Hello I work for Unity (for now lol, we’ll see)! I’d like to just say from my end of things we do actually do a solid amount of R&D. Just that a depressing amount of it either never sees the light of day, takes so long to release it has already been done better by someone else, or is unannounced with little to no documentation on release so it never gets visibility. The other thing to note is that Unity does a lot of non-game things that might not be that noticeable if you’re just looking at it from a game making perspective, like our publicly known contracts we have to help train the military to “totally not kill people you guys”!
Damnit I was hoping I was in fast enough to be the Morrowind fan girl post but you’ve already mentioned it lol. Still play Morrowind, my favorite game, and the primary reason I’m in the game dev field.
You don’t really ‘finish’ Factorio, but a few months ago I FINALLY launched my first rocket after a thousand hours of play over 6.5 years. I just always had other things I was up to and for a long time launching a rocket mechanically did nothing so I had no incentive. Here I am detailing some of it at that other site
Unity tripled in size in like 4 years iirc. It is trying very hard to be a large company. Like the culture has been shifting from small company feel to big corporate feel for a while now (since before I joined). It still is clinging very hard to having small company feel though because that’s the kind of culture almost everyone here was sold on.
As far as the efficiency of our size, I’m honestly not super sure. We’ve been multitasking a lot and have cut things in the past, like Gigaya. My department has always felt understaffed and I get the vibe that a lot of departments feel the same. I haven’t talked to anyone that was like “my team is too big to function well”. So if there is an inefficiency issue it is maybe a broad thing that could be hard to see from any one part of the whole. That said I work in a very specific part of the company and don’t branch out a whole lot to other groups so my interdepartmental knowledge is limited.
I can’t get too specific on that one because people get fired for leaking meeting info (I’m hoping to keep this job for one more year wish me luck lol). But in my opinion the new CEO has been a lot more open about what’s going on. He’s very straightforward and has been engaging with us in a more human way than JR ever did.
I work at Unity. The brain drain is for real. It started 2 layoffs ago and is picking up speed. My department lost some really valuable workers, because layoffs are imminent they don’t let leads hire many replacements, and the resulting critical work gets dropped on people already doing full work loads. Some of the people my department has lost helped build core systems from scratch years ago so that intimate knowledge of those systems is just gone.
Gigaya, yeah. I have very little insight on that one it came as a bit of a shock internally too from my understanding. I really wish that project kept going it had a lot of value. From my point of view in my fairly limited position, the tech debt I deal with isn’t too bad but there are wild scaling issues from growing too fast in the last few years.
Don’t get me started on Plastic… There’s this weird thing that happens internally sometimes when we get to work on fun projects, like mini game jams kind of thing. Someone in the group will inevitably be like “We should use Plastic” and we all kinda have to go along with it because it feels like we’re not allowed to admit that Plastic blows. Then we end up frustrated and complaining about it but not switching to Git because again, can’t say out loud that one of our own tools doesn’t work well that would just be silly
I work for Unity, granted I’m just a lowly worker they don’t tell me shit. I honestly don’t know on this one, or rather I feel there probably still would have been but maybe not to the extent this one is rumored to be. Our change in leadership is the starting point for some internal reworks so it is possible if the pricing scheme worked JR wouldn’t have ‘resigned’ and we’d be operating on a more status quo basis. I suspect layoffs would have come down the pipes again sooner or later though