- 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
It is supposed also count prior installations, but customers haven't been have been under-reporting the numbers.
The tech bubble is bursting. The CEOs in tech really thought that COVID lockdown era growth would continue infinitely, and seemed to bet their house on it. And now the workers must suffer the consequences, of the actions taken by these executives. It's all a bunch of nonsense and extremely unfair.
