Oh look, capitalism yet again fucking creatives, what a surprise.
I'm honestly a little confused about why Unity had 7000 employees in the first place. But that's besides the point that this is horrible for so many. Even after these layoffs I'm confused about the total number of employees they have???
They got most of those employees during the metaverse/web3 push they made. Also a not insignificant part of those are not developers, but marketing and sales people.
Unity is the most widely used game engine worldwide. Hundreds of games are released every week and the majority of them are made in Unity. Beyond the people that work on the engine itself, there are likely tons of people that work on training, support, localization, marketing, sales..
Sure. But Epic has 3000 employees in their entire company and does more than just work on an engine? Not just a little bit more, a HUGE amount more between their games, platforms, engine and so on.
Makes me wonder if the owners saw this coming months ago, and the license fee fiasco was done on purpose to deflect responsibility?
I don't think they're making much money. I think the license fee was a misguided (and desperate) attempt at monetisation. I think the whole company is mismanaged as it shouldn't be this size at all, and the way they tried to monetise it was based around this completely overbloated number of employees.
I'm not defending the layoffs. It's bad. But the company shouldn't be this size to begin with. It's gross negligence on the part of management to get to this state and fuck with people's lives like this.
