- 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.
Still boggles my mind that Unity has 7700 employees. It’s funny how Godot while having only 10(?) developers is considered good alternative for Unity.
TBF godot is open source and has over 2300 contributors on github. Still less than unity and most of those don’t get paid for their work, but saying that there are only 10 developers is not true and not fair to all of the people contributing in their free time
Not all 2300 worked full time on godot tho. Most contributors either want to add a feature and leave, or bugfix and then leave. But those 7700 unity employees sounds like full time or at least part timer to me.
The 7700 wouldn’t all be in roles that directly contribute to the codebase, either.
It is mind boggling to me how “high touch” business to business sales is like who do you need a dedicated account representative for every customer?
There is more to sales than just the initial contract. Each account has a CLV and its the job of the revenue teams to not only figure out what this is, but then funnel customers through the various stages of post-sales business development, product adoption growth, churn mitigation strategies…etc. to not only meet this but extend it. Sales and revenue are not just a one and done operation. When done correctly you essentially have a farming model vs a hunting one (this can be further refined with things like ICPs, funnel feedbacks…etc), but this often requires some level of continuous account touch points to maintain (gotta water the plants, keep them free of weeds, put down new fertilizer when appropriate, ensure there are no pests causing problems, weather proof the enclosure as much as possible…etc, you get the idea).
That being said though, a lot of businesses are still operating on the pre 2022 growth models or are just now catching up and trying to shift to a more sensible revenue based model, and that is leading to sheding of numbers in an (often misguided imo) attempt to not go under.
7690 middle managers and 10 devs
Exactly. And the unity engine is not the only product that unity makes. They have a full cloud platform with DevOps tools, Game Services like Matchmaking, Leaderboards, Ads, etc. and many more things.
Nonetheless, what the Godot Team + Community is creating as a FOSS product is absolutely amazing and i would say it’s well on its way to becoming the Blender of game engines
True. Didn’t think about that.
I’m curious how much those 2300 contributors have actually added to the repo though. Are they the equivalent of 10 full time devs? 100? 5?
2300? Making a change to the repo is what makes someone a contributor. Sorry if I completely misinterpreted the question.
I think they meant how much code each of those contributors added to the repo. Like did 500 just add a single line? Did some of them simply fix a typo in a single string? That kinda thing.
IE how much have the 2300 contributors added in aggregate compared to the 10 FTE?
My gut instinct is that the employees probably account for 90% of the codebase.
I was digging into it because that baffled me.
It looks like Unity Software provides a lot of services related to Unity and Cloud usage of the engine. I’m guessing this is a ton of consultants.
Godot is being pushed as an alternative for indie developers who likely weren’t using those services. Those services are likely being used by developers making more mainstream games like Pokemon Go and Call of Duty Mobile.
Most of their employees are likely in that realm and marketing/sales
Hoping it’s not a mistake but I’m early enough in my career I’m still prepping for my first indie game and I’m currently pivoting to godot. I want to make pc and mobile titles, and I was already upset over how unity treated their customers and now they’re laying off 25%… I’d rather try something else while I have time to learn
I wonder what those 7700 employees do
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.
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.
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