Unity has been hit with another round of layoffs. This is according to posts on LinkedIn from recently laid off staff and confirmed by reporting from Game Developer and 80.lvl. According to reports, employees were notified via emails sent out at 5 AM local time, while the layoffs affect a number of different teams within the the game engine software company. According to a message posted in the Unity forums, one of the casualties in the layoffs was the entire Behavior department which built tools that assisted in NPC scripting. It’s not clear at this point how many employees were impacted.
Unity has been on shaky ground for the last two years, undergoing several rounds of layoffs amid other upheavals. In January 2024, Unity eliminated 25 percent of its workforce or around 1,800 employees. Before that in November 2023, Unity closed several office locations and cut 265 jobs.
Before that was one of the events that likely contributed to all the layoffs: the company’s disastrous deployment of its Runtime fee. The fee, which initially intended to charge developers a small fee for every download of a Unity game, was roundly rejected by prominent indie developers. Several voiced their concerns on social media, while others threatened and, in the case of a collective of mobile developers, actually enacted a boycott of the software.
The fallout led to Unity revamping the runtime fee and resulted in CEO John Riccitiello retiring less than a month after the runtime announcement. The Verge has reached out to Unity for comment.
