Software developer Unity Technologies (also known as Unity Software) has begun its sixth round of layoffs in as many years. The number of employees who will lose their jobs is currently unknown, but reports indicate that entire departments, including the entire Unity Behavior team, will be affected.
Software developer Unity Technologies (also known as Unity Software) has begun its sixth round of layoffs in as many years. The number of employees who will lose their jobs is currently unknown, but reports indicate that entire departments, including the entire Unity Behavior team, will be affected.
The layoffs were first reported by a post by Coline Turquin, a former senior software developer at Unity and one of the affected employees, 80 Level reports. Turquin said she was let go after five years of employment «as part of recent layoffs».
The layoffs were later confirmed by Florence Rolland-Soulier, who left Unity in 2023 because the company had changed too much from what it was before. She called the new job cuts «massive,» noting that Unity had let go of «some of its brightest, most talented, most forward-thinking» employees.
Shortly after, a post from the official Unity forum appeared on Reddit, stating that the entire team working on Unity Behavior, a visual tool for creating behaviors used to control NPCs or objects, had apparently been laid off.
«Unfortunately, today we were informed that our team has been hit with the latest wave of layoffs, and we will no longer be able to support you. I have reached out to management to ask if they can release the project open source, but there are no guarantees», — wrote the fired behavior developer, Shanee Nishry.
Former Unity senior technical artist Peter Rowe not only confirmed the large scale of the layoffs, but also explained how Unity management decided to break the news to him. According to Peter, he received an email early in the morning informing him that he had been «terminated» and that he would lose access to the system by the end of the day. The former employee found the message «completely unexpected and impersonal,» suggesting that the layoffs were not announced in advance, even within the company itself.
Subsequently, 80 Level managed to obtain a letter from Unity, which mentions «significant organizational changes» in the CTO, game engine developers, and advertising teams.
«Currently, our product and engineering teams are spread across multiple products, which creates complexity and limits impact. Historically, we have engaged in lengthy debates about what we should focus on, which has hindered rapid decision-making and limited the speed of release. We have also added people and created operational structures that were supposed to speed us up, but have turned out to slow us down», — the chapter on the development of the Unity game engine states.
This is the sixth wave of layoffs at Unity Technologies. The company previously cut 200-400 people in 2022, about 1,165 employees in 2023, and 1,800 employees in 2024. Given previous layoffs, the potential number of affected developers could range widely — from a few hundred to over a thousand.
Recall that in the fall of 2023, Unity was embroiled in a scandal when it tried to change the monetization of its game engine. At that time, the company announced a change to subscription plans for its products and announced the introduction of a commission that would be charged for almost every installation of a game created on its engine.
This has shaken up the gaming community, with many developers saying they may remove their games from sale on January 1, 2024, to avoid paying this fee. They are also considering switching to other game engines.
Outrage over Unity’s decision to implement such monetization has begun to spill over in some places — the company announced that it was closing its offices for two days due to death threats to employees.
