Unity’s Sudden Lay-Offs: 5 AM Email

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Apparently, the entire Unity Behavior team was cut, alongside many other employees.

This just in: Software developer Unity Technologies has executed yet another round of massive layoffs – the sixth one in recent years – eliminating an undisclosed number of employees, including, apparently, entire departments.

Unity

The layoffs were first revealed in a LinkedIn post by Coline Turquin, a former Senior Software Developer at Unity and one of the affected employees, which states that Coline was terminated after five years as “part of the recent layoffs,” implying she was not the only one impacted. This implication was later reaffirmed by Florence Rolland-Soulier, who left Unity in 2023 due to the company changing too much from what it once was, who described the job cuts as “mass” and noted that “some of the brightest, most talented, most visionary” workers had been let go from Unity.

Shortly after, a post from Unity’s official forums gained attention on Reddit, revealing that what seems to be the entire team behind Unity Behavior, a visual tool for authoring behaviors used to control NPCs or objects, has been fired. “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,” wrote the affected Behavior developer, Shanee Nishry.

Moreover, former Senior Technical Artist at Unity, Peter Roe, not only confirmed the large scale of the layoffs but also revealed how Unity executives chose to deliver the news to him. According to Peter, he received a 5 AM (presumably PST, given his location) email informing him that he had been “eliminated” and that he would lose system access by the end of the day. The former employee found the announcement “completely abrupt and impersonal,” suggesting that the job cuts weren’t announced beforehand, even within the company itself. Please note that Peter has only described his personal experience, and other employees could’ve received the news differently.

At the moment of writing, the exact number of affected employees and the reason for the terminations remain unknown.

As mentioned above, this marks the sixth wave of layoffs within Unity Technologies, with the company losing 200-400 people in 2022, around 1,165 workers in 2023, and 1,800 workers in 2024. With that in mind, the number of affected developers could range widely, from a few hundred to over a thousand.

Source: 80.lv & LinkedIn