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I personally think Unity suffered from success - I suspect they grew to match their fairly outsized success, found out they were fairly large and needed more re

I personally think Unity suffered from success - I suspect they grew to match their fairly outsized success, found out they were fairly large and needed more revenue to sustain themselves, and so they increasingly looked to and focused on pushing advertising to make up shortfalls, while the game engine was increasingly turned into a vehicle for profitably integrating advertising into games. My suggestion: Personally, Unity really needs to go lean, embrace their developer experience more, and cut costs. There are 7703 staff (as per wikipedia) - and I don't wish this upon the employees, but they can probably afford to cut some fat.

blah_why_not 3y ago
"they can probably afford to cut some fat." They have TONS of fat to trim I used to work there. I was appalled by how many people in the company spent company time in slack chats about controversial political issues (as if they would persuade someone with divergent values). While I was working, I saw various slack channels filled with a constant stream of political chats. I thought "What the hell is everyone else doing while I have my head down and I am working?!" I resigned after 3-4 months. I found it to be "clown world" inside Unity.
- seattle_spring 3y ago
  I've never worked at a midsize or larger company that didn't have several highly politicized individuals posting to slack seemingly all day.
- kramerger 3y ago
  To be fair, what you consider political chat could be quite innocent talk to someone else. I was once called a communist activist for proposing making 2-sided default on the printer. But yes, unity as a company has somre problems.
_manifold 3y ago
Indeed, it seems like their whole plan to address profitability issues is just "get bigger", but all that's done is create a bloated, immobile monster that's completely lost touch with thee customer base that got them to where they are. At ~7000 employees, Unity has roughly double the employees that Epic has - where is all the labor going? To me it's pretty clear that Unity is more interested in being a commercial product/platform whereas Epic is leaning into the engine/technology side and developing their own games. Theoretically both angles can be valid, but I think Unity has completely misunderstood why most of their customers chose then in the first place.
gmerc 3y ago
On trimming fat: It’s bullshit. There’s ~300.000 professional game developers in the industry (not including Indy). They make revenue of approx 350 billion USD. That’s big tech revenue per employee. Profit probably about 450k USD per employee. The average salary in the industry is somewhere around 50k usd! The top 10% compensation outside of corporate execs is less than the profit per employee - and barely that of a mid range FAANG engineer. I switched from senior tech director - top 5 people compensation in a big studio - in games to Mid level manager in big tech at a 5x in TC over 4 years to 8x at Director level over 6. Yes the industry is extremely lo sided in profitability and risk, but people are not the problem. In case of unity, insane ad tech plans and complete failure to predict the market are the problem. Just like with the big tech layoffs, the “cut the fat” and “lazy employees aren’t working hard enough and coasting” narratives exist to absolve senior executives of their failure to adequately plan, manage and control costs and new initiatives or L&D spend. Nothing mid level controls or approves. In public companies, the senior management and shareholders get to use employees (and game developers) to pay for their i’ll fated bets and mistakes. Rarely, like in this case, there are consequences. We are on track to lay off 3-5% of games this year, in an industry where on average every employee is vastly profitable. Talent that’s desperately needed and hard to train. Games is the story of what happens when you don’t have unions and regulation forcing fair distribution of value - massive profits with lobsided distribution that makes many studios only operate with tax credits and at the constant edge of layoffs.

blah_why_not 3y ago

"they can probably afford to cut some fat." They have TONS of fat to trim I used to work there. I was appalled by how many people in the company spent company time in slack chats about controversial political issues (as if they would persuade someone with divergent values). While I was working, I saw various slack channels filled with a constant stream of political chats. I thought "What the hell is everyone else doing while I have my head down and I am working?!" I resigned after 3-4 months. I found it to be "clown world" inside Unity.

seattle_spring 3y ago
I've never worked at a midsize or larger company that didn't have several highly politicized individuals posting to slack seemingly all day.
kramerger 3y ago
To be fair, what you consider political chat could be quite innocent talk to someone else. I was once called a communist activist for proposing making 2-sided default on the printer. But yes, unity as a company has somre problems.

_manifold 3y ago

Indeed, it seems like their whole plan to address profitability issues is just "get bigger", but all that's done is create a bloated, immobile monster that's completely lost touch with thee customer base that got them to where they are. At ~7000 employees, Unity has roughly double the employees that Epic has - where is all the labor going? To me it's pretty clear that Unity is more interested in being a commercial product/platform whereas Epic is leaning into the engine/technology side and developing their own games. Theoretically both angles can be valid, but I think Unity has completely misunderstood why most of their customers chose then in the first place.

gmerc 3y ago

On trimming fat: It’s bullshit. There’s ~300.000 professional game developers in the industry (not including Indy). They make revenue of approx 350 billion USD. That’s big tech revenue per employee. Profit probably about 450k USD per employee. The average salary in the industry is somewhere around 50k usd! The top 10% compensation outside of corporate execs is less than the profit per employee - and barely that of a mid range FAANG engineer. I switched from senior tech director - top 5 people compensation in a big studio - in games to Mid level manager in big tech at a 5x in TC over 4 years to 8x at Director level over 6. Yes the industry is extremely lo sided in profitability and risk, but people are not the problem. In case of unity, insane ad tech plans and complete failure to predict the market are the problem. Just like with the big tech layoffs, the “cut the fat” and “lazy employees aren’t working hard enough and coasting” narratives exist to absolve senior executives of their failure to adequately plan, manage and control costs and new initiatives or L&D spend. Nothing mid level controls or approves. In public companies, the senior management and shareholders get to use employees (and game developers) to pay for their i’ll fated bets and mistakes. Rarely, like in this case, there are consequences. We are on track to lay off 3-5% of games this year, in an industry where on average every employee is vastly profitable. Talent that’s desperately needed and hard to train. Games is the story of what happens when you don’t have unions and regulation forcing fair distribution of value - massive profits with lobsided distribution that makes many studios only operate with tax credits and at the constant edge of layoffs.