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Game Engine Company Marketed As Behind 50% Of All Games Faces More Layoffs

A new report states over 600 people at Unity will lose their jobs.

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Unity, the company behind the same-named game engine, is reportedly slashing 600 jobs as part of a new round of layoffs--its third within a year. That number accounts for 8% of the workforce.

The Wall Street Journal adds Unity plans to cut down its worldwide offices from 58 currently to fewer than 30 over the coming years. Unity touts on its website that over 50 percent of all games are made with the namesake engine as of 2021. Notable titles that utilize aspects of Unity include Among Us and Apex Legends.

John Riccitiello, former EA president and current Unity chief executive, told WSJ that the layoffs are needed "for higher growth." He added that middle managers will be affected. "It was clear we had too many layers," said Riccitiello.

Last year, Riccitiello apologized after saying developers were a "f***ing idiot if they didn't consider monetization during the creative process for making games. This also happened after Unity laid off 200 people. The company fired another 300 employees in January.

In addition, Unity plans to move forward with a hybrid work model beginning in September. That means employees will have to show up at an office at least three days a week.

Unity had record revenue of $1.39 billion in 2022, which included its first profitable quarter since going public in 2020.

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ghostgate2001

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This Riccitiello guy sounds like pure evil. Imagine destroying hundreds of lives not because your company is struggling to stay afloat ("Unity had record revenue of $1.39 billion in 2022") but "for higher growth."

There's no such thing as "enough" dollars with people like that - they can't be content with simply doing well and making a tidy profit - they've gotta have all the dollars and they don't care how many lives they destroy in their quest for that unattainable and illusory grail. They're psychopaths, basically.

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Nargg

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So, Unity is dying. Oh well, there's plenty of other engines to use.

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darshie76

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@nargg: Unity is not dying; as you can see they made record profit. It is simply ran by an ex EA CEO; which means they care less than 0 about people and only care about investors... So that translate in zero consideration for any sort of respect for the human side of things, and they just care about making profit for their investors.

This is why they hired their current CEO; which was kicked out of EA; just to say what kind of wonderful person he is. Companies simply lay off people to increase profit; it is one of the things they can affect, as they cannot affect sales; but they can cut costs. Every company had layoffs in the past year or 2; every single one.

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m4a5

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@nargg: With that flawed logic, all tech companies who hired over the pandemic are "dying" lol

Unity isn't immune to what the industry is doing...

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lokar82

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I learned Unity for a project a few years back, it had a lot of issues. The 50% number should really be checked, hard to believe it's that high.

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darshie76

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@lokar82: May surprise you but most of the indie games and 2d games are made with Unity; most of the phone/tablet games are made with Unity. Because it is easy and simple to use.

It may surprise you but money do not come only from AAA games that use for most part Unreal engine; but they are also coming from 2d platformers, which are quite big on console and PC; and from mobile games with heavy monetization; for which Unity is basically number 1, as Unreal has no facilities to monetize basically; as well as Unity. If you just play AAA games, it is understandable that this number is strange to you.

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m4a5

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@lokar82: ...All of the popular game engines have issues.... lol

Unity is great for games that aren't trying to be hyper realistic like Unreal Engine. And think about mobile, they'll count too (and are easier to work on in Unity than other engines).

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chronocommander

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Apex Legends does NOT use Unity, who fact-checked this article?

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jinzo9988

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Edited By jinzo9988

@chronocommander: Unity has an entire case study on Apex Legends on its website. It's apparently using Unity for multiplayer... in which case, it's using an aspect of Unity and the article is correct. The game may not be built on Unity, but that doesn't mean you can't use Unity for a specific part of it. I'm not going to read through all the drivel, but Unity has some sort of a thing called Multiplay that is able to scale backend multiplayer server shit from a very small scale to a very large cloud-based scale in seconds and that's what Apex uses.

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chronocommander

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Edited By chronocommander

@jinzo9988: The game is just using the multiplayer backend services, not the engine itself:

https://unity.com/case-study/apex#about-apex-legends

https://unity.com/products/game-server-hosting

The article could make that clearer instead of going for a vague "aspects" where most people will think it's the engine (Apex uses Source). Thanks for making the services side of the Unity company visible.

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