Game development platform Unity has announced that it is cutting 1,800 jobs amid a company restructuring, in an attempt to “position itself for long-term and profitable growth.” The announcement comes after a tumultuous year of layoffs across the industry, during which Unity had downsized several jobs as well.
These layoffs were confirmed as part of an SEC filing, in which the company stated that jobs cut will represent around 25 percent of the company. The end goal in this is to restructure and refocus the core of their buisness in the coming fiscal year and beyond.
Unity expects the costs of these layoffs- including severance pay and additional payouts- to be incurred during the first fiscal quarter of 2024 but has admitted they can’t reasonably estimate the amount of time it will take to move fully beyond these payments. Additionally, this news follows months after shareholders were told that layoffs were impending as the company attempted to reduce its office footprint, as well as discontinue some products in a portfolio assessment.
The game developer, currently one of the most used, has struggled over the last year even beyond layoffs. Early in 2023, new leadership in Unity implemented a new policy that charged developers using their engine a few every time their game was installed by a user. This applied to every installation, even if a user was reinstalling a game. The policy additionally applied to demos that the developers might release for their game.
Naturally, this policy was hit with a large amount of backlash by developers both using Unity as their engine and not. This persisted for much of the year until Unity announced a walk-back of several of these policies as plans were made to put consumers first. Many of these layoffs likely stem from these changes in approach.
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