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.
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
No, there is a major difference in the number of people that would work at the company and how much they would be paid. More people aren’t always better for the company, especially in a bloated and unfocused company like Unity.
Pandemic happened, people bought more games, Unity got more money right before an IPO. They IPO'd pretty dang high as a result (debuted at $60 or so, peaked at $200).
So of course they capitalize on that by trying to expand into other ventures. There's only so much money to make by focusing only on games, and around this time Unreal was making huge ventures into the VFX market. Unity still invested a lot more and expanded on games and VFX as well, but you can still see on their sites a few of the many other ventures they dove into:
And on top of all that they aquired quite a few things in the process. Ziva, Parsec, and ofc a big stake in Weta's own tech. Then right before the fall started that had that whole merger-aquisition thing with Ironsource.
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It's a practice many US companies employ, and while they may not "anticipate" this, they have an easy solution: layoffs. They don't see these layoffs as a failure (maybe the PR hit from the ad price changes, but not the layoffs), just an easy business strategy once it is no longer convenient to keep growing.
And again, they aren't punished. Almost everytime a layoff happens in tech the stocks rise a bit. They jumped 3% from this announcement. Investors don't see this as a badly managed company move that shakes faith in the product. Just "oh they gonna make for a better earnings call, better invest!". There's no shame in this stuff where there should be (and there is in some EU countries and most of Asia. You can't just layoff 25% of your staff at the tip of your hat in those countries).
I’ve been through enough layoffs to know that the effectiveness of the laid off employees is very rarely factored into the decision of who to get rid of.
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.
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?
Tl;Dr: in the past, if you hired developers and made no money, you could choose to either classify that work as R&D or Maintenance.
From a business perspective it matters because R&D gets written off until it becomes profitable, but maintenance is for long-term on software that's in production, so you amortized the maintenance over 5 years if you see it that way, if you're making money now, but you wouldn't amortize the R&D because it isn't making money and that's just a way to get yourself a big tax bill with no way to pay it. It was an option. No longer, all one bucket now.
I'm probably oversimplifying but today, with the S174 updates in effect, you don't have this choice. If it's classified as either, it gets amortized over 5 years, unless it's developed outside of the country then it's 15. Either way it's a massive tax bill because you had to have revenue to pay the devs and that revenue gets taxed in the first year now, where you could have written it off before all this.
This leaves very little room for speculative investments in R&D that were actually quite incentivized before S174.
We called it an investment and showed no profit, paid no taxes (except for the payroll taxes, social security taxes, all the other taxes which you obviously still can't avoid through paying employees in whatever locality they are working based out of...)
So the net effect of S174 is (we seem to be observing) that organizations with large developer footprints are now figuring this out a bit too late and laying off some or all of that staff pool to try to dig themselves out of this before it's really too late. You can't invest in research unless it's gonna pay off this year or you have some sort of money tree to use to pay for it and pay taxes on it. That makes it hard to see as an investment unless you are able to become profitable today.
The worst part is nobody seems to get it in the food chain. My (former) boss is barely aware of this issue, my CEO hasn't brought it up, but I am laid off and all my coworkers are. We are nearly all software developers. I have to assume it's related, until I can find another software developer job that isn't going through the same thing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
Sure, but a lot of studios still maintain and upgrade bespoke game engines to ship projects.
All it would really take is a company of decent scale deciding they want to base their engine around Godot and having an appetite to upstream some meaningful work.
>and having an appetite to upstream some meaningful work.
That's the part that probably won't happen, unfortunately. Not without specific contracting. Blind Squirrel (the devs behind the botched Sonic Colors remaster) didn't even credit Godot as an engine it based it's proprietary engine off of.
Competition drives innovation. See Clang and GCC. GCC, if what I've read briefly is correct, was languishing a bit until Clang came along and pushes GCC to improve.
Big If. But even still, the most important factor for large studios is support: especially tailored dedicated support for AAA production. And I don't know if Godot can ever compete in that regard without living long enough to become the villian.
Yeah, this isn't just a games thing but a big company anything thing. Labor is the biggest expense, and if you can delegate that to someone else's payroll as a 3rd party to maintain, everyone wins (except possibly the worker if it turns into some exploited contractor role).
Also, I know most people think of console when they hear "AAA", but Unity rules the mobile space and that platform makes just as much money as consoles/pc these days. So when I say 'AAA" studios, I'm talking less about Blizzard and more about King, Zynga, and the like. It's especially true in Asia with Netmarble, Nexon, and Tencent (although a few more games these days are looking at Unreal even on mobile). They want support not just for development and maintaince, but to setup and scale up servers,
1. I wouldn't call Candy Crush "indie" either, so I'm not sure what in your mind is "opposite of AAA". It is still a game owned by what is considered a AAA studio with AAA level of funding (P.S. I don't think Candy Crush is made in Unity, but an easy example of "small looking game that has a bunch of labor put into it"). Same with Zynga (owned by Take Two) and Popcap (owned by EA).
2. I simply used AAA in the traditional means of "how much budget does the game have?". Desptie the presentation, these mobile games do have hundreds working on them, and have millions in development and even more in marketing. At that scale, you very much want to delegate out support if possible. And that's where Unity comes in.
And with games like Genshin Impact (Made in Unity, but with some asterisks on how Unity China is structured), the term will only get muddier as a certain slice of mobile games blur more into the console/PC market.
>If you read my text above, you will see why this approach is not wanted. It's fantastic for AAA games, but Godot being a general purpose game engine has different requirements.
That does seem to exemplify what the GP means in terms of trying to aim for performance. I am not at all reassured of "CPU driven renderer is very performant" mentioned in the same post I'm reading. I'm sure these days you can run 90% of 2D games on the CPU with zero issue (outside of maybe not having a potato for a minspec if you utilize heavy VFX), but that sounds like a recipe for performance issues on anything more than the most simple 3D games.
Comments from the founder here happened consistently over the years and is part of why I decided to pursue another open source engine instead in the end, as someone looking to make a medium-scale 3D game.
I don't mean this as a slight to Godot; it is in fact much better to focus on one audience than be a swiss army knife, and I'm sure many game devs are right at home in Godot. But I can't help but admit that these rigid responses of "this way is good, you're wrong" instead of "this way is a compromise to provide design convenience over raw performance" rubs me the wrong way.
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?
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).
> 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.
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).
I am assuming that the comment I was responding to was making that assumption and was dismissing the thought - I may have misread it and he instead was questioning what percentage of the layoffs were programmers instead.
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.
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.
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].
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
