Unity ring in the new year by firing 1,800 people in the name of “long-term and profitable growth”

The quest to appease the immortal share price continues as game engine provider Unity announce that they’re laying off another 1,800 people, or around 25% of their current workforce, in a bid to “position” the company “for long-term and profitable growth”.

The news comes from a Securities and Exchange Commission filing scooped up by the Verge, which also has an official press statement from Unity’s PR director Kelly Ekins.

“Today, as part of our company reset outlined in our Shareholder Letter on November 9, 2023, we announced that Unity has made the difficult decision to implement a workforce reduction, targeting approximately 25% of our total workforce across all teams,” Ekins wrote. “This decision was not taken lightly, and we extend our deepest gratitude to those affected for their dedication and contributions.”

Unity’s “reset” plans followed a mixed set of third quarter 2023 financial results, exacerbated but not caused by the disastrous, and somewhat-walked-back, introduction of new runtime fees for Unity developers. Unity’s interim CEO Jim Whitehurst said at the time that the company were “acting quickly and expect to make final decisions over the next few weeks”, with changes in place before the end of the first quarter of 2024.

In addition to cancelling certain products, firing people and closing offices, Unity also declared on 9th November that they would focus on their “core” in the form of the Unity Editor and the runtime fee business, while looking into new monetisation approaches and “significant opportunities” for growth such as generative “artificial intelligence” tools.

Later in November, Unity began putting these plans into effect, cutting 265 jobs and closing 14 offices while ending an agreement with digital effects company Wētā FX.

While Unity’s latest round of layoffs has gone down well with investors so far, the company’s antics and especially, their new runtime fee model have been terribly received by Unity game developers. Back in September, a number of prominent smaller teams including Among Us developer Innersloth announced plans to ditch Unity and switch to rivals such as the Godot engine, or even bolt together their own game engines from scratch. Back in November, Whitehurst suggested that the business model change would have “minimal benefit in 2024”, but that it would “ramp from there as customers adopt our new releases”.

Best of luck to everybody losing their jobs as part of Unity’s cost-cutting.