Unity make another round of job cuts as CEO acknowledges “exhaustion associated with prior changes”

Game engine company Unity are making yet another round of job cuts across various departments, from software development to advertising. They’ve yet to specify how many people have been affected – according to a leaked memo from Unity CEO Matthew Bromberg, those concerned will be notified today – but several Unity employees have confirmed that they’re now looking for work on LinkedIn, amongst them senior technical artist Peter Roe and senior software developer Coline Turquin. In his LinkedIn post, Roe describes the layoffs as “completely abrupt and impersonal”. Apparently, a noreply address contacted him at 5am local time to reveal that he’d lose access to systems by the end of the day. Funny stuff.

A post on Unity’s official forums also suggests that the entirety of the team behind Unity Behavior – a visual tool for writing behaviours for NPCs or objects – have been let go. “Unfortunately, we were told today that our team is included in the latest round of layoffs and we will not be able to support you any longer. I’ve reached out to leadership to ask if they can open-source the project, but there is no guarantee,” writes Behavior tech lead Shanee Nishry.

As noted by 80.lv – who broke the story and subsequently got hold of Bromberg’s memo – this is Unity’s sixth reported wave of mass layoffs since 2022. It’s part of an existential struggle at the engine company that saw Unity announce plans to charge certain devs a fee per installation of a Unity game, then dump those plans a year later following a comprehensive backlash. In November 2023, Unity got rid of 265 people and broke up with VFX studio Wētā FX in a company “reset”. In January 2024, they binned off a further 1800 people – 25% of their workforce at the time – in the name of profit growth.

Going by Bromberg’s leaked memo, Unity’s restructurings have yet to right the ship, from the point of view of executives and investors at least. “I know that there is some exhaustion associated with prior changes at Unity that haven’t delivered the promised results, but 2025 is going to be the year where we bring to market products and services that will transform our position in the marketplace and provide a springboard to long-term growth,” he writes.

Bromberg proceeds to detail which bits of Unity need to be trimmed back. “Our product and engineering teams are currently stretched across too many products, creating complexity and limiting impact,” he argues. “Historically, we’ve engaged in extended debates about what our focus would be, which would prevent crisp decision making and limit release velocity. We also added people and created operating structures that were meant to speed us up, only to find they were slowing us down.” Ah yes, the Sonic the Hedgehog school of corporate planning.

There follows some squishy, open-ended language about Unity’s new company priorities. Firstly, Unity will be focussing more on “fidelity for ubiquity”, which appears to mean making Unity software work better on a range of devices rather than pushing the high end. “While we’ll always try to enable the best quality graphics we can, our primary directive is to help customers reach the widest possible audience across platforms and devices,” Bromberg writes.

They also plan to “invest in stability by tackling critical technical debt, making it easier for customers to build and run games while reducing risks tied to outdated technologies.” In other words, put less emphasis on coming up with new Unity tech and focus on getting existing Unity tech working better. And then there’s “platform extensibility”, which means helping developers running the Unity engine add to the tech as they please. Bromberg also bigs up the idea of investing in live services and generative AI, alongside giving Unity developers and advertisers access to more player data.

To facilitate all this, Unity are “bringing key technical teams together to ensure all product decisions directly support our new principle”, and making a number of other reorganisations across Unity’s offices in Montreal, Tel Aviv, Copenhagen, Seoul, Tokyo, and San Francisco. In the process they’ll be integrating several Unity services – “Unity Ads, Unity LevelPlay, and the Tapjoy offerwall” – into the core Unity Runtime technology, “so that they are on the same cloud and data platform and share a single data set”.

There’s a lot more detail in Bromberg’s memo, but again, it’s unclear how many people will lose their jobs as a consequence. If you’re one of those now looking for work, best of luck.