When your money grubbing tactics fall through the floor, the only thing left to do is to start chopping off limbs to survive.
Unity Software are preparing a largescale reduction of its workforce, with plans to lay off around 1800 employees. This decision is a crucial element of the company’s organizational restructuring, aligning with a strategic focus on its “core business.”
The Unity saga has been a spectacle to behold for those interested in games as a whole from a design standpoint or those who aspire to develop their own experience as a hobby, with the company essentially throwing their reputation down the drain as the company attempted and failed to incorporate an install-based business model.
Unity managed to piss off just about everyone in the indie developmental scene with their predatory runtime fee that was no doubt targeting prolific live service mobile games built on the Unity game engine, eventually backtracking after immense ridicule to a revised runtime model for LTS 2024 and beyond, but the damage was clearly done.
Indie developers no longer trust Unity, with lots of small time developers switching focus from the Unity engine to alternatives such as the Unreal Engine or the rise of Godot as witnessed with Road to Vostok switching from Unity to Godot.
Unity Software have killed their corporate reputation, they’re immensely behind the likes of Epic Games in terms of providing a feature rich game engine for customers, as mainstream development will undoubtedly switch entirely from leveraging Unity moving forward they’re left in a dire position financially.
Which is why they began laying off staff, with 265 employees getting the axe back in November.
And now they’re laying off another 1800 employees, roughly 25% of their total staff. Which just goes to show how Unity Software as a whole like every other corporation that delves into the video game industry are incredibly bloated and are hemorrhaging funds.
The planned layoffs are set to take effect in the first quarter of 2024. As reported by Reuters, an internal document from Unity Technologies, shared by interim CEO Jim Whitehurst, has conveyed analogous policies to the company’s staff.
The document underscores the company’s commitment to downsizing various ongoing ventures and refocusing on its core business. Notably, this round of layoffs is reported to be the largest in the company’s history.
I genuinely doubt that such severe layoffs are going to be the last time we see Unity purge itself to maintain profitability, the company as a whole is effectively a walking corpse at this point as the Unity engine falls behind the competition on a technological standpoint, with the runtime fee coming into account with LTS 2024 onwards there’s genuinely no reason any developer both big and small would continue to use Unity outside of convenience of asset flops as it’s quite possibly the easiest engine to build upon straight out of a udemy course.
