Unity lays off hundreds of employees in “resource realignment”

Unity has laid off approximately 200 workers as they “realign some of [their] resources.”

Unity is one of the most used game engines in the industry. While Epic Games and its Unreal Engine tend to cater to larger developers, Unity targets the indie market. The company behind the engine employed up to 3,300 employees when it went public in June 2020. However, since going public Unity’s stock price has been plummeting, already down 70 per cent this year alone.

As reported by Kotaku, two weeks ago Unity CEO John Riccitello assured employees that there would be no layoffs during an all-hands meeting. It would appear that this wasn’t the case as Unity has now laid off four per cent of its workforce, which amounts to approximately 200 workers.

In a statement given to Protocol, Unity had the following to say: “As part of a continued planning process where we regularly assess our resourcing levels against our company priorities, we decided to realign some of our resources to better drive focus and support our long-term growth. This resulted in some hard decisions that impacted approximately 4% of all Unity workforce. We are grateful for the contributions of those leaving Unity and we are supporting them through this difficult transition.”

Unity has a statement now confirming the layoffs and also confirming they’re affecting 4% of its workforce, or slightly more than 200 people going off the latest employee count from last year’s SEC 10-K form. pic.twitter.com/T8KfxpKqZt

— Nick Statt (@nickstatt) June 30, 2022

Laid-off employees will be paid for the next month, and another month of severance and COBRA health coverage will be available to them after that.

There have been murmurings of discontent at Unity, with Kotaku reporting that rapid strategic pivots are commonplace at the company and an anonymous source on the tech message board Blind claiming that the company instituted a hiring freeze earlier this month.

Despite the layoffs and falling share prices, Unity acquired digital effects studio Weta, best-known for its work on the Lord Of The Rings trilogy, for £1.3 billion last year. Last August, Unity also acquired cloud gaming company Parsec for £260 million.

In other industry news, Pokémon Go creators Niantic cut 8 per cent of its staff in a recent layoff.