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Unity Technologies has laid off hundreds of employees at its offices around the world. According to posts on Blind, the retrenchments affected at least 150 employees and possibly more.
Unity confirmed he had retrenchments. The reports said that Unity had frozen appointments and started some (unreported) retrenchments at least a month ago. Another round of retrenchments began Tuesday and continued this week.
Part of the challenge at Unity is that it has a large team of engineers developing its game engine, but unlike its rival Epic Games, it does not make video games itself. Epic is highly profitable due to the success of Fortnite, which subsidizes extensions such as the Epic Games Store and metaverse work.
“As part of an ongoing planning process where we regularly assess our resource levels against our company priorities, we have decided to realign some of our resources to better drive focus and support our long-term growth,” the company said in a statement. “This has led to some difficult decisions that have affected about 4% of all Unity workforce. We are grateful for the contributions of those who are leaving Unity and we support them through this difficult transition. ”
Unity has far more users than Epic Games has for the Unity game engine, but Unity relies on revenue from Unity Ads, which is heavily dependent on mobile devices. And the ability to target users with user acquisition campaigns has been hampered in recent years by Apple’s suppression of privacy, where privacy is a higher priority than targeted advertising. Meta’s Facebook also suffered from this change.
So far, the retrenchments have affected employees in the US, Canada and Denmark. The seriousness in the US is apparently one month of looking for another job, two weeks’ pay for each year worked and three months of COBRA health coverage. Employees in Canada and Denmark received more.
Shares of Unity have fallen by more than 70% so far this year.
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