Well duh, you always (short term) make more money (short term) when you’re paying fewer employees (short term)! And those (short term) gains will look really good in the future ex-CEO’s resume (and bank account)!
I remember back in all the “controversy” somebody pointed out they have about 5,000 employees. Which is an insane number of employees for a company of their size, so I guess they possibly are making a profit by firing unnecessary stuff?
Not trying to defend in the least bit Unity after their runtime fee debacle, but maybe this is a good first step towards realizing how they can provide their products without screwing over their customers.
I get layoffs suck, but sometimes, companies get a bit bloated out of eagerness to provide a bunch of services and products and need to tone it down a bit.
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What do you mean? Surely any company announcing layoffs will include reductions to executives their pay in the same announcement, proportional to the amount of layoffs. Businesses are ethical and doing otherwise would just make no sense.
I actually asked one of our execs this to their face during fallout of the last firings. I was told most the execs turned down their bonuses so they really are behaving in an ethical way! They have empathy and solidarity! /s
I suspect the real problem is that Unity’s revenues and profitability don’t match whatever targets have been set by it’s investors. Unity Technologies lost $921m last year on revenues of $1.39bn. That’s not a great position to be in for a 19 year old company, and with supposedly 2bn people a month supposedly using a Unity powered game every month.
They’re either earning too little, spending too much or both. They’ve tried to increase income, controversially, and now they’re trying to cut costs. Question really is, can this company actually be profitable or is their business model just fundamentally flawed.
Yeah I get that. But sometimes in the chase for wringing more money out of customers, companies hire a bunch of people in anticipation for the moves they’re making. Then they have to fall back on their decisions and laborers pay in the end like you mentioned.
All I’m saying is better that then them trying to shoehorn in more changes that’ll piss off the game dev community even more and result in even bigger layoffs.
IMO, I hope engines like Godot which I really enjoy eat up some of Unity’s market share. I know this isn’t a popular opinion. Just my observation from working with various companies of different sizes.
Supporting Godot over unity et al. is incredibly popular on the fediverse lol
Hey I work for Unity, I don’t speak for them and have a limited scope of what I can talk about. Imo (no evidence, just feels), this has nothing to do with the customers or saving face. Between 2019 and 2022 Unity went from 2700 to 7700 employees. I think they bit off more than they could chew both hiring people and buying companies, COVID money is drying up across tech, and they’re trying to slam the workforce back inline with pre COVID levels.
This will fuck customers so hard. We’ve had two layoffs already. Morale is shot, this is making it worse, some of the best workers are leaving for more stable work because of it so there is a very real brain drain going on. My department already lost some of our most valuable people in the last few months, we are seriously limited on replacement hires, and the work they did is getting slapped on to the shoulders of like 6 of us as just more work same pay. This is going to happen to every single department in a layoff this big and large chunks of Unity will crumple because of it.
I will say that I actually like this CEO (as much as someone can like a CEO he’s still a rich POS don’t get me wrong). He talks to us like humans and was very up front about layoffs. JR was an indescribably huge dick who never even pretended to be human and both the previous layoffs was like “nah we’re not going to fire anyone” the week before firing people. So I think there is potential for him to help turn things around eventually but right now the company is in free fall and the product will be noticably set back.
Thank you for the insight. The Unity debacle really shot my trust in the product. I hope it bounces back and that your job security returns.
It messed up my trust too I’m learning Godot now lol
