Live data from Hacker News

Unity to lay off 8% of its workforce

cnbc.com

31–40 of 138 posts

Re: Unity to lay off 8% of its workforce

#31
Unity is a broken company that sells a critically broken engine.

Sure, it's a great engine for rapid prototyping & releasing indie titles, but not great for getting to the finish line. I know of teams that have had to take out source licenses and edit the engine to fix & work around bugs so they could actually ship their game.

Unity also don't build and release with their engine, like Epic does with Unreal & Fortnite, or Valve does with their games. And, when they tried to finish a whole game self-produced in-house, Gigaya, it was too hard for them to complete with their own engine. https://forum.unity.com/threads/introducing-gigaya-unitys-up...

> It served its purpose as a source of product feedback during its active development and will continue to provide value as an internal resource. Any further learnings would have been minimal during the additional required time to get it to the finish line and would have been disproportionate to the necessary investment. Gigaya was conceptualized as an internal production to generate first-hand product feedback, as well as a learning resource for our users. To release it as a sample project would have required a thorough cleanup and optimizations in its current stage.

Do you really think Unity will get better if Unity can't release a game and support its whole release lifecycle from production, release, ongoing support, and next console generation uprevs? Heck no.

When I pick an engine for my next project, it's going to be Godot or perhaps Unreal, not Unity.

Re: Unity to lay off 8% of its workforce

#32

https://www.google.com/search?q=unity+vs+unreal+engine https://www.google.com/search?q=what+video+games+use+unity+e... How much does/did Unity charge for the top games that use their engine? How else do they generate revenue (and profit)? How do they compete with Unreal? Is Unreal more successful of the two?

The thing with Unreal is that it doesn’t really even have to be very profitable. Epic would need a game engine of their own anyway. As long as their own games that use it make money, everything else is just extra gravy. Unity’s only revenue streams are their game engine and their advertising platform. Edit: I forgot they also have an asset store.

They also have a services product line for gameserver hosting (Apex Legends uses it), voice/text chat (Riot Games uses it), and a few other things.

https://unity.com/solutions/gaming-services

Re: Unity to lay off 8% of its workforce

#33

Unity is a broken company that sells a critically broken engine. Sure, it's a great engine for rapid prototyping & releasing indie titles, but not great for getting to the finish line. I know of teams that have had to take out source licenses and edit the engine to fix & work around bugs so they could actually ship their game. Unity also don't build and release with their engine, like Epic does with Unreal & Fortnite…

> Unity is a broken company

An ad company that is extremely good at selling the idea of it being a game engine company.

Unity has a massive ecosystem around it. Well, I mean life support. And it'll not last forever.

Re: Unity to lay off 8% of its workforce

#34
post #8

The second half of the news, not mentioned in TFA, is that they are going to close around half of their offices worldwide "in the coming years": https://www.gamesindustry.biz/unity-lays-off-hundreds-more-c... No info on which offices might be at risk.

Probably not the main Copenhagen office as I expect Danish employee protection rights to be off the chart.

The union-company power balance need the company to want to keep the office open. Otherwise there is nothing to bargain with.

Re: Unity to lay off 8% of its workforce

#35

Unity is a broken company that sells a critically broken engine. Sure, it's a great engine for rapid prototyping & releasing indie titles, but not great for getting to the finish line. I know of teams that have had to take out source licenses and edit the engine to fix & work around bugs so they could actually ship their game. Unity also don't build and release with their engine, like Epic does with Unreal & Fortnite…

I think you are being a little harsh. https://unity.com/madewith/hollow-knight

Right now there is no engine better for a small studio of 3-5 people. Godot is VASTLY overrated, and Unreal gets way too complex too fast.

Re: Unity to lay off 8% of its workforce

#36

Unity is a broken company that sells a critically broken engine. Sure, it's a great engine for rapid prototyping & releasing indie titles, but not great for getting to the finish line. I know of teams that have had to take out source licenses and edit the engine to fix & work around bugs so they could actually ship their game. Unity also don't build and release with their engine, like Epic does with Unreal & Fortnite…

I think you are being a little harsh. https://unity.com/madewith/hollow-knight Right now there is no engine better for a small studio of 3-5 people. Godot is VASTLY overrated, and Unreal gets way too complex too fast.

Out of curiosity, what makes Godot overrated?

Re: Unity to lay off 8% of its workforce

#37
post #25

Just 8%? The company is valued at $9.5b and is burning almost $1b a year... For every $1 they do in revenue they're currently losing about $0.66. I've been expecting this for sometime and I'm guessing they'll be forced to cut more.

That sounds a lot like profit, no?

Maybe I misunderstood, but I took that to mean expenses are $1.66 for every $1 of revenue

Re: Unity to lay off 8% of its workforce

#38
post #25

Just 8%? The company is valued at $9.5b and is burning almost $1b a year... For every $1 they do in revenue they're currently losing about $0.66. I've been expecting this for sometime and I'm guessing they'll be forced to cut more.

That sounds a lot like profit, no?

No lol, I don't mean for every $1 they do in revenue they have $0.66 in costs, I mean for every $1 they do in revenue they're spending $1.66 and losing $0.66.

These kind of numbers might be okay if they were a new startup growing sales 100%+ YoY, but they've been around since 2005 and have a mediocre growth rate of about 25-30%. There's just no excuse for this level of mismanagement.

Re: Unity to lay off 8% of its workforce

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are being a little harsh. https://unity.com/madewith/hollow-knight Right now there is no engine better for a small studio of 3-5 people. Godot is VASTLY overrated, and Unreal gets way too complex too fast.

Out of curiosity, what makes Godot overrated?

It's not as mature as other platforms, but it's built extremely well from the base up. Unity has a huge ecosystem and tools, but it's built on a shitty/messy platform full of bugs and hacks.

If I was to make a quick & simple 2d or mobile game today, I'd go with Unity. If you want to make something that will require more effort, but work well for years, Godot is better.

UE5 is the choice for anything 3d and complex.

Post reply on HN