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Unity Software To Cut 3.8% of Staff In 'Company Reset' (reuters.com) 45

Posted by BeauHD from the just-in-time-for-the-holidays dept.
According to Reuters, Unity Software will eliminate 265 jobs or 3.8% of its global workforce as part of a company "reset." It will also end an agreement with Peter Jackson's visual effects company Weta FX. From the report: Tuesday's announcement includes termination of the professional services piece of an agreement Unity struck with movie director Peter Jackson's visual effects company Weta FX in 2021 after Unity purchased the technology and engineering division of Weta FX. As a result, 265 employees whose jobs are related to the agreement will be laid off, the company said. The company has said its total workforce was around 7,000.

In addition, Unity will shut down offices in 14 locations such as Berlin and Singapore, pending employee consultation in some countries, and significantly reduce its office footprint for the remaining offices, including in San Francisco and Bellevue, Washington. Unity will no longer mandate that employees work from offices three a days a week and will reduce "full in-office services" to three days a week in most locations, the company said. More changes are in store to "refocus" Unity's business, Whitehurst told Reuters. "While no additions have been finalized, it's clear that we will reduce the number of things we are doing overall," he said.
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Unity Software To Cut 3.8% of Staff In 'Company Reset' More

Unity Software To Cut 3.8% of Staff In 'Company Reset'

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  • I have to thank UNITY (Score:3)

    by ihaveamo ( 989662 ) on Wednesday November 29, 2023 @06:15AM (#64040399)
    ..because their antics have got me to learn GODOT. I would never have without them. A hearty thanks!

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      Serious question: How is Godot in your experience vs Unity? I keep hearing that it's about 7-10 years behind Unity in terms of features and ease of use. But most of it seems to come from people who tried Godot and went back to Unity, which may indicate a bias.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by chefren ( 17219 )

        I hear Godot is so slow they even made a play about it.

      • Re:I have to thank UNITY (Score:4, Insightful)

        by fleeped ( 1945926 ) on Wednesday November 29, 2023 @08:41AM (#64040543)
        It is fairly behind in terms of polish, but they're not making dumbfuck decisions or fragmenting the product much (besides the gdscript/net). I've been porting a large code-heavy project and my major pain is that I have use low-level facilities for rendering (that are thankfully exposed) as the high-level API is designed around the most common use-cases. My fear is that the common use-cases are based on their earlier audience, which is less serious indie developers, so now that more serious devs are looking at their direction, they would really need to focus on optimisation and flexibility to retain them.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

          Interesting point. So we're having even more split into "Unreal for high end, GODOT for low end and Unity is getting squeezed out in the middle with its terms of service change ruining reputation for B2B business".

          Going to be interesting to see if GODOT crew can actually grow the engine without having all the problems Unity is having plus problems that come from being open source funded primarily by donations (as I understand, correct me if I'm wrong).

          • Yep. Unity's focus on mobile might become a focus out of necessity due to losing market to other platforms. They should be fine for now for console indies too. I'm fairly new to Godot so I haven't monitored in detail how it works financially (besides the fact that they've had many more donations and sponsors since the Unity fuckup). But "growing pains" is a thing, and a sudden growth of income needs some really good management for efficient spending and a good forward direction to maintain momentum and ...

          • Part of Unities problem is its making stupid decisions to service some ridiculous C-Suite created cash flow problems.

            Godot is open source, and although there is a company associated with it, its strictly firewalled off from influencing development in stupid ways. Its just there to consult and help out with console ports.

            Its problem is going to be somewhat the oposite, getting the labor for the less sexier parts of the engine. But with all that said, so far, its working, so if they just keep doing more of wh

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

              Isn't there a massive amount of various plug-ins and resources for both Unity and UE, mostly paid?

              Does GODOT allow for the same? Or do they have to be "free and open source" as well to plug into it?

              • Isn't there a massive amount of various plug-ins and resources for both Unity and UE, mostly paid?

                Does GODOT allow for the same? Or do they have to be "free and open source" as well to plug into it?

                Godot is MIT licensed, so worst case a company can fork it to create a proprietary version. However, the powerful plugin system allows creating plugins with any model.

                There's the fact that people arriving to Godot tend to value open source highly, of course. But the newly gained attention could expand the community to areas where more people create proprietary closed source complements for the tool.

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

                  I'm just thinking about the fact that most people would like to get paid for their work. A good example would be premade assets and plug-ins being sold/licenced for unity and unreal to do many things. This is an important part of proliferation of both unreal and unity.

      • I'm enjoying it - but I'm mostly dabbling in 2d - has everything I need there. I did some stress tests and find sprite generation FASTER than unity - probably because there's less overhead. I'd say 80% of it is "oh that's nice" and 20% "what the hell were they thinking?". The built in physics is ok, but there's already plugins for stuff like box2d and JOLT for 3d Their built in language is easy to use - GDSCRIPT - I find it ... Pythonesque - but you can do C# as well - but that's splitting the community

    • I should have named my language GDScript first, but for me GD means something else.

  • and significantly reduce its office footprint for the remaining offices, including in San Francisco and Bellevue, Washington.

    No, stop, the San Francisco real estate companies were adding so much... err... shareholder value!

    Unity will no longer mandate that employees work from offices three a days a week and will reduce "full in-office services" to three days a week in most locations, the company said.

    Is "full in-office services" a euphemism for having the subcontractors who do the catering come in? If so I feel a bit bad for them, you can't pretend to cook when you work in a canteen. Like you can pretend to manage or lead.

  • Unity extended leadership team makes a business decision to change their revenue model. It backfires, badly. They are basically forced by their own customers to revert their changes. And now the same leadership decides to yank those with zero saying on this huge negative PR under guise of reorganization?

