Unity Software plans to reduce its workforce by 25%, eliminating ~1,800 jobs
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Among my acquaintances, they are now actively being avoided as an engine. Their asset store is still helpful, though. And with good open source competition like Stride (shown at GDC and C# + visual editor like Unity), I'm guessing that getting anyone to buy into a financially unpredictable and technically unstable engine like Unity is a very tough sell.
Don't get me wrong, I would rather be working on any other engine.
Unreal is great, but its very heavy, and blueprints - yuck.
The core team at Godot don't understand the needs of developers and it's very buggy. You wouldn't choose it if you don't want to be in the business of fixing bugs in your engine.
Didn't godot start as an in-house engine in a gamedev company?
On the other side Godot does not have this bandwidth so at the moment you have to bring your own engine team for your own needs. And because of that many "unsexy" features are not as good as they could be.
That said, I see a lot of movement and the Fund raised significantly in the last months. And the fact that stuff is open source helped me so much compared to Unity where you might have documentation but the feature just doesn't work and you can't figure out why..
Personally I have no interest in GDScript, but I recently ported a rather large C# code-base from Unity to Godot and I never had to touch GDScript. So it can happily be ignored. In general it took me less time to rewrite the code-base then implementing some of the workarounds for missing features in Unity (e.g. HTTP2) in the first place.
I heard the exact same complaint from plenty of Unity users about Unity though ;)
It will be hard to measure though as the biggest impact over time will be lost growth.
In game development universities there are only three game engines that count, Unity, Unreal, and the one students have to develop during their studies.
Especially if you're an American, and not personally wealthy enough to be able to float the debt for a degree that no one will care about, going to school to learn any kind of software development would be idiotic.
That said, it would probably be best to focus on the most popular game engines just because that experience is more valuable and the community around them more developed, but encouraging vendor lock-in only leads to the normalization of exploitative practices. People should experiment and try new frameworks when they can.
A lot of the people who switched to Godot after Unity's license debacle remained. A lot left for Unity as soon as they started acting reasonable again, and they had a lot of complaints about Godot which have only made the framework better, and more competitive, and Godot will be more attractive to them the next time Unity screws them over, which it now knows it can do. That can only happen if developers take a risk on investing in alternatives.
Despite that, Stride 4.2 launched very recently and (claims to) has full .NET 8 support, so I imagine they will be taking advantage of such features very quickly. That's one of the biggest pluses for me in how quickly they keep up with and commit to being fully .NET compliant.
As for the other points, sure. the marketing wave hasn't hit yet and that wave can be a bit ephemeral. I feel that educational coverage defeats the point on why people would use Stride as of now. Maybe one day that will be important, but it's contingent on the marketing, and part of that will be contingent on people who decide to dive in and make some impressive games with the engine.
People doing that obviously won't have 5 years of Stride experience on their resume, so they have to rely on fundamentals in both software engineering and engine programming to do that.
Where did you get that from? They just got a new CEO who is not as delusional/incompetent/x as the last one?
Even if their revenue keeps growing at 30% YoY these cuts still make perfect sense considering how bloated the company was
If it is in line with some observations I see in the industry, the biggest 'boom' in workforce growth has been in internal facing secondary processes. Especially HR related functions a went through the roof, and general administration and finance had a big push as well. In primary processes most growth was in supporting roles; management, strategy & vision, process control etc., not so much in the actual core technical production roles.
Do your observations match?
Now the economy is contracting and debt is more expensive, so a lot of fat should get trimmed. The tooth-to-tail ratio has to go up again.
However nobody wants to admit that their own job should be cut, so these roles won't just vanish, and these people won't just change careers.
I don't understand this sentence. Jobs are not created by people who want jobs.
https://www.businessinsider.com/rich-people-create-jobs-2013...
I know the idea that you’re trying to infer is more akin to people creating jobs by hiring themselves becoming an inflated workforce being a rather silly idea, but in truth the entire system is just a rather more complicated version of that in many ways.
As much as the ultra-rich like to stand on their large contributions to society via their company accomplishment and present themselves as job creators, truth it the vast majority of jobs are created because of middle class demand and in that very real sense we have jobs because we want jobs.
It won't though, entire limbs will be cut off.
1. they acquired several products during the pandemic. They all added to the headcount.
2. Half of Unity's income is from ads. They have a huge structure for supporting ads on all ends; as support for the devs, towards other businesses in integrating them, towards customers wanting to serve ads, etc.
3. take the above point and keep in mind that Unity is much more global than Unreal. They got to the asian market in particular years before Unreal tried to reach out, and as a result they more or less own the mobile mindshare. you staff balloons very quickly when you aren't just 2 US studios, because every country you support needs some local(-ish) staff to support all of the above.
4. Then from there they expanded into other indutries to pitch the engine. Unreal seems to have beaten them to VFX, but they are trying to get reach into tech like architecture, automotive, and aerospace.
And I haven't even started talking about the actual game engine yet. It becomes clear why they got so large when you realize most of their business isn't focused on core game engine development (which they still do plenty of).
>In primary processes most growth was in supporting roles; management, strategy & vision, process control etc., not so much in the actual core technical production roles.
yeah, definitely. A lot of this expansion I described above is less about engine devs and more about support staff, as well as staff to help steer the increasingly large ship.
total layoffs in 2023 were 1100. headcount at the end of 2023 was 7000.
considering they are removing another 1800 jobs, they are on track on having 0 employees by ~2027.
Even Epic in its entirety still has almost 2x less employees…
Shareholders be happy...but only until the revenue starts crashing.
That’s a massive “aside” though?
Unreal’s royalty is 5%? With the pricing changes Unity’s is 2.5% or as low as 0.N% if you go with the instal fees.
