Unity Software to lay off 1,800 employees, or 25% of staff

  • 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.
aaaaaaadjsf,
@aaaaaaadjsf@hexbear.net avatar

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.

KingThrillgore,
@KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml avatar

https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/70eb3cf7-e273-4c9a-b7cf-144736670d1d.jpeg

porgamrer,

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.

autokludge,
@autokludge@programming.dev avatar

It is supposed also count prior installations, but customers haven’t been have been under-reporting the numbers.

sirdorius,

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.

Marcbmann,

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?

KepBen,

The second one. It’s funny that people think this is an absurd suggestion, too.

Marcbmann,

Lmao, yeah, let’s just let everyone join the unemployment line together. Big brain moves.

saintshenanigans,

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”

sirdorius,

Every major business decision go to a vote?

Yes, especially when you plan to fuck over all your existing customer base, as was the case here. A lot of Unity employees knew this was a major fuck up, and would have never went with the plan

MadhuGururajan,

Lay off a few C-Suite. Abolish golden parachutes. It’s not so difficult that a company can’t run for a few months without execs.

deur,

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.

Marcbmann,

So because the execs suck ass, everyone should lose their jobs instead of a fraction of the employees. Genius move.

mrkite,

Because the execs suck ass, everyone will lose their job eventually an yway.

DaleGribble88, (edited )
@DaleGribble88@programming.dev avatar

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.

agamemnonymous,
@agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works avatar

Every worker a member of the board

Jaysyn,
Jaysyn avatar

Doesn't matter, Unity is a dead man walking.

Scrollone,

Godot FTW!!!

askat,
@askat@programming.dev avatar

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.

derfl007, (edited )

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

fogetaboutit,

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.

Windex007,

The 7700 wouldn’t all be in roles that directly contribute to the codebase, either.

towerful,

7690 middle managers and 10 devs

colorado,

It is mind boggling to me how “high touch” business to business sales is like who do you need a dedicated account representative for every customer?

NovaPrime,
@NovaPrime@lemmy.ml avatar

There is more to sales than just the initial contract. Each account has a CLV and its the job of the revenue teams to not only figure out what this is, but then funnel customers through the various stages of post-sales business development, product adoption growth, churn mitigation strategies…etc. to not only meet this but extend it. Sales and revenue are not just a one and done operation. When done correctly you essentially have a farming model vs a hunting one (this can be further refined with things like ICPs, funnel feedbacks…etc), but this often requires some level of continuous account touch points to maintain (gotta water the plants, keep them free of weeds, put down new fertilizer when appropriate, ensure there are no pests causing problems, weather proof the enclosure as much as possible…etc, you get the idea).

That being said though, a lot of businesses are still operating on the pre 2022 growth models or are just now catching up and trying to shift to a more sensible revenue based model, and that is leading to sheding of numbers in an (often misguided imo) attempt to not go under.

derfl007,

Exactly. And the unity engine is not the only product that unity makes. They have a full cloud platform with DevOps tools, Game Services like Matchmaking, Leaderboards, Ads, etc. and many more things.

Nonetheless, what the Godot Team + Community is creating as a FOSS product is absolutely amazing and i would say it’s well on its way to becoming the Blender of game engines

askat,
@askat@programming.dev avatar

True. Didn’t think about that.

huginn,

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?

DaleGribble88,
@DaleGribble88@programming.dev avatar

2300? Making a change to the repo is what makes someone a contributor. Sorry if I completely misinterpreted the question.

DeadlineX,

I think they meant how much code each of those contributors added to the repo. Like did 500 just add a single line? Did some of them simply fix a typo in a single string? That kinda thing.

huginn,

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?

IE how much have the 2300 contributors added in aggregate compared to the 10 FTE?

My gut instinct is that the employees probably account for 90% of the codebase.

ursakhiin,

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

bigboopballs,

I wonder what those 7700 employees do

porgamrer,

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.

  1. VFX studio offline rendering going to be replaced with modern game engine rendering any day now!
  2. AR is about to take off and revolutionise every industry at any moment, if only someone can render the overlays!
  3. 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!
  4. The military will be desperate to spend their infinite budget on using unity to simulate warzones or something!
  5. 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.

saintshenanigans,

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

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