Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Businesses Software

Unity Software Cutting 25% of Staff In 'Company Reset' Continuation (reuters.com) 25

In an SEC filing on Monday, Unity Software said it will lay off approximately 25% of its workforce, or 1,800 jobs, by the end of March. It marks the San Francisco-based company's largest layoff ever. Reuters reports: While Unity is not widely recognized outside the gaming industry, over 1.1 million game creators rely on its software toolkit each month, including the maker of the popular "Pokemon Go," "Beat Saber" and "Hearthstone" games. Monday's deep job cut will affect all teams, regions and areas of the business, the company told Reuters.

The layoffs come shortly after interim CEO Jim Whitehurst announced a "company reset" in November. "We are ... reducing the number of things we are doing in order to focus on our core business and drive our long-term success and profitability," Whitehurst wrote in the memo to all Unity employees on Monday. While Whitehurst provided no specifics on structural changes to come, a company spokesperson confirmed there will be additional changes coming. This is the fourth round of layoffs the company has conducted within the last year.

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Unity Software Cutting 25% of Staff In 'Company Reset' Continuation

Comments Filter:
  • They are panicking now that FOSS engines like Godot are getting good
    • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Monday January 08, 2024 @05:47PM (#64142309)
      It's not that they're getting good, I mean they are but it's not that. Unity has shown it's not safe to use. Nobody is going to want to touch it for any serious project because they've made it clear they intend to change the terms of the license even after the license was granted

      Nowadays small game companies often rely on their back catalog to see them through while they're developing their next game. You can't do that if at any time one of your middleware guys can come to you and say that sure we license this to you for this price but we changed the deal and now you have to give us 50% of your gross.

      Dungeons & dragons did much the same thing but they backed down a lot more completely. And even with that a lot of the game module developers are now designing their modules so that they don't depend on any of the wizards of the Coast stuff.

      Somewhere along the line these companies got the mistaken notion that they're like Microsoft and that they can do whatever they please.
      • by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Monday January 08, 2024 @08:37PM (#64142747)

        That's pretty much the problem here. They have shown that they cannot be trusted to not just up and change the licensing agreement. Now, I can fully understand why Unity did it, but the way they did it startled a lot of potential customers, i.e. developers.

        It's not even just that they have to rely on their back catalog, but learning a toolbox like Unity is already a nontrivial investment, whether you're a single developer who has to learn the tools or whether you're a studio that has to hire qualified staff. Even if you don't have anything finished yet, the decision what platform to choose is already a pretty decisive one that can mean sink or swim to your whole project if the rug is suddenly pulled out under you.

        And Unity has shown that they're not shy to do some rug pulling if they feel like it.

        And it's not that the game devs didn't want to pay licensing fees, so I doubt that Godot is going to be the big winner, I'd rather expect Unreal to see a considerable influx in users now. The problem wasn't that licensing costs would be charged. That was accepted, but what you need is that you can have a reliable cost estimate to work with. If your licensing terms suddenly change without warning and without recourse, that's something you cannot accept.

        With D&D, while a similar situation, it was even more harebrained because circumventing that licensing problem is even easier. Here, you just don't make it a Dungeons & Dragons book but rather one for Mazes & Monsters and if people use it to play D&D with it, that's not my problem...

        • Now, I can fully understand why Unity did it, but the way they did it startled a lot of potential customers, i.e. developers.

          What they did was lie like rugs. They claimed that people would get to keep using the license on the terms they agreed to, then they changed that.

          If they had made the change only for future customers they might have gotten away with it, but they went retroactive, and now they can never be trusted again.

          Everyone who works there had better GTFO while they can leave voluntarily because Unity is going away, and good riddance. It was a lousy engine anyway. Games made with it have always been limited compared to

          • Even if it only affected future projects it would have been inacceptable in the way they did it. Licensing Unity starts the moment you're finished with your project and start selling it. Ok, with today's "early access" bull, that's not entirely true, but it still only starts after a considerable amount of the development cycle has already been done and a lot of cost has been sunk. Imagine you're a year into development, finally ready to get some of that invested money back from your hopeful early access ado

      • ...because they've made it clear they intend to change the terms of the license even after the license was granted

        To be fair, every EULA in the world insists the vendor has the right to do that. Unity just actually did it.

        Part of the reason I buy almost no games anymore is because I'm sick of the rug regularly being pulled out from under my feet. This kind of crap needs to be made illegal.

        • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward

          To be fair, every EULA in the world insists the vendor has the right to do that. Unity just actually did it.
          Part of the reason I buy almost no games anymore is because I'm sick of the rug regularly being pulled out from under my feet. This kind of crap needs to be made illegal.

          You are misusing your words. Rights do not exist in the context you are using the term.

          A right is something you can afford to have a court enforce. When you can't afford it, it isn't a right.
          This is separate from legal and illegal.