If each of your developers cost 100-200k or more per year the $2000 yearly license fee is not such a big deal. So for commercial games with at least a few people working on the full-time (and especially if the team is much larger) Unity would still be considerably cheaper than Unreal..
The problem is how arbitrary and uneven their pricing model is. Some users might end up paying considerably more than 5% and some less than 0.5% (even when subscription fee is included).
Unreal also has $1,500 per seat/year subscription option if you want actual customer support (IDK how comparable this is what Unity is offering but that’s another matter).
Sure, royalties can outweigh your per dev costs or cursed “install fees”. But that is contingent on achieving massive success. So shrug. It’s a very fair model imo. Not that per seat fees aren’t also fair.
The driving criteria is really not the fees here but the capabilities of the engine and the familiarity of the team. Or, perhaps, the concern that Unity appears to be an ever growing dumpster fire and possibly even malicious business partner.
Laughing a bit at your $200k game devs for an indie studio.
I’m mostly talking about larger studios with at least 15-20+ people (which isn’t even necessarily that many, the mobile freemium shovelware market is huge).
> massive success.
It’s not though. 1 million is really not a lot (I’m of course not talking about small indie/hobbyist developers that’s an entirely different segment).
Also as bizarre as that whole pricing model debacle was in certain cases they actually made the engine cheaper: - revenue limit is now per project and 200k instead of 200k (so it’s totally free bellow that/no install fees/no subscription) - no more mandatory splash screen
The royalty/install only kicks in after 1 mil revenue AND 1 mil users anyway. Also for non free games the install fee can be extremely low:
e.g. your game sells for $20 on average and you sell 12,500 per month you’ll only end up paying about $1350 or 0.54%. On a yearly basis that’s extremely cheap compared to Unreal.
> Unity appears to be an ever growing dumpster fire
Yeah, that’s another matter. I certainly am not a huge fun of many aspects of the engine and especially their overall approach constantly shipping new half finished/broken features abandoning them and then replacing with something eve more broken in a couple of years…
That said it’s still a relatively decent product for certain uses and still massively ahead of any alternatives (including Unreal and Godot) in some segments.
> Laughing a bit at your $200k game devs for an indie studio.
I was certainly not thinking about indie developers. Although while indie is a pretty broad term, $100-200k (overall cost per employee) is certainly not at all unreasonable even for more serious indie studios that are actually making money and are in the US (probably even on the low end, I really doubt you could get a fulltime developer for 100k (salary + taxes + overhead even in the current market..)
Plus 40k per year for the 20 devs that you face even if you don’t ship.
But sure, unreal is a bad choice for shovelware and garbage mobile games.
Sure, but that not a significant amount compared to all the other costs
> But sure, unreal is a bad choice for shovelware and garbage mobile games.
Well it’s a had choice for almost all mobile games (it just happens that most of them are shovelware regardless of the engine)
> Heck at free/open source you’re paying Unreal nothing and Unity a flat rate so then it’s infinite percent of your revenue
Unless you’re making < $200k then Unity is entirely free (and the mandatory splash screen is not a thing anymore). So really this only applies if your revenue is between 200k and 1 million (which is certainly not an insignificant proportion of the market but yeah it’s really not that clear cut and depends on your situation, also there is a lot more uncertainty in Unity’s case..).
> A higher but predictable percentage of sales can be appealing compared to that.
Well again the current model is basically identical to Unreal (besides the per seat license) just considerably cheaper.
Of course the real issue is that they believed that they could actually pull that off in the first place and the trust issue stemming from that. At least they got rod off Riccitelo but AFAIK most the of remaining (extremely incompetent) upper management team is still there..
True. But I wasn’t really talking about indies (or not only them anyway).
Also the Unity fee/royalty thing doesn’t kick in below 1 million $ AND users, and above that is somewhere between 0.1% and 2.5% depending on your revenue per user (and also is likely negotiable).
If they bumped that old plan to like, $10m Dollars there would have been a lot less outrage. The AAA studios might have revolted but more behind closed doors, as usual.
Yeah. But realistically nobody would have paid that much since it would have been cheaper to just update to pro to increase the cap to 1 mill
The funniest thing is that you couldn’t even use Personal if your revenue was above $200k before the price changes in theory there wasn’t a single developer who would have pay the 0.2$ fee per install it at the time of the announcement.. yet it was the source of most of terrible headlines.
it was such an absurd idea for them to even include it (instead of sticking with the 200k cap as they ended up doing afterwards).
More discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38918643
Imo they always needed a revenue share, the license model wasn't enough. I believe epic charges 5% for unreal, so it's hardly unheard of. Though doing it retroactively would also be unacceptable.
Unity have never been serious competition outside of being easier to pickup for indie developers. Trying to compete with Unreal was their mistake.
Okay. Any suggestion for how unity could have avoided losing hundreds of millions of dollars?
They're a game engine they naturally compete with unreal.
I dont think it's our job to solve unity's financial problems, but I am feeling generous this morning so here is some pro bono financial advice:
Stop adding so much unstable eye candy to unity and focus on the stuff that most devs actually use.
Some devs moved to competitors not because of money, but because the editors ridicules startup time and how buggy it was. Thats a pretty good sign of bloat, dont you think?
In retrospect the acquisitions were a huge mistake, but that was when the whole industry was operating off of "corner the market first" mentality. That ended suddenly and caused all the tech layoffs of 2023. Hindsight is 20:20, but this was an industry problem, not a unity problem. Tech as a whole needed to shift away from promising explosive growth, but with the AI craze we are still far from doing that.
But I guess not that many noticed this after the initial outcry