fraction of the employees. Genius move.
Others have already stated the second option as preferred, I’m going to offer up some more context. The obvious contemporary example of this sort of structure is a co-op. There is usually some general manager or CEO-like position that handles day-to-day operations, and major business decisions are decided by a member vote. If that is a little too on the nose, it is not uncommon to have a shareholder vote for major business changes in a more traditional, publically traded, company.
This actually could have been much worse. I heard they are trialing a system where they lay off one employee every time unity is installed, but luckily there have only been 1800 installs since September.
