this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2023
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The best programmers there probably see the writing on the wall. The best small game dev studios will also.
I think unity is going to see a big quality drop even if it manages to get out of this death spiral.
And I'm still curious if they'll get targeted by regulators for the anti-competitive shit that started this (the whole thing was intended to strong arm developers into using their ad platform to get an exemption from the new pricing model and put a rival ad platform out of business).
I work at Unity. The brain drain is for real. It started 2 layoffs ago and is picking up speed. My department lost some really valuable workers, because layoffs are imminent they don't let leads hire many replacements, and the resulting critical work gets dropped on people already doing full work loads. Some of the people my department has lost helped build core systems from scratch years ago so that intimate knowledge of those systems is just gone.
Thanks for commenting, it's interesting to get an inside perspective instead of just speculating.
Out of curiosity, how are they (executives/management) communicating about this whole thing internally? Like are they trying to downplay the impact of that screw up or are they being genuine in how they present the situation?
I can't get too specific on that one because people get fired for leaking meeting info (I'm hoping to keep this job for one more year wish me luck lol). But in my opinion the new CEO has been a lot more open about what's going on. He's very straightforward and has been engaging with us in a more human way than JR ever did.
No worries about not being specific, I was only expecting a general answer if any at all.
And that's good. Tough times at a company can lead to improved culture (at least for those who survive the layoffs). Best of luck to you!
Unity has over 7000 employees. When you compare it to epic with its 3000, it seems a bit much and rather ineffective.
Do you have any insight on this?
Unity tripled in size in like 4 years iirc. It is trying very hard to be a large company. Like the culture has been shifting from small company feel to big corporate feel for a while now (since before I joined). It still is clinging very hard to having small company feel though because that's the kind of culture almost everyone here was sold on.
As far as the efficiency of our size, I'm honestly not super sure. We've been multitasking a lot and have cut things in the past, like Gigaya. My department has always felt understaffed and I get the vibe that a lot of departments feel the same. I haven't talked to anyone that was like "my team is too big to function well". So if there is an inefficiency issue it is maybe a broad thing that could be hard to see from any one part of the whole. That said I work in a very specific part of the company and don't branch out a whole lot to other groups so my interdepartmental knowledge is limited.
Exactly. The colossal lost of trust is not easy to regain (if it can ever be regained at all) and that's will be a specter haunting Unity's economic performance for the years to come. I've seen so much outpouring of support for Godot and other open source / free game engines, and really hope that support continues.