Unity Software to lay off 1,800 employees as part of a corporate restructuring - eviltoast
Unity Software to lay off 1,800 employees, or 25% of staff
www.cnbc.com
Unity Software is slashing about 25% of its workforce just eight months after announcing its prior round of layoffs.

Unity Software to lay off 1,800 employees as part of a corporate restructuring::Unity Software is slashing about 25% of its workforce just eight months after announcing its prior round of layoffs.

    • maxprime@lemmy.mlEnglish
      371·
      10 months ago

      Totally. The classic MBA move of firing important people who’s role he doesn’t understand, seeing short term gains from lack of salaries, and exits the company just in time for it to tank because it can’t operate without those people. Walks away with a few cool million, on to his next company to suck dry.

    • pdxfed@lemmy.worldEnglish
      20·
      10 months ago

      Those stock grants aren’t going to grant themselves son. Literally Lord Farquad. “Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I’m willing to make.”

    • hitmyspot@aussie.zoneEnglish
      2·
      10 months ago

      Yep, and now they will struggle to get new talent and the ones that can will likely leave as they don’t feel safe. I feel sorry for the employees, but this is how it’s supposed to work. Future ceos of other companies might think twice before screwing over customers and other devs.

      So it sucks for their affected, but it should be a net benefit to the industry long term.

  • Muffi@programming.devEnglish
    991·
    10 months ago

    Employees that get fired over dumb-ass CEO decisions should be able to sue the crap out of the company. Let’s make it easier to kill the companies that do this shit.

      • SquishMallow@lemmy.worldEnglish
        652·
        10 months ago

        Ah right. Gotta continue letting them get away with whatever they want or we might hurt the bottom line. This thinking is part of why we’re here.

        • fosforus@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          943·
          10 months ago

          why we’re here.

          Where?

          edit I’m seriously asking. What is extraordinary about this?

          edit Also,

          Let’s make it easier to kill the companies that do this shit.

          What do you think killing a company does to its employees?

          • SquishMallow@lemmy.worldEnglish
            173·
            10 months ago

            In a state where corporatism dominates everything and the reins are minimal. We allow corporate A to get away with more than we deem appropriate for the sake of preserving the bottom line. This gives them leverage to do it again and again or to intensify. It also showcases to corporation B that this abuse is at an apparent acceptable threshold, with room to probably get away with a bit more. It’s an abusive cycle that will continue to demolish the well being of more and more people until proper reins are put in place.

            • fosforus@sopuli.xyzEnglish
              717·
              10 months ago

              What are you suggesting? That corporations shouldn’t hire and fire people or that corporations shouldn’t exist at all? What would replace them?

              Statistical detail: Unity had about 4000 employees in 2020, apparently 7200 before these layoffs. So they’re now going down to 5400, which is roughly their 2021 numbers.

                • fosforus@sopuli.xyzEnglish
                  27·
                  10 months ago

                  What kind of regulation that’s currently missing would you have applied in this case?

                • orrk@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  39·
                  10 months ago

                  what have regulation ever solved? they just make everything more expensive and difficult for the people actually driving progress, unlike you dirty parasite… oh wait, we aren’t in a libertarian Ayn Rand cosplay, are we?

              • SquishMallow@lemmy.worldEnglish
                3·
                10 months ago

                You are correct in that numbers leading into Covid rose dramatically and started to fall off over the last, I wanna say, year and a half or so. Still larger than before. I do not have anything against hiring and firing on a by need basis. However, I do think that’s gone too far in this instance. When you have 15-20k people being let go at multiple organizations, there’s something wrong with the decision process in the first place imo.

  • notannpc@lemmy.worldEnglish
    66·
    10 months ago

    Ah yes, fire 1,800 employees that bring value to the company. Definitely don’t fire the brain dead, overpaid executives that destroyed the companies credibility with a terrible monetization scheme.

  • AgentGrimstone@lemmy.worldEnglish
    59·
    10 months ago

    First they fuck their customers, then they fuck their employees. Execs are doing a great job, probably gonna give themselves a raise.

  • Blackmist@feddit.ukEnglish
    51·
    10 months ago

    Make your customers hate you.

    Make your staff hate you.

    Wow, what a great business plan they have. I’m sure there’s a bright future for them.

    • radix@lemm.eeEnglish
      3·
      10 months ago

      They don’t need a future. They want profit right now. Pump and dump.

  • db2@lemmy.worldEnglish
    494·
    10 months ago

    After what they tried to pull a few months back I have no sympathy.

    • LdyMeow@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      89·
      10 months ago

      None for unity, but I have tons for the employees. Company execs made some dumb decision and now they are losing their jobs.

