A pattern I've observed at international companies who have done multiple layoffs in the past 12 months is that the European offices are rarely hit hard in wave 1 due to the additional statutory protections in many European countries.
However, that seems to fire the starting gun on the preparations needed to then carry out layoffs that require longer statutory processes in Europe, which then get included in the second or future wave of layoffs. Meta for example appeared to follow this pattern, and I've heard as much from people with direct knowledge of events.
Off the charts? Compared to completely at will maybe. You generally have to pay 3 months severance + 1 month per 3 years of employment for a maximum of 6 months severance after 9 years of employment. That's it.
True, but what I noticed is that in many of these countries you can't just start layoffs whenever.
Frequently you need to have consultations with unions or staff representatives, present an actual business plan for the layoffs and why people can't be reconverted.
That hits the breaks on any impulsive layoffs and it adds another buffer of a bunch of months.
I heard that it's relatively easy to fire people in Denmark, at least compared to the rest of Europe. Once fired, they fall into the arms of a generous social safety net, so getting fired is not as harmful as it is in other countries.
In what way? Here in Sweden most fired employees gets a couple of monthly salaries. It won't stop them from shutting down a full office. The union can go on strike but seems rather pointless if they are shutting down anyway.
Unity is a broken company that sells a critically broken engine.
Sure, it's a great engine for rapid prototyping & releasing indie titles, but not great for getting to the finish line. I know of teams that have had to take out source licenses and edit the engine to fix & work around bugs so they could actually ship their game.
Unity also don't build and release with their engine, like Epic does with Unreal & Fortnite, or Valve does with their games. And, when they tried to finish a whole game self-produced in-house, Gigaya, it was too hard for them to complete with their own engine. https://forum.unity.com/threads/introducing-gigaya-unitys-up...
> It served its purpose as a source of product feedback during its active development and will continue to provide value as an internal resource. Any further learnings would have been minimal during the additional required time to get it to the finish line and would have been disproportionate to the necessary investment. Gigaya was conceptualized as an internal production to generate first-hand product feedback, as well as a learning resource for our users. To release it as a sample project would have required a thorough cleanup and optimizations in its current stage.
Do you really think Unity will get better if Unity can't release a game and support its whole release lifecycle from production, release, ongoing support, and next console generation uprevs? Heck no.
When I pick an engine for my next project, it's going to be Godot or perhaps Unreal, not Unity.
You perfectly described how Unity makes their money:
When your game is 95% finished, you stumble onto Unity Engine bugs that you can't circumvent in C# so now you need to purchase their extremely pricey source code access.
Just pointing out here that one of the most profitable video games in history is made in Unity (Genshin Impact) as is its followup, Honkai Star Rails.
Other big games made in Unity: Fall Guys, Cuphead, Hollow Knight, Amplitude's Endless games, The Ori series, Tunic, Pokemon Go, Pillars of Eternity, Kerbal Space Program, Rimworld. This list doesn't include the many mobile games made in Unity, where it is by far the leading game engine.
Major games with Unreal: a lot, it owns the AAA space for games using third-party engines.
Hollow Knight is not a unity in-house game, it is a 3rd party studio. I did not say that Unity is not capable of great titles.
Unreal is the opposite end of the difficulty curve: where Unity is great for rapid prototyping but terrible for deployment, Unreal is terrible for prototyping and project bring up, but most of your problems for deployment are front-loaded.
Godot is certainly...maturing. It's not without its flaws. I help ship a very widely-used project with it (with a team of 3-5 actual 3D devs that work with Godot) that has many build targets—perhaps one of the biggest Godot projects in production—and I've definitely made cynical comments about it before on this very website. But as we're now in an era of Godot 4, I sincerely think that Godot—because it's built by people who deeply care about shipping great games and tools to build those games with as their P1—will wind up being far more successful than Unity in time. (At least, when compared to Unity's current trajectory and tools, compared to Godot's current trajectory.)
Your central claim: "a critically broken engine" is overstated. Poorly made, maybe. But lots of teams are shipping games with Unity: Hollow Knight and Cult of the Lamb are massive sellers demonstrating Unity clearly can work.
It really could use more commercial success stories to validate it though. Cassette Beasts is very impressive, but there need to be a lot more to give confidence to teams to switch over.
It's not as mature as other platforms, but it's built extremely well from the base up. Unity has a huge ecosystem and tools, but it's built on a shitty/messy platform full of bugs and hacks.
If I was to make a quick & simple 2d or mobile game today, I'd go with Unity. If you want to make something that will require more effort, but work well for years, Godot is better.
