Unity continues to remain on the bad side of the industry with yet another confounding move. The company has decided to fire roughly 1,800 employees and Unity is calling it another “company reset” as the cause. The mass layoff accounts for a massive 25% of the total workforce of Unity and is a significant hit to the employees in question.
The entire industry has opted to remove as many employees as possible throughout 2023, but it seems that trend is carrying over to this year as well. The likely reason Unity is doing this is as a cost-cutting measure. Unity announced the mass layoff through an internal company memo on Monday. This is the second mass layoff within Unity in the last few months.
Unity Mass Layoff & Company Reset Following Turbulent Period
This is one of the largest mass layoffs we’ve witnessed over the past year, and is the biggest in Unity’s history. Unity expects the employee mass layoff to be completed by the end of March 2024. The game engine developer confirmed that this mass layoff will impact all parts of the organization.
The news comes right after a tumultuous period for the company. Last year, Unity decided to introduce a new method of monetization by charging developers on each install of a game developed on the Unity engine. This new scheme was a blatant attempt to increase developer costs by a massive amount. Since over a million developers use Unity, and millions more play games made on Unity, the backlash to this decision was monumental.
This resulted in Unity removing John Riccitiello from the position of CEO and replacing him with Jim Whitehurst for the time being. The aforementioned backlash was so immense that many developers decided to abandon Unity entirely as their engine of choice and move on to other more reliable platforms that would not increase its costs by 10 times on a moment’s notice.
