Unity Software cutting 25% of staff in 'company reset' continuation

https://www.reuters.com/technology/unity-software-cutting-25-staff-company-reset-continuation-2024-01-08/

by nycdatasci • 3 years ago

141 94 3 years ago

minimaxir• 3 years ago

The company reset after the failed company reset, anyways.

hinkley3• 3 years ago

I'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• 3 years ago

Not good.

shrimp_emoji• 3 years ago

Great.

fwsgonzo• 3 years ago

They've fired so many employees that they (the employees) may as well band together to create a new game engine.

mdev23• 3 years ago

https://godotengine.org

rplnt• 3 years ago

Very much depends of what kind of employees they fired.

ebiester2• 3 years ago

If more than 25% of their employees were that bad, then they had bigger problems before they got to that point.

pixelesque• 3 years ago

As 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• 3 years ago

I'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.

hinkley3• 3 years ago

You 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• 3 years ago

The 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• 3 years ago

I 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• 3 years ago

Unfortunately the founder has some particular opinions on game engine performance https://gist.github.com/devshgraphicsprogramming/faa1f98f656...

nickthegreek• 3 years ago

I’d prefer the industry to have more than 2 main choices. There is room for all 3 if ran competently.

jayd163• 3 years ago

Yeah but that's basically one engine per niche. No diversity of choice at all.

cobalt• 3 years ago

Godot is unfortunately no where near ready for prime time, and imo also has some weird design choices that has me preferring unity

willis936• 3 years ago

This smells more like Unity circling the drain than pulling up. Best to seek better options than hope for doomed ones.

atoav• 3 years ago

Do 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• 3 years ago

even if they did, these cost cuts are typically designed to increase stock prices.

missedthecue2• 3 years ago

That 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.

anonymouse0082• 3 years ago

Probably don’t have to if they aren’t 174s

yebyen3• 3 years ago

I 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?

tschellenbach• 3 years ago

Well if you cut everyone's salaries, you also don't retain the good people. That's the theory at least. In practice, some of these companies don't know who is solid and who isn't since they have layers of management. So it can be quite random

bananapub• 3 years ago

Well if you cut everyone's salaries, you also don't retain the good people.

what good people? the upper management of this company fucked up so badly that they're sacking 50% of the company!

wilg9• 3 years ago

Obviously that makes no sense. It’s a layoff, they’re not cutting salaries.

mynameisvlad2• 3 years ago

I mean the result is the same, lowering costs due to “current economic conditions” and such.

StreetChief2• 3 years ago

They're saving money - they could do that by reducing executive pay.

afhfah834• 3 years ago

Seems like they overextended the company back when the metaverse hype was happening

boeingUH60• 3 years ago

Reminder 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

anigbrowl• 3 years ago

This is starting to remind me of the Bed Bath and Beyond saga.

hinkley3• 3 years ago

They already did one reset, which has triggered this one. What do they expect to come from this?

AndrewKemendo• 3 years ago

I 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

johnnyanmac10• 3 years ago

Oh 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• 3 years ago

What'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?

wilg9• 3 years ago

Is that what they did here? Article doesn’t say it.

makeitdouble• 3 years 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.

johnnyanmac10• 3 years ago

Ironically 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• 3 years ago

To 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• 3 years ago

1. 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.

jayd163• 3 years ago

It 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.

johnnyanmac10• 3 years 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.

andoowhy• 3 years ago

1) Nested prefabs and newer C# versions was great, everything else has been a wash.

2) Hell no. It's slower to start, slower to import, slower to compile.

3) Nope, and our artists would (rightfully) quit on the spot.

4) Nope. DOTS doesn't really cover our case, and their rendering solutions are needlessly fragmented. Actually, everything is needlessly fragmented: unity versions, adding a package manager, deprecating their network stack without a replacement, it's just a mess.

jayd163• 3 years ago

The package manager is actually good. Way better than the previous zips renamed as .unitypackage, anyway.

wilg9• 3 years ago

Yes, no, no, yes HDRP is fine

tombert• 3 years ago

I 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• 3 years ago

But stock prices don't always rise on layoff announcements.

jakderrida• 3 years ago

This 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• 3 years ago

Just another 25% more and they'd have almost a sane number of employees for a game engine.

bradjohnson• 3 years ago

Good 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.

spacebanana72• 3 years ago

This 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• 3 years ago

Nope, 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.

spacebanana72• 3 years ago

Have 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.

johnnyanmac10• 3 years ago

Probably.

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• 3 years ago

These 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• 3 years ago

Coincidentally 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.

altairprime3• 3 years ago

(I’m wrong, see below.)

wilg9• 3 years ago

I 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/n...

altairprime3• 3 years ago

Yup, oops! Retracted, thanks.

missedthecue2• 3 years ago

Last quarter Unity lost $124 million on only $544 million in revenue.

Unity Software cutting 25% of staff in 'company reset' continuation

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