2023 was a rough year for Unity and its workers. It seems like 2025 will be the same, with Unity’s biggest layoff amount yet.
One of the go-to engines for indie and small-to-medium-scale game developers is undoubtedly Unity. In fact, Unity has been part of game creation for more than a decade, but it seems like 2023 was the year when the company started making wrong decisions while trying to profit. As Unity is one of the most used engines on the market, it is one of the small options you could go for while setting the basics.
The company knew the stats and came up with a plan to charge developers per download. As expected, none of the parties involved in creating and playing the games were happy about this, as exploiters would download and uninstall the games, giving more trouble to developers.
Luckily, the management team withdrew its decision to charge per download, averting the crisis. The whole business of charging fees per download ended once the company’s CEO, John Riccitiello, left. There was also an alleged stake sellout from John Riccitiello the day before the announcement of the fee-per-download decision, which raised eyebrows even more about what’s going on inside the company.
While some stakeholders have to make a profit in the direst situations, the same cannot be said for people in the subsidiary studios, as Unity is still laying off people to aim for a better profit margin.
In Unity’s latest report, around 25 percent of the workforce is planned to be fired during January 2024. The announcement is not new; around November, the management team notified that they would be resetting the company but did not exactly explain how many workers would be affected.
25% roughly comes around 1800 workers, and this includes all the small studios and affiliates who work for Unity. With this decision, the total amount of workers the company has fired so far will add up to 9500, which is nothing to scoff at, considering these are all people who did work for Unity one way or another.