I definitely recommend GDScript, especially if you are using Godot 4 / GDScript 2. The language was designed to be used in Godot to make games, and in my opinion it’s very good at that. The editor integration is great, defining export variables for the inspector, adding doc comments that show up in the built in help viewer, dragging nodes and files into your script to get their onready and preload paths, etc… It’s just really nice to use, and takes literally a day to become proficient.
Yeah, I recently looked at setting up some C# dev for Godot 4 and I found documentation scarce. Conversely, GDScript was much better catered for, even allowing for the fact that the documentation isn't all there for Godot 4 yet
>when they tried to finish a whole game self-produced in-house, Gigaya, it was too hard for them to complete with their own engine.
I'll correct this statement and say that the dev team was perfectly confident working and eventually deplying Gigaya, and it did in fact help discover some bugs and features that went into the roadmap for the engine.
It's just that management suddenly laid off most of the team and diverted the rest elsewhere. There was no one left to work on the project. I assure you those decisions were not ones made by engineers nor artists due to a lack of confidence. Simply another victim of the coporate churn.
Things are going very well to Epic. Exclusive games like Gears of War, Redfall and the next Halo are adopting their engine (I'm not sure if it tells more about Microsoft incompetence or Unreal's virtues).
One of the issues with triple A game dev is that it's hard. No matter what engine you choose. Unity is hard with your hands tied behind your back but UE is also very difficult to get a technically well done game at 60 FPS if you don't have the experience and ability on your team AND management. Some people have been sold the BS that you if you use UE your technical problems are solved and then 1000 blueprints later you are in hot water as you approach ship.
Redfall has been a complete critical failure and the last mainline Gears of War title is from 2019 (and this is a franchise that’s owned by Microsoft - I’m not sure what you mean by “exclusive”). These aren’t particularly good examples.
Cool, sell your soul to a corporation that literally exploits minors [1][3]. Of course they can afford to pay Silicon Valley salaries, given that most of the game development is done by sub-subcontracted child labour [2].
I think Roblox’s business model is similar to that of sweatshops’ in a sense that they’re enabling minors to earn money when there are no better alternatives. Is that truly a bad thing? From westerner’s perspective, a sweatshop might be an exploitation but for the workers’ perspective it’s the best opportunity available to them.
"I want to work in this field because I am passionate about it" is always a license for employers to exploit their workers. Video gaming, fashion, entertainment, even social service – all new entrants into such careers quickly get a dose of reality about how glamorous they actually are on the inside.
My advice to smart CS students looking for jobs always is – find a nice company that makes business software. The more boring the job, the better your salary and work-life balance will be. You can work on your passions on the side.
> My advice to smart CS students looking for jobs always is – find a nice company that makes business software. The more boring the job, the better your salary and work-life balance will be. You can work on your passions on the side.
I’m a father of a then-little girl who was molested by one of her 2nd grade classmates. What came out of the safety investigation, the boy who molested her was taught that behavior through unmoderated sexually oriented user generated content on Roblox. I am stunned to see you recommending people should actually work for this groomers cesspool, with said content persisting to this day. The only reason I can imagine is you work there. And if you do, then fucking do something about it.
This had grave consequences for my daughter, the trauma, the PTSD, and a year of therapy.
Anything where you let kids talk to each other will have that problem. Roblox does have various parental controls. Also, Roblox has an ESRB rating of E10+ rating, meaning users need to be at least 10 years old. What's a second grader doing on there?
> I am stunned to see you recommending people should actually work for this groomers cesspool,
It's about as much a groomer's cesspool as Discord, Twitter, Reddit, or any other social media.
I feel this is a problem with parenting more than the tool. If it wasn't roblox it would have been any other website on the internet. Should we ban the internet for kids under 13? Maybe, but banning something from kids never kept some from getting access.
The evidence is astounding and the reaction to the evidence of the Roblox Corporation is horrifying.
It's more ethical to work in land mine manufacturing than at the Roblox Corporation.
I'm surprised the malware origins weren't scrutinized more in the press when the deal was announced. Ultimately it seems like the Unity CEO was trying to buy his way to profitability, without realizing that the two companies were a total culture clash.
No lol, I don't mean for every $1 they do in revenue they have $0.66 in costs, I mean for every $1 they do in revenue they're spending $1.66 and losing $0.66.
These kind of numbers might be okay if they were a new startup growing sales 100%+ YoY, but they've been around since 2005 and have a mediocre growth rate of about 25-30%. There's just no excuse for this level of mismanagement.
Unreal and Godot seem to be doing a number on Unity from both ends. The higher end of the industry is going Unreal while the indie games and hobbyist are going Godot. I imagine this is also why Epic is a Godot donor.
