Unity has experienced another wave of layoffs. This is evidenced by messages on LinkedIn from recently laid-off employees, as well as reports from Game Developer and 80.lvl. According to the reports, the employees were notified by email at 5 am local time, and the layoffs affected several different teams at the game engine software company. According to a message posted on Unity’s forums, one of the victims of the layoffs was an entire behavioral science department that developed tools that helped create scripts for NPCs. It is unclear how many employees were affected.
Unity has been on shaky ground for the past two years, experiencing several waves of layoffs amid other turmoil. In January 2024, Unity laid off 25 percent of its workforce, or about 1,800 employees. Before that, in November 2023, Unity closed several offices and cut 265 jobs.
Before that, there was one of the events that likely led to all the layoffs: the company’s disastrous rollout of its performance fee. The fee, which was originally intended to charge developers a small fee for each download of a Unity game, was strongly rejected by well-known indie developers. Some of them expressed their concerns on social media, others threatened, and in the case of a group of mobile app developers, actually boycotted the software.
This led Unity to revise its user fees, and CEO John Riccitello resigned less than a month after the announcement of the user fee increase.
