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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 Skylines 2.
Just points to a mess at the leadership level. Their failed relicensing debacle shows the poor level of judgement of the C suite.
No love for Unity here, their licensing debacle was horrendous, but I've seen no indications that DOTS is responsible for CS2 perf issues. Everything I've seen points to other things lacking in the engine (a decent LODing system for example), general optimization issues that'd be present in any game shipped too early, and inefficiencies in the rendering pipeline.
"Unfortunately a lot of the graphics-related issues are indirectly caused by the game’s use of DOTS"
"The cause for unnecessary geometry is both the lack of simplified LOD variants for many of the game’s meshes, as well as the simplistic and seemingly untuned culling implementation. And the reason why the game has its own culling implementation instead of using Unity’s built in solution (which should at least in theory be much more advanced) is because Colossal Order had to implement quite a lot of the graphics side themselves because Unity’s integration between DOTS and HDRP is still very much a work in progress and arguably unsuitable for most actual games"
No game engine can save a game from someone dedicated to being inefficient, like rendering high poly teeth on pixel tall models.
They pivoted from developing an engine to developing an IPO.
It's looking like there was no plan beyond that, once Riccitiello sailed off into the sunset with his loot.
There never is. This is how capitalism works. Cory called it enshittification.
they thought they had the Hollywood lock. Then turns out Hollywood isn't worth shit these days and treats em' like some post house on deathrow either way.
They bet too much, too hard, in all the wrong places. And tried lock-in and pricing out the indies. They should've done the Adobe thing and let those college kids pirate.
Dunno, very expected from this angle.
Why did they use Unity for Cities Skylines 2? Unity is widely known for performance issues in game dev community right? (I am not a game developer).
Why not unreal engine etc?
People underestimate the cost of switching game engines.
While a lot of concepts are transferrable between engines, if you've got a team of experienced C#/Unity developers who haven't touched UE, switching to C++/UE is likely to cost a lot of time/money. A new engine can still be a steep learning curve for experienced game developers. You might be able to pick up the basics over a weekend, but reaching expert levels of knowledge takes years.
That cost increases further if it means restarting a project from scratch rather than building on top of an existing codebase (which will likely include not just the game itself, but also an assortment of tools built within Unity for building content and improving workflows).
Unity's killer feature for many is still its C# support. If you're a small team or solo developer who doesn't need AAA levels of performance, it can be a big time-saver over working with C++.
I presume because they already used Unity in Cities Skylines (the original), and it would be easier to build and improve on the previous edition instead of throwing most of it away and starting a new project with a new engine.
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.
They were already entrenched with their first game, and used that opportunity to buy into the DOTS hype.
DOTS had a much troubled development cycle; most of what was promised was eventually abandoned, and the key people were laid off. Anyone that bought into it is now stuck in the hybrid-DOTS limbo, where they have to invest substantial amount of time into making the engine features work.
The issues with CS:2 are well documented and nothing do with DOTS; it was entirely the game developers fault.
The vendor of the tools should always try to empathize with the users of their tools and make the experience better.
Even if the user insists on being a little bit weird. Perhaps especially so.
We like to chase the most difficult customers. It forces us to have the best products.
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 super well.
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.
Also notable:
> Unity will shut down offices in 14 locations such as Berlin and Singapore, pending employee consultation in some countries, and significantly reduce its office footprint for the remaining offices, including in San Francisco and Bellevue, Washington.
> Unity will no longer mandate that employees work from offices three a days a week and will reduce "full in-office services" to three days a week in most locations, the company said.
It seems like WFH is a "perk" when company is in cut down expenses mode, and RTO is mandated when it's thriving.
Nice! It's nice to see a company make an employee-friendly movement here, as opposed to many of the other big players forcing their employees back into the commute rat-race.
Whoa imagine the people they forced to relocate and now are telling them it was the wrong decision. I can only say that unity’s leadership are idiots, nothing else.
Sound of a shoe dropping...
Most notably, this is laying off their entire acquisition of Weta Digital which was an audacious $1.6B purchase.
After which Unity did nothing to take the proposed products into the marketplace.
I think they were not easily commercialized. I was a VFX software developer and internal tools are both very advanced and also fragile foot guns if you try to do anything that isn’t exactly down the golden path. VFX devs are not the usual product guys, they are usually either R&D/math guys or hackers, with little in between.
The way to commercialize WETA stuff would be to make new product teams and basically redo much of the work with professional software devs and figure out where the original VFX R&D had gaps - and it always has massive gaps.
Unity just went nuts with wacky acquisitions the last couple years and this was one of them.
Just Weta FX - those were the guys and gals that used Weta tooling for producing films and such. Not Weta Tools - those are the guys and gals building and maintaining the Weta tools
Wait, Unity owned WETA FREAKING DIGITAL? My goodness!
>and end an agreement with a digital video effects company [Weta Digital]
Man, what did I even get laid off for if they were gonna cut off their billion dollar acquisition anyway? Thought they'd at least leverage that talent and tech to properly compete with Unreal in the Film space. But alas. More unfulfilled dreams.
I was intending to join Unity as an intern, only to realise that the entire office had closed.
3.8% is lower than most required attrition programs at FAANG
It's the 4th round of layoffs in under 2 years
Will the boards of tech companies ever learn that once founders and key tech people are sidelined they no longer fulfil their core mission of delivering tech? Tech companies need to remain tech focused because thats what people want from them. Unity ticks a lot of chekboxes but as others said are half baked. The only market it seems to serve well is mobile because mobile has few demanding features.
More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38452493
Unity promised much but never delivered. DOTS is a mess. For AAA you are better with Unreal and for small games Godot might be enough.
Unity's only advantage is the huge community and the tons of stuff in their store and the huge number of tutorials.
Anyway, I am glad I exited game de few years ago and I am much happier doing web development and microservices.
Starting to seem like modern Unreal works well for small games too.
How about cutting 100% of the idiotic board who cost them their business?
[dupe]
Some more discussion over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38452493
now do Ironsource ($4.4B)
The other 3.2% goes in a second round?
unity is a mess on the inside
there are slack channels practically devoted to political bickering
i was disgusted with what I saw there (outside of my own engineering team which was actually quite decent with the exception of one person) and left within 3 months
>there are slack channels practically devoted to political bickering
What kind of political bickering? Internal company politics or government/social/identity politics?
Do these layoffs include any of the C-suite / execs / upper management?
You know, the people directly responsible for the company's situation? Accountability? No?
This started with the CEO being removed, so I think, Yes!
I mean the CEO 'resigned' in October, if that's what you're looking for.
I'm c-suite and the most important function of layoffs is to preserve the business as an ongoing concern, preserving what jobs I can. If the business fails, everyone loses their job, which is terrible!
Now, if the reason for layoffs is due directly to poor decisions by someone who should not have reasonably made that decision given the variables in front of them, that person should probably be terminated. But layoffs can occur for all manner of reasons. If you are in the business of making feather hats, and suddenly feather hats go out of style because of shifts in market demand, how can you fire the business leader? Not everything is in the control of management. Management comes in every day, sees the situation before them, and makes the best decisions they can to grow the business.
> Do these layoff include any of the C-suite
Yes
> The people directly responsible for the company's situation?
Yes
> Accountability?
Some.
> No?
Bruh, I just said yes.