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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] atoav|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tschellenbach|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wilg|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cyanydeez|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anonymouse008|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amatecha|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] omershapira|2 years ago|reply
• Has the engine improved in any capacity in the past 5 years for your usecase? (IL2CPP is the only example that comes to mind)
• Are workflows faster or more reliable?
• Has any AI tool become available for your projects? Weta Digital tools?
• Have you benefitted in any way from the company's efforts to penetrate the AAA market? I'm talking about DOTS and HDRP primarily.
[+] [-] andoowhy|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jayd16|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] CaptainFever|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] wilg|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TillE|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] willis936|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] __loam|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tracerbulletx|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnnyanmac|2 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] makeitdouble|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] wilg|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fwsgonzo|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rplnt|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mdev23|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EA-3167|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hinkley|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boeingUH60|2 years ago|reply
It’s good to be CEO!
1- https://www.secform4.com/insider-trading/1193857.htm
[+] [-] anigbrowl|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AndrewKemendo|2 years ago|reply
This time it’s even worse, announcing waves of layoffs which keeps everyone scared of their job for months.
Unconscionable but what else would you expect during this period of enshittification and bb&bing
[+] [-] johnnyanmac|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] minimaxir|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hinkley|2 years ago|reply
I don't know which it will end up being, but I can say that I have a bag of microwave popcorn on standby.
[+] [-] afhfah834|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hinkley|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imblacknigger|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] tombert|2 years ago|reply
I think they would be off to a pretty good start just following my career for the last year.
[+] [-] dboreham|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] spacebanana7|2 years ago|reply
Unity would’ve been the most profitable (least loss making) part of Meta reality labs.
Maybe he’d even have open sourced the entire thing and written it off as a marketing expense.
[+] [-] johnnyanmac|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] RomanPushkin|2 years ago|reply