Unity’s recent layoffs are the result of a shift in the company’s strategy. This strategy will mean fewer features and improvements to the engine than before, and, like the adjustments to the pricing change, it will favour large developers more.
Unity has a product to sell, and that product has been fairly consistent throughout its lifetime. Unity’s product is focused on making games easier to make than they otherwise would be. The product is based on the theory that it will continue to let developers do more with less effort, and that Unity will be able claim some of what is saved through their fees. Unity’s product is very good and so lots of people use it, although some of them do not pay for it.
Unity’s previous strategy was to continue adding features that allowed even better games to be made even more easily and so be able to charge more. On paper, it makes sense, especially since Unity played such a large role in growing mobile gaming, and it makes porting to other platforms (a major factor in achieving success) quite simple. Some developers have never liked this approach, deriding its extra features and calling the company bloated, but this is how it has operated until now. It is now apparent that developers are not willing to pay what Unity thinks its product is worth, and so Unity is making substantial cuts to become profitable within the constraint its customers have established.
To get an idea of what a stripped down approach looks like, consider the open source rendering engine OGRE. It has been used to make successful independent games, but it involves considerable effort to produce a game since every other factor from handling inputs to a save system needs to be implemented. OGRE does not charge a fee, but it is not free because the effort required to turn it into a game isn’t free. OGRE can be thought of as lying on the opposite end of a spectrum from Unity, but the differences among the other alternatives are only a matter of degree. People pay for Unity over those alternatives because it does something better, allowing them to earn more through either saving on costs or selling more of their game.
Unity will not become impossible to use under the new strategy but developers will be missing out on the features that otherwise would have been created. Larger development teams can handle this change better than smaller ones, since the cost of filling in the missing capabilities is spread over more people. The consequences will be felt gradually, but the long run result is that it will take more effort to do what would have been possible had Unity not scaled back, and projects that can’t make up the shortfall through their own effort will be less competitive than ones that do.
Whether this is good or bad is a matter of opinion. I’d prefer to see fewer layoffs and more successful products, but not every idea is going to be financially successful. Unity is not that different from a game developer with a disappointing release being faced with hard decisions. The market has told them what they value and they are adjusting accordingly. Only the most callous are actively celebrating the layoffs, and developers are not entirely insincere in expressing regret or condemnation, but it isn’t entirely consistent with the long run sentiment they’ve expressed towards Unity either. Unity’s new approach, including the layoffs, is much more in line with what people are asking for. It’s a bit like how we don’t think too carefully about why our clothes are so inexpensive and express our preferences through what we buy.
Developers have pointed out that Unity’s financial health is not their concern. This is mostly true. Few of us think about the grocer’s costs when we buy eggs, and hearing that those eggs are more expensive because it’s more expensive to run the shop usually makes us more angry than a price increase without explanation. The difference is that Unity is a supplier to many businesses, and businesses should put some thought into their suppliers and their relationship over the long term. A garment manufacturer does need to think about where the cotton comes from since failing to do so means they can face a factory full of costs and no way to pay for them. A developer doesn’t need to think about a supplier’s profitability, but that supplier can make choices that affect the developer’s own profitability.
Sudden changes in cost, like Unity’s price change, are relatively rare. Often the costs are introduced more subtly. Twitch’s price has stayed the same, but it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when the site became a collage of advertising with a broadcaster in the middle. Devoted users will notice the retreat from a lot of Twitch’s ancillary services, but it is much more common to realize one day that there seem to be fewer people stopping by or that the site just isn’t what it used to be. We can expect the same for Unity. The old strategy was a great pipeline for premium features to wind up in the hands of small teams, but it cost too much to do, customers weren’t willing to support it, and so developers will be left to implement whatever does not align with the new “focused” Unity.
If the response to the price change is the primary cause, smaller developers do not seem to have done themselves any favours here. Few of the most vocal opponents would have paid the new fee and now they are going to lose something. They will not wake up one day to discover a smoking crater where the engine used to be, but they will spend more time doing things that might have been taken for granted under the old model. More work for the same price doesn’t benefit anyone, but it will be most acutely felt among the smallest teams.
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