    I still wonder which new toys their C-execs will get with this year hefty bonus they managed to, uh, earn.

    • Obviously they have a problem with their profitability. Having failed to make more money by charging more, they're going to try making more money by getting rid of staff.

      Something tells me they don't understand who they're getting rid of - realistically, if you're running things well there are only a few people who need to go at any given time and you're already working on it. Mass layoffs are far less discriminating and cause massive morale problems, and anyone with the talent to move elsewhere will be d

      • According to summary every single one of the 265 were in a single unit all working based on a single contract that expired. They should have kept 265 around doing nothing?

        The rest is all about office closures. As we slashdot users know, offices are unnecessary and should all be shutdown. This is clearly a smart move.

        What is the issue?

        • As we slashdot users know, offices are unnecessary and should all be shutdown.

          Because people doing hardware support for the overpaid programmers can store all the equipment at their homes. When some overpaid programmer mangles his machine, they can go to the support's house to get things taken care of.

          Must be nice to live in a fantasy world where living in your parents basement is the norm. Because clearly everyone else who works has to follow suit.

          • ...for the overpaid programmers...

            Correct me if I'm wrong, but those are the people who actually make the product being sold. That being the case, I have a hard time seeing them getting paid too much. Without them, there is no company.

            • At most companies every group is important and without that group you wouldn't have a company.

              Is any group bloated or individuals overpaid? Yes at many companies. But being on the Product side is not special magic. Just one part of a larger machine.

              Try racing your 1500hp V12 hypercar with a $50,000 engine block without $10 in spark plugs.

              Try racing the same car with spark plugs and no engine.

              You need both to win the race or even be in the race.

              • At most companies every group is important and without that group you wouldn't have a company.

                You can have CEO's, secretaries, marketing, sales teams, and all the rest; but without a product to sell, they will all be out of a job rather quickly. They are all important for supporting the product, but the product is the backbone for everything. Without the product, none of the others have any reason for existing; and those making the product are, by far, the most important people in the company. They should be among the highest paid.

                You can still have a company if all you have are the people who are m

                • You can not have a real company without all those other people.

                  A garage startup? Sure.

                  Revenue of tens or hundreds of millions? Not a chance.

                  *ALL* of them are necessary at a real company.

                  Sure, go ahead have 2000 devs making product but no sales team, no finance team, no sales team, no ceo to even tell you what the product should be. Good luck with that. Don't get too big a head because you can code.

          • It's called a data center or cloud for anything bigger than a laptop. If they fuck up their laptop too badly you overnight them a new one.

            Have you worked in IT support before? This isn't rocket science.

          • I deal with this issue from time to time. It involves couriers and having spare machines. You still need an office for some things, but nowhere near as much as you used to need.

            And yes, if you're doing hardware support remotely you not only need a workbench in your house but some storage space.

            The real problem crops up when your remote workers are down multiple days because you have insufficient spares or a courier screws up.

        • Apparently nearly all of those 265 are in NZ and will be rehired (by Weta FX) [thepost.co.nz]. Since they are in NZ, Unity office closures are not related to them (they work in the Weta offices).

          • Thanks for the details. So those people weren't even let go. They were essentially transferred to the company that they had been working for through the now expired contract with that same company.

    • They didn't backtrack enough, still demanding royalty fees. I imagine Godot and others will continue seeing ongoing growth as people finish their unity projects and choose another zero royalty option.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by teg ( 97890 )

      Unity extended leadership team makes a business decision to change their revenue model. It backfires, badly. They are basically forced by their own customers to revert their changes. And now the same leadership decides to yank those with zero saying on this huge negative PR under guise of reorganization?

      I still wonder which new toys their C-execs will get with this year hefty bonus they managed to, uh, earn.

      It's not the same leadership - the then-CEO is gone, and they got a new one from outside. The new CEO's CV includes being a former CEO of Red Hat.

  • I sure hope this group is mostly self-serving, stock-pumping suits who have no idea how games work.
  • Sucks when people get laid off but this was always a logical direction to go in. Previous CEO wanted to get Unity into Visual Effects like Unreal was being used to. The problem was, he did this buy going on an acquisition spree and not having a thought out strategy for how Unity would become a must have for VFX when graphics were never its strong point. Through all this, the actual game engine was getting worse and worse. Current CEO clearly understands all this and is most likely (hopefully) refocusing the

    • Previous CEO wanted to get Unity into Visual Effects like Unreal was being used to. The problem was, he did this buy going on an acquisition spree and not having a thought out strategy for how Unity would become a must have for VFX when graphics were never its strong point.

      The problem was, Unity had zero chance to deliver on that because of its lack of capabilities. It craters at much lower levels of complexity than Unreal. That's why the games made with it tend to feature such small worlds.

    • Current CEO clearly understands all this

      Not really. You can have two divisions focusing on different things. What you're saying is that you're deciding to drop your IDE product because a different team writing a compiler wasn't doing a good job. As far as the programmer is concerned, they need both. A good compiler is useless with a good IDE.

      Unreal isn't being used because it's good at VFX. It's being used because it's good at 3d development. Unity could benefit a lot from this as developing a 3D game is largely about the tool used to create the

  • That is what this looks like. There are only so many epic decisions one can make before doom comes knocking on your door.
  • our CEO fucked up. He gets a golden parachute and you guys'll be lucky to get 2 weeks severance from the contracting firm we used to hire you so that we didn't have to pay benefits.
  • From a good idea to a sad decision to axe it. Funny thing is: as soon as Unit came up, all the sudden Blender's game engine disappeared.

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