Have there been any well-known games made in Godot yet? When I started with my first proper game which was released a few months ago I went with Unity because I couldn't find any successful examples and the knowledgebase was lacking in comparison with Unity.
Depends how you define well-known. The Godot showcase lists some of the popular ones: https://godotengine.org/showcase/. I believe Dome Keeper did $1m+ in sales with a 2-person team and I assume Brotato and Cruelty Squad are probably in 7 figures as well. So far, the hits have definitely been on the smaller side, but I expect things will change with Godot 4 being released. Another big factor is that most of the games released so far have been developed by tiny teams.
Apparently it was a remastered version, Sonic Colors: Ultimate - It's interesting this came out on the Switch since I'm pretty sure there is no official Switch support in Godot.
I don't hear of smaller local shops doing mass layoffs like this. It seems the companies that paid more than local average and overextended themselves during the pandemic are the ones most affected by layoffs.
My guess is they are cutting glut, realizing that the free money times are over and not that there's fundamental issues (apart from relying on free money too much of course). I'm a bit nervous about them turning profitable eventually but there's enough technical merit and niche that they should. I remember they grew headcount by a lot but maybe I'm misremembering. Maybe this sounds a bit cynical but 8% actually feels low.
I only have so much time and it's all hobby projects but my heuristic is "multiplatform, 2d focus -> Unity; 3d -> Unreal". The two "big ones" seem to have interesting enough niches carved out (Unreal is also big in the simulation area and in movies). Sadly I haven't had the chance to try Godot or any other engine really.
Greedily overhired because "money is free" and now cutting down to a workforce size that actually represents what they need (as opposed to forced to cut people even though they would provide value due to severe cash flow issues).
How will they pay their bills by contributing to godot? Would be interesting if it had a paid marketplace and some of the devs could start writing extensions for godot. That would make the engine more popular as well.
I know of several Godot asset stores, at least one significant community-supported extension on GitHub, and a company that sells tutorials and example resources. The ecosystem seems to be growing.
I would hope people just go back to writing engines from scratch. It's really not that hard and unlocks being able to do unique non cookie cutter things which in the end games are supposed to contain.
Writing your own engine requires a far stronger knowledge of math, rendering, audio, and networking (just to start with) than the median dev has, probably by a few orders of magnitude.
If you want to build the next Call of Duty, sure. Engines like Unity and Unreal promise to aspiring gamedevs that they can build the next COD. The reality is that most aspiring gamedevs won’t ship a game, partly because the tooling is orders of magnitude more complex than a simple rendering library, and because their aspirations to create the next COD is orders of magnitude more complex than building the next Celeste.
Rendering libraries like Monogame hit a sweet spot of shielding the developer from most of the complex rendering maths, while being general enough to allow you structure your code how you like. Simple rendering libraries are a much harder sell though because a capabilities video demonstrating rotating sprites and blend modes doesn’t seem as enticing as Quixel scanned environments or Dynamically globally illuminated assets.
> The reality is that most aspiring gamedevs won’t ship a game, partly because the tooling is orders of magnitude more complex than a simple rendering library, and because their aspirations to create the next COD is orders of magnitude more complex than building the next Celeste.
If I wanted to build the next celeste, sure. But Even if I did I don't have the brand recognition to sell as well as celeste.
I want to make a 3D game anyway, so that's big enough reason to let an engine do the heavy work.
Sure but learning a framework like unity or godot is it's own massive investment (which can be taken away from you ala this article), and doing game dev isn't a part time job you do so if you're gonna spend your life on it better just learn that stuff anyway.
If you're making a small 2D game and are willing to make some tools for artists, then sure. You can get away with slapping together a few frameworks. But we are far past the days where you can make some decent 3D game at scale from scratch, unless you yourself are some unicorn of a "full stack" graphics engineer.
If you're willing to go for graphics as good as minecraft (best selling game of all time mind you, even in 2023) it's just as feasible as in 2011, in fact it's a lot easier (and hardware a lot more forgiving). People care much less about graphics and much more about gameplay, and building things from scratch makes making unique experiences much more feasible.
How much does/did Unity charge for the top games that use their engine? How else do they generate revenue (and profit)? How do they compete with Unreal? Is Unreal more successful of the two?
The thing with Unreal is that it doesn’t really even have to be very profitable. Epic would need a game engine of their own anyway. As long as their own games that use it make money, everything else is just extra gravy.
Unity’s only revenue streams are their game engine and their advertising platform.
That's not correct. They don't even mention the asset store in their annual reports or shareholder letters any more, but in 2020 the Asset Store revenue was part of a category that was less than 8% of revenue. Their main revenue drivers are their ad solutions and engine licensing for large studios.
That was news for me, too. I thought they were a much smaller operation. I always thought I was rooting for the underdog vs Unreal, but apparently they're the giant.