          It is already illegal to break a contract, it doesn't need to be made more illegal.
          It all comes down to if you can afford to enforce that right.

          This is why large corporations didn't say boo about unity "just actually doing it", because they knew beyond any doubt that unity did no

      • It's not that they're getting good, I mean they are but it's not that. Unity has shown it's not safe to use.

        People were motivated to look for alternatives, found them, and are not going back.

    • by Xenx ( 2211586 ) on Monday January 08, 2024 @05:52PM (#64142341)
      I mean, they shot themselves in the foot with their cash grab policy changes. I'm sure Godot and others are eating into their market share, but they also made the alternatives look better through their actions.
    • by Luckyo ( 1726890 ) on Monday January 08, 2024 @06:08PM (#64142385)

      At current tempo, Godot will take several years just to get to where Unity was half a decade ago. The actual problem is that Unity's business is B2B, not consumer. While their top brass behind the recent brouhaha was primarily consumer specialists.

      B2B differs from consumer business in large part in that trust between parties is absolutely paramount in B2B, and of low relevance in consumer business. Because there are no consumer protections in B2B. All you have is mutual trust. As a result, consumers forget and forgive. B2B never forgets and takes a lot of effort to forgive. Because risks in B2B are far greater. Mutual trust is the sole thing keeping up the trust in other party upholding its part of the agreement.

      Unity broke the trust in the most fundamental way it could. It went full Darth Vader with "we have altered the deal, pray we don't alter it further". Except that it didn't have the kind of stranglehold needed to have this sort of a negotiation tactic. There are in fact alternative for Unity on the market for new projects. And while they do have a stranglehold on projects where their clients are invested into their engines, this can be severed after project is done.

      And so, businesses that were Unity's clients are now in emergency mode asking not "if" they should drop unity for something else, but "what" they should drop it for. The first stage, decision to drop Unity as the engine for the next new project is already done in many if not most companies that produce more than one project. There's no trust, and therefore there's no ability to do business. Now the only question that remains is what is needed to shift to trustworthy alternatives.

      • by Tyr07 ( 8900565 )

        You know, and I'm kind of okay with this.

        There are have some good unity games but many plagged with performance issues. Really cool creative ideas, but for comparative performance people understand 'Runs better than Java, doesn't run as good as C'.

        Sure, it might have been developers getting used to unity, as even with other well known engines people can make poor performing games, but man oh man did a lot of people with great concepts kick off with unity, and one of the biggest slights for their games was t

        • Recent Unity titles have baked-in telemetry as well.

          • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

            Unity had baked in telemetry for ages. It's started with every instance of a unity game and is a process called "UnityCrashHandler32" or "UnityCrashHandler64" (depending on whether it's a 32 or 64 bit executable). Unlike the name suggests, it runs in the background when you start the game, and attempts to communicate with the server after you close the game, regardless of it crashing or not.

            If your firewall is competent, it will catch these processes, as they're separate from the game executable.

      • At current tempo, Godot will take several years just to get to where Unity was half a decade ago.

        Even if we grant that for the sake of argument, Godot is still a very capable engine for a huge swath of games, both 2D and 3D.

        • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

          No one is saying that it isn't "capable". What is being said is that it's not competitive. Because factually, it's not. Yet. But it did get a massive infusion of funding and the work on making it competitive is ongoing. But it will take a while, just like it took a while for unity to get there.

    • by edwdig ( 47888 )

      Godot isn't a threat because consoles are a huge chunk of the game industry, and a FOSS model doesn't work well with the NDAs requirement for consoles.

      Unity went public not that long ago, and did what a lot of companies do in that situation. Their stock price was very high after the IPO and they used that to their advantage. They used the stock to buy about 26 other companies with the hopes of it creating a faster path to profitability. Now the stock price has come down to a more realistic level, so it's ti

  • Unity was given open-source creed--without being open, free as in freedom--or beer.

    I think that this is a great time to help others by working on Blender's old game engine, or staring a new one.
    [I don't want to think that work on Blender's game engine had anything to do with Unity, but the timing is interesting.]
    • Epic (unreal engine) started becoming a big sponsor of blender. Which makes a great deal of sense when they're selling a game engine. They want other tooling required to be cheap/free to encourage uptake.

      Blender as a 3d modeller is no threat. Blender with integrated game engine was not a serious threat by any means, but why fund a potential competitor? It would have been easy for them to have enough influence to gently push in the direction of ditching it. It was already poorly maintained so easy to justif

  • by BytePusher ( 209961 ) on Monday January 08, 2024 @08:47PM (#64142779) Homepage
    I am just starting game development and I'm using Bevy and not Unity so I can predict my costs.
  • At least TFS (probably TFA) told us who Unity was and a reason why we should care.

  • It is a certainty that the CEO and other top executives are getting nice bonuses for their efforts.
  • These layoffs were already planned -- Unity was just waiting for the holidays to be over so it's not as bad for PR.

news: gotcha

Working...