Unity is laying off 1,800 employees, about 25% of its staff
In the company's biggest layoff ever, Unity Software is cutting 1,800 members, roughly 25%, of its staff.
Per Reuters, the latest Unity layoffs were revealed in a regulatory filing and internal company memo on Monday. The company reportedly said it expects to complete the jobs cut by the end of March. All teams and areas of the business will be impacted by the mass layoffs.
Unity is the development engine used to build games such as Pokemon Go, Hearthstone, Call of Duty: Mobile, Valheim, Beat Saber, and Cuphead.
"We are … reducing the number of things we are doing in order to focus on our core business and drive our long-term success and profitability," Whitehurst wrote in the memo sent to all Unity employees.
The news comes just a few weeks after Unity announced a company "reset" and let go of 265 employees, at the time about 3.8% of its workforce. The company's interim CEO and president Jim Whitehurst said then, "While no additions have been finalized, it's clear that we will reduce the number of things we are doing overall." This much more sweeping round of layoffs seems to be a continuation of that plan.
Unity was the target of a major controversy within the game development community back in September when it announced plans to charge developers a fee every time someone installs their game after a certain threshold. The company soon after issued a formal apology for the runtime fee but stopped short of removing it entirely, instead opting to soften some of its most controversial aspects.
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