Their largest business is largely mobile ads in mobile games, as I understand it, and has been for a while. As a business, they haven't really competed all that effectively with Unreal for AA/AAA games. If you like ads in mobile games, root away!
I want to love Unity, but as a low-level and backend developer I find it incredibly frustrating to use.
I deal mostly with automations, so rarely do things directly anymore. I'm always thinking in terms of: how can I record this and play it back, can I get at the underlying data structures (hopefully standard like JSON or CSV), can I do multi-file search and replace with shell tools like grep using regexes, can I exercise the thing with a different tool like curl instead of a GUI, etc etc etc. So when I have to do something more than once, I often copy the text into something like BBEdit and run text filters on each line or use rectangular select on tabular data or format it as TSV (tab separated values) to copy/paste data into spreadsheets.
But in Unity, I have to do everything the bare hands way with cookie cutter tools. I realize that's by design, but please, give experienced developers the means to access the underlying data structures so they can automate their work.
For example, I was setting up the controller button mappings for my VR rig. At first it was great, until I tried to copy and paste rows in their GUI and found that it didn't work. I get tripped up constantly by the simplest tasks because Unity evidently doesn't run its GUIs by new users, the way that Apple might when they're designing a new interface.
And then there's missing functionality in their standard libraries. For example, the GL_LINES primitive from OpenGL is simply missing, and there's no metaphor that replaces lines within their renderers. This isn't really their fault, since such basic functionality has been stripped from the underlying drivers on most platforms. Instead, they provide an over-engineered line mesh tool, which is fine, but many orders of magnitude slower, and we can't just use it as a shader on an existing model.
There's no separate stop button. It doesn't save what I do in play mode automatically, or even ask me whether to make some of the edits I've made permanent. Their version control tool is atrociously bad compared to standard ones like git. The shader graph GUI runs many thousands of times slower than it should (unusable on my daily driver Mac Mini, I have to bust out the gaming PC).
Times everything. A beginner mind outside of the Unity ecosystem sees these hindrances immediately. But experienced Unity users become blind to them. My very good programmer friend thinks I'm simply crazy and using it wrong. But see, that's his answer for everything. To criticize me instead of to consider ways that the tools could be improved. Which is the antithesis of computer programming (in fairness, he's much more of an artist or craftsman than an engineer like me).
Then I run into problems with their opinionated stances like composition over inheritance. Or various friction in C# that I never hit in languages like PHP that I chose specifically to avoid the manual management of C++-inspired languages. Which is its own can of worms, because developers cling to advantages that suit them rather than seeing the advantages that other paradigms could bring. Again, this is very anti-programming in my book.
So my advice to Unity would be to take a year and stop chasing Unreal. Implement the low-hanging fruit. Fix the bugs. Update the documentation. Consider allowing a large list of languages, especially Javascript/Lua/Python. But I think that the odds of any of this happening are so low that I regret taking the time to write this comment.
It was an excellently timed IPO because the insiders’ lockups expired in 2021 while the stock was above $100.
I know someone who had >$5M worth of Unity stock (employee grants). He sold it all in 2021. Had the IPO happened a year later, his stock would have been worth 80% less.
I’m assuming a lot of these Unity insiders sold. Fortunately genius fund managers like ARK’s Cathie Wood were buying hand over fist.
Didn't PE guys or some one buy Unity. With high interest rates you get reality into business models and squeezing efficiency. I do not know but the next decade does not look like workers' paradise like some have envisioned.
Unity is a public company since September 2020. They did merge last year with a mobile adtech company called IronSource (which had also been public but became a part of Unity).
The only way workers get any say over corporate decisions about things like compensation, layoffs, stock buybacks etc. within the investment capitalism model is if they are organized and control voting seats on the corporate board.
Don't worry, implementing this as the standard in the USA will not result in "Marxist Communism" - it's the norm in Germany today, e.g. VW is controlled by a 20-seat supervisory board where unions control half the votes. The result is neither a shareholder's nor a worker's paradise, but a reasonable compromise.
It really depends on the specific union and what they push for in negotiations. Some unions will prioritize layoff preventing policies that make layoffs a less desirable option for a business. At the very least, a union will probably get you a better severance package than you would get out of a company with no union. And if severance is more expensive, it shifts the economic incentives and might make a company more hesitant to lay people off.
Thanks for sharing this update. It's always sad to hear about layoffs, but it's important to stay informed about what's happening in the industry. I hope those affected by the layoffs are able to find new opportunities soon. Unity is a great company and I'm sure they'll come out of this stronger.
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/unity-lays-off-hundreds-more-c...
No info on which offices might be at risk.