    • Pacmanlives@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      10 months ago

      New CEO now though. Old CEO fucked Unity hard. Jim is the old RedHat CEO before IBM bought them. He was super well liked there. So I have some faith in him getting things back on track and having a good company culture. Just takes time and unfortunately wrecking ball some times. I speak as someone who has been laid off from corporate restructuring before. I found bigger better things with more pay.

      • TangledHyphae@lemmy.worldEnglish
        14·
        10 months ago

        You mean the whole licensing ordeal? Retroactive type crap? I know a few developers personally that dumped it entirely because of that. Although I heard they backpedaled a little bit on that part because of the backlash, but the damage is done, trust is gone.

  • LazyBane@lemmy.worldEnglish
    312·
    10 months ago

    It’s crazy to think that people are still making new games on Unity after it’s been made painfully obvious that the company is in the corporate downward spiral of enshittification.

    • Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish
      22·
      10 months ago

      I’ve done a little bit of game development and the thing is if you’ve already started you don’t have a lot of choice it takes a huge amount of work to refactor to another engine and to be honest it’s basically the same as just starting again.

      Sure you can reuse a lot of the art assets but depending on how far through production you are, they may not actually you’ve been finalized yet anyway so you’ve basically got nothing you can reuse. People might have decided that since the changes that were announced (the licensing fee only applying to new versions of the engine) it’s worth it for this game and then they can move to another engine for later projects.

  • FrankTheHealer@lemmy.worldEnglish
    24·
    10 months ago

    How long until Godot is a drop in replacement for Unity lol. We need open source to save us from these asshole corps

      • mojofrododojo@lemmy.worldEnglish
        9·
        10 months ago

        I’d hoped to see Unreal grow into a do-it-all engine with as much flexibility as Unity. Instead they’ve focused on extremely high detail (nanite) visuals and have built one hell of an FPS engine with some flexibility. But it’s not a great fit for many applications.

        Godot poses some difficulties with console deployment, but if you look at what Godot’s built in the last 3 years compared to how Unreal or Unity have advanced… I’m pretty stoked about Godot.

        • Blackmist@feddit.ukEnglish
          3·
          10 months ago

          Depends if you value industry standard employee skills, or premium support, or ability to launch on consoles without hiring a third party to port it. Yes, it’s proprietary, but they’re old and reliable, and swimming in so much Fortnite money that you can reasonably expect them to be there for the lifespan of your project.

          If you’re a lone wolf game developer and can’t afford support or salaries for others, then Godot will be just fine. Your business plan is likely just “make a cool game and see how it does”.

  • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.caEnglish
    231·
    10 months ago

    The only way that this could be good news, is if the entire c-suite was a part of that 1800.

      • sebinspace@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        10 months ago

        That’s the same logic as people not tipping because they believe it should be abolished; u til it actually is abolished, you’re only hurting the waiter.

        Like a dickhead.

        • ramirezmike@programming.devEnglish
          51·
          10 months ago

          that link is pretty vague on specifics. It lists unreal first at the top but it’s not clear that it’s sorted by usage or just by their recommendation on what to use. To be frank, I don’t like unity and I’d personally use unreal over it, but I’m just pointing out that unity makes up a lot of games.

          If you scroll down it even says

          The most used game engines in the industry are Unreal Engine and Unity. These engines have a large user base and are widely adopted by game developers.

          Again, without measuring or indicating which is more. This article has some some statistics from steam and itch and admits it’s difficult to count. The results from itch are more trustworthy because of how the data is gathered but you start getting into “what counts as a game”? There’s more information here on usage including that it makes up 90% of games on VR platforms.

          It’s difficult to measure because games aren’t required to publish this information, but depending on what counts as a game (do hobby games released on itch count?) it can be a significant amount.

        • Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish
          31·
          10 months ago

          It definitely isn’t the most used how on earth did you come to that conclusion? It’s increasingly popular definitely and it is a good engine but it’s not the most used.

          Unreal Engine 5 is a relatively new product and Unreal Engine 4 was basically on par with the Unity, so there wasn’t a great reason to use it over unity especially considering the Unity had the developer community behind it. Even now Unity still has more community drop-ins than Unreal.

        • ramirezmike@programming.devEnglish
          10·
          10 months ago

          Sorry if that came off the wrong way, I’m pretty frustrated with Unity myself. I’m just pointing out the difficulty it would be to avoid Unity games. I think donating to other engines and supporting developers who use other engines might help, but Unity is just too engrained in the industry it’ll be years before it actually loses its grip and you’d really just be hurting developers and not Unity by boycotting their games.