Update, Feb. 6: A new filing with the Washington state employment security department shows an additional 70 workers cut from Unity’s workforce in Bellevue.
A fresh round of layoffs at gaming giant Unity Technologies has impacted its office in Bellevue, Wash., resulting in the dismissal of 50 employees in Washington state, according to a new filing.
Unity said Monday that it plans to eliminate 25% of its workforce, or approximately 1,800 jobs worldwide. Reuters reports that the dismissals will affect “all teams, regions, and areas of the business.”
Unity Technologies, based in San Francisco, is best known for its eponymous game engine Unity, which has been used to build hundreds of video games over the course of the last decade. Less famously, Unity has also seen use in making films, training artificial intelligence, worker training films, and model creation for automakers and architects.
Unity is particularly pervasive in the mobile gaming space, where roughly 80% of the games that have been placed on the market in the last decade were made on Unity. This includes billion-dollar titles like Pokemon GO and Call of Duty Mobile.
This week’s dismissals at Unity are the largest in the company’s 20-year history, and come after a November layoff that affected 265 employees. In addition to its offices in Bellevue and San Francisco, Unity maintains locations in Austin, Texas; Calgary; Montreal; Pittsburgh; Vancouver; Port Coquitiam, B.C.; and Pereira, Colombia.
It also comes in the wake of last year’s controversy, which saw much of the video game industry openly revolt against a planned change to Unity’s terms of service. In September, Unity announced it would alter the terms by which it licensed its engine to game developers. This included the introduction of a new monthly “Runtime Fee” that could’ve resulted in studios being charged a price for each time their Unity-created games were installed by a user.
Unity later rescinded many of those licensing changes, but much of the damage was already done. In the aftermath, Unity CEO John Riccitiello stepped down and was replaced by Jim Whitehurst. Both the November and January rounds of layoffs are reportedly part of a plan by Whitehurst that calls for a “company reset.”
