Unity Software to lay off 1,800 employees as part of a corporate restructuring
(www.cnbc.com)
from L4s@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world on 09 Jan 2024 04:00
https://lemmy.world/post/10482189
from L4s@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world on 09 Jan 2024 04:00
https://lemmy.world/post/10482189
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.
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oh no
After what they tried to pull a few months back I have no sympathy.
None for unity, but I have tons for the employees. Company execs made some dumb decision and now they are losing their jobs.
While the execs undoubtedly get additional bonuses and a nice cushy landing when they inevitably bail…
Well they cut costs by 25%! Great job all around!
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.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss
Lol, the CEO fucked each and every one of these people over. Restructuring, my ass.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
So you’re calling for 100% layoffs?
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.
Where?
edit I’m seriously asking. What is extraordinary about this?
edit Also,
What do you think killing a company does to its employees?
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What do you mean?
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.
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.
They’re suggesting regulating corporations properly.
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?
Well, currently you guys in US (and also we in EU in many ways) seem to have two styles of governing corporations: bailouts & less regulation and bailouts & more regulation. I agree that less regulation combined with bailouts is worst of all worlds. We should have no bailouts and as little regulation as possible.
Not that bailouts have anything to do with Unity really, it was just the most immediate thing I remembered that clearly doesn’t work well with less regulation as demonstrated by subprime mortgages in late 2010s for instance.
you do realize that this isn’t an Ayn Rand cosplay convention… right?
the “no bailouts and as little regulation as possible” is a fairy tale, unless you think that bombing the families of striking coal miners was a good thing.
PS: the no bailout/regulation shtick comes from the idea that you somehow are unaffected by the actions of others
Perhaps you should re-read your Ayn Rand or libertarian manifestos if you think anyone in those cliques thinks bombing of anyone is legal. Or perhaps I’m not understanding what you’re referring to. Please enlighten me.
oh, wait until I tell you about the NAP, no bombing anyone that so much as annoys you is completely within their manifesto, let alone strikers.
Ok, I’ll wait.
What kind of regulation that’s currently missing would you have applied in this case?
I’m not the one who suggested regulations. For me, corporations shouldn’t exist at all.
Oh ok, what would you replace them with?
Cooperatives, employee-owned companies, etc.
You know that those things are not illegal in capitalist economies, right? Many even exist.
Yes, so?
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.
Remember this in your gaming decisions, y’all.
most games are made in Unity. Like, more than half and up to 90% depending on platform.
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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.
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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
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.
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.
So punish developers that chose an engine years ago for something they had no control over? How does that help anything?
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.
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Qas last year’s not enough reason?
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.
Yeah, that They are justifying their name by uniting people against them
How long until Godot is a drop in replacement for Unity lol. We need open source to save us from these asshole corps
The time enshittification worsens.
I suspect most developers will go to Unreal rather than Godot.
Unreal isn’t a great option either tbh
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”.
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.
And not one c suite member was fired.
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.
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.
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.
They don’t need a future. They want profit right now. Pump and dump.
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.
It seems like every big game company I apply for turns to shit, sorry guys I’ll stop
First they fuck their customers, then they fuck their employees. Execs are doing a great job, probably gonna give themselves a raise.
damn. I need to be an exec. sounds like they fuck
You’d have to lose your morals
I dont really like mushrooms anyway
Execs don’t lose their morals.
People who become execs never had morals to begin with. It’s not a job you go for because you value people.
Yeah, but this guy I assume does
I’d disagree with that, there are quite a few execs who are doing the right thing. Less so for public traded companies, but even there not every single person is a soulless moneymonger.
Divorce rate amongst CEOs is pretty high. Is it because they aren’t at home much, or are they all walking talking society-collapsing DSM-5 examples?
And then the execs fuck off with their golden parachutes.
The only way that this could be good news, is if the entire c-suite was a part of that 1800.
It’s cute that anyone thinks that would ever happen.
Oh, I don’t think it would, I’m just saying it would be good news if that were the case.