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Unity Software to lay off 1,800 employees, or 25% of staff (www.cnbc.com)

submitted 10 months ago by askat@programming.dev to c/gamedev@programming.dev

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Unity Software said Monday that it would lay off about 1,800 employees, or 25% of its overall workforce, as part of a corporate restructuring plan.
The company said it is unable to “reasonably estimate the costs and charges in connection with this reduction, which it expects will be substantially incurred in the first quarter of 2024.”
In October, John Riccitiello retired as Unity’s CEO, while former Red Hat CEO James Whitehurst became interim CEO.

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[–] bigboopballs@hexbear.net 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I wonder what those 7700 employees do

[–] porgamrer@programming.dev 2 points 10 months ago

Game engines had a lot of growth speculation for the past decade. There were a lot of harebrained ideas about how game engine tech could disrupt loads of existing industries and provide the foundations for various new ones. e.g.

VFX studio offline rendering going to be replaced with modern game engine rendering any day now!
AR is about to take off and revolutionise every industry at any moment, if only someone can render the overlays!
The VR metaverse is here, and millennials love renting so much they are going to rent virtual flats and use unity to look at them!
The military will be desperate to spend their infinite budget on using unity to simulate warzones or something!
Wow Roblox found an amazing loophole for monetising child labour using a game engine. Let's steal their idea and scale it up!

And so on.

For every idiot idea there is some large R&D team full of poorly-managed developers desperately trying to apply unity's completely unsuitable technology to a problem it can't solve, on the off chance that one of them turns into a money printer. There's also probably a bunch of marketing people, sales people and suits trying to get past regulatory barriers, etc.

Whenever reality hits on one of these hype bubbles, a lot of people get fired. It just happened to VFX, for example.