[qwebfdzsh]

They are still massively over-bloated. Realistically they should cut at least another 30% or so (for some reason they still have about 50% more people than they did at the beginning on 2022).

Of course that would turn into a disaster due to obvious reasons (good luck firing the "right" people). So they are kind of screwed, no way can the generate enough income