Unity To Lay Off a Quarter of Its Staff

We are barely two weeks away from 2024, and we are already seeing more layoffs, this time of Unit. The company – which announced it would cut jobs shortly after the “fulfillment fee” controversy – is set to lay off 25% of its staff.

What's called a “business reset”

A regulatory filing (as reported by Reuters) says Unity will reduce its workforce by laying off about a quarter of its workforce. That equates to about 1,800 jobs in total, according to the filing, as the company “restructures and refocuses its core business.”

The Reuters report states that shortly after this announcement, Unity shares rose almost 5%.

The company already had to close branches towards the end of last year. So the news that many people are being laid off is unlikely to come as a surprise.

This all appears to stem from Unity's new fees, which force studios to pay additional fees every time a game built on the Unity toolkit is installed on a user's device. This caused a huge backlash from developers and the community.

Unity backtracked a bit, but many were concerned that the “runtime fee” didn't take into account how it would handle people installing pirated copies of games. As such, many independent teams and individuals felt they would be financially disadvantaged, and many vowed to abandon Unity altogether.