this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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Epic Games is reportedly laying off around 900 employees | Said to be roughly 16% of its workforce.::UPDATE 4.54pm: Epic has confirmed reports of widespread layoffs at the company, saying the move will affect "around 830…

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Unity has 7700 employees, and they only create a game engine.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I have a hard time wrapping my brain around it taking 7700 people to create a game engine. But I'm not in that industry and have no idea what's involved.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Me neither, but iirc Valve has 300 employees total. It seems massively out of proportion.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 1 year ago

Yeah like Twitter had 7500+ employees before Elon went and fired 90% of them. Sure the site is worse off for it, but it still runs. Clearly most of that 90% were nonessential to the function of the company.

A lot of these tech companies are bloated like that

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

AFAIK most of them are salespeople.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

An engine is not just a kernel of 3 dimensionality logic and lighting principles. Engines are there to speed the development of games, and so are composed of lots of tooling and infrastructure for game developers to use. I’ll bet the core technology engineers and testers number 2000 and the rest are researchers, customer relations people, advertising, marketing, sales, lawyers, international market specialists, website managers, HR, corpdev (large deals / mergers) and of course the management layer. Really a lot of large corporations need a lot of the same apparatus. It would be great if you could find out, company by company, how many people it takes to actually build the product but the total number has to do with how many it takes to run the business.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It's hard for me to wrap my brain around since I've never worked in an org that large. Even when I worked at a large company my org was small compared to that.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Not just a game engine, Unity is a software company with numerous services. Mainly game related though. There’s the Unity ads platform which probably employs hundreds in Finland alone. Unity is used from entertainment to manufacturing industry.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Isn't that 2022 numbers? They've fired a lot of people lately, not sure the number they're at now

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

Yeah, my quick search unearthed the number from 2022.