A year after laying off 25% of its workforce in what it called "a company reset," engine maker Unity has reportedly put even more people out of work. The layoffs were reported by multiple Unity employees on LinkedIn (via Game Developer) and while the number of people let go is currently unknown, a post on the Unity forums says the entire team responsible for Unity Behavior, a tool used to develop and control the behaviors of NPCs in videogames, has been let go.
The latest round of layoffs at Unity seem to have come as a surprise to at least some impacted employees: One wrote in LinkedIn that the cuts were "totally unexpected," while another wrote that he "didn't expect it to happen so suddenly." A third employee said he was notified of the layoffs by "a 5 am email from 'noreply@unity' informing me that my role was being 'eliminated' and that I’d lose system access by the end of the day."
Unity is a popular and widely used game engine, but the past few years have not been good for the company or the people who work for it. It's closed offices and laid off hundreds of employees in multiple rounds of cuts, all while self-inflicting wounds by calling developers who don't focus on monetization "fucking idiots" and imposing a wildly unpopular installation fee in 2023. The blowback was fierce enough that then-CEO John Riccitiello (yes, the former EA guy) stepped down in October 2023, but just a month later interim CEO James M. Whitehurst said Unity needed to be "leaner [and] more agile," and sure enough deeper cuts followed in January 2024, when 25% of the company's workforce—roughly 1,800 people—were let go.
In an internal email obtained by 80.lv, current Unity CEO Matthew Bromberg said the company is "currently stretched across too many products, creating complexity and limiting impact."
"Historically, we’ve engaged in extended debates about what our focus would be, which would prevent crisp decision making and limit release velocity," Bromberg wrote. "We also added people and created operating structures that were meant to speed us up, only to find they were slowing us down."
If that sounds at all familiar, it might be because Whitehurst said essentially the same thing after taking over from Riccitiello in 2023: "We are currently doing too much, we are not achieving the synergies that exist across our portfolio, and we are not executing to our full potential."
Going forward, Unity will "Optimize around 'fidelity for ubiquity'," Bromberg wrote, which he said means that "while we’ll always try to enable the best quality graphics we can, our primary directive is to help customers reach the widest possible audience across platforms and devices." Unity will also "invest in industry, live services, and AI," which is presumably a continuation of ongoing efforts: Unity announced plans to incorporate AI into its tools in June 2023, another maneuver that didn't go down entirely well with everyone.
The net result of these changes is, of course, job losses as Unity restructures to merge various teams and eliminate roles determined to be redundant. All employees impacted by the cuts are expected to be notified of their impending unemployment by the end of February 12. I've reached out to Unity for comment and will update if I receive a reply.
