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Unity Software to cut 3.8% of staff in 'company reset'

reuters.com

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Re: Unity Software to cut 3.8% of staff in 'company reset'

#171

Post by FoodWThrow »

Tsarbomb wrote: post #144
initplus wrote: post #31

Unity are spending too much money to develop far too little. New engine features are almost universally half baked (DOTS, UI mess). They acquire in demand features from the community just to let them wither (pro builder). The only thing that's consistent between different Unity features is how unpolished they seem. Notably the mess they have made of DOTS seems to have been partially responsible for sinking Cities Sky…

What? DOTS is great and extremely performant. CS2 is completely the fault of the developers. The real issue with Unity is that they don't double down on DOTS + HDRP/URP. I have not opened the editor for a few months but last time I worked in Unity the legacy render pipeline was still the default and documentation around DOTS and HDRP was somewhat lacking which is a shame because when you get it working, it works supe…

DOTS isn't ECS. DOTS was supposed to be, a Data Oriented Tech Stack. Currently it only has ECS with some extra bits. Ergo, DOTS is an unfinished mess. And that unfinished mess --along with a mandate to release for Gamepass-- culminated into CSII suffering from utterly ridiculous issues.

Re: Unity Software to cut 3.8% of staff in 'company reset'

#172

Post by immibis »

baggy_trough wrote: post #166
immibis wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they weren't owned by landlords, you'd have the money up front to buy one.

That does not follow at all. How would, for example, a college student with no assets be able to buy a house up front if landlording was illegal?

How do they buy anything else, like textbooks or coffee? They have a student loan - that's how.

You ever met a college student with an Xbox? If we stopped treating houses as an investment and started treating them as a commodity like Xboxes, you could afford one.

Re: Unity Software to cut 3.8% of staff in 'company reset'

#173

Post by baggy_trough »

immibis wrote: post #172
baggy_trough wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That does not follow at all. How would, for example, a college student with no assets be able to buy a house up front if landlording was illegal?

How do they buy anything else, like textbooks or coffee? They have a student loan - that's how. You ever met a college student with an Xbox? If we stopped treating houses as an investment and started treating them as a commodity like Xboxes, you could afford one.

I very much doubt it because it takes many times as many resources to create a house than an Xbox. Making housing loans to people with no income or assets is a great way to cause a financial collapse, as we saw not too many years ago.

Re: Unity Software to cut 3.8% of staff in 'company reset'

#174

Post by thargor90 »

OnionBlender wrote: post #151
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't say its known for performance issues but it certainly is known for scale issues in open world games (Things like moving too far from 0,0,0 causes polygons to flail and physics to break, so you need to do tricks to work around that) which feel like the sort of thing you're going to encounter on a game world that exists from person scale up to plane scale.

In Outer Wilds, the player stays at 0,0,0 while everything else moves around them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbY0mBXKKT0&t=1907s

I was under the impression this is how things always work in graphics pipelines. You don't want to give up on all the precision between 0 and 1

Re: Unity Software to cut 3.8% of staff in 'company reset'

#175

Post by [deleted] »

immibis wrote: post #158
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He has a point though. Workplace is for work, not politics, religion, activism, romance, etc. that are not related to work. Bringing religios, political or social issues at work could create unnecessary friction or even spark feuds. Better keep those separate, or at least very low-key, not public.

Everything is political, especially the system of wealth creation and distribution.

[deleted]

Re: Unity Software to cut 3.8% of staff in 'company reset'

#176

Post by dajt »

WitCanStain wrote: post #130
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He has a point though. Workplace is for work, not politics, religion, activism, romance, etc. that are not related to work. Bringing religios, political or social issues at work could create unnecessary friction or even spark feuds. Better keep those separate, or at least very low-key, not public.

While I broadly agree that that's a wise move, at the same time if I have to spend 8 hours a day working just to stay alive I can hardly be expected to also kill all non-work aspects of my personality for that time as well.

Only until they figure out how to make Severance a reality. I'm sure the C suite would love that to bits.

Re: Unity Software to cut 3.8% of staff in 'company reset'

#177

Post by dajt »

wddkcs wrote: post #82
yorf89 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except he's still getting paid until April. I doubt the employees getting the sack because of this will be extended the same sweet deal. Pretty messed up that you can fuck up and make hundreds lose their jobs, and get paid for several months afterwards to do literally nothing.

There's one CEO, and n employees. The one will always receive preferred treatment, over the many. Is it pretty fucked up that 1+1=2? Both are constants in the universe. Whether he did a good job is irrelevant, he did a job and got paid for it. It'd be pretty fucked up if the board hired him, then didn't pay him per contract.

Most people don't get paid out to the end of their contract if they're let go early, or not that I've seen and if you're let go for ineptitude why should they?

This is just different rules for the rich. I'm sure he'd survive much better even without that money than any other employee being let go with their much less generous package.

Re: Unity Software to cut 3.8% of staff in 'company reset'

#178

Post by dajt »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #154
yorf89 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except he's still getting paid until April. I doubt the employees getting the sack because of this will be extended the same sweet deal. Pretty messed up that you can fuck up and make hundreds lose their jobs, and get paid for several months afterwards to do literally nothing.

It's almost as if it's a way harder job or something, I mean look at your own post you have animosity towards them despite knowing nothing about them just from them taking on that job.

Someone has to do those jobs, but what offends people is the extent to which that class keep giving themselves more all the time, and exponentially more than what happens to the rest of us. All jobs are important, not just the C suite.

They get paid appalling amounts of money when they're just treading water - it's not fair they also get good payouts when they stuff up so monumentally.

Re: Unity Software to cut 3.8% of staff in 'company reset'

#179

Post by qwebfdzsh »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #152
qwebfdzsh wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are still massively over-bloated. Realistically they should cut at least another 30% or so (for some reason they still have about 50% more people than they did at the beginning on 2022). Of course that would turn into a disaster due to obvious reasons (good luck firing the "right" people). So they are kind of screwed, no way can the generate enough income to support 7000 people without massive growth. It's a bit…

Epic did exist and make money shipping Unreal Engine before Fortnite, although Fortnite became a huge success I'd say that having people in the same building having to actually build a real product with the tools you make in that building is also the right attitude to being able to make tools that are profitable and work for real people. Heard from a comment on here that all Unity tech demos use extreme custom tweaks…

But doesn't change the fact that financially Unreal is a side business for Epic (IIRC even their storefront somehow makes more money..). What's the point in making those tools if you can make significantly more money arguably in a much easier way?

This is way Unity pivoted into ads and is/was(?) trying to entire other areas like VFX/industrial etc. stuff. Charging per seat is just a terrible business model for a game engine.

> Heard from a comment on here that all Unity tech demos use extreme custom tweaks on the base engine and then when that demo ships it all gets thrown out

That's true, they didn't even throw out that stuff, demos were made on a separate branch of the engine by team(s) completely separate from the people working on the engine. That and most of the stuff they were doing in their demos is irrelevant for pretty much all of their users anyway (and obviously they weren't very effective at attracting VFX and AAA clients..). IIRC they canned most of their in house demo team back in 2022.

> building having to actually build a real product with the tools you make in that building

Honestly I'm not 100% sure about that. It's not like all teams have the same problems and workflows and it's not like Unity is not getting enough feedback from their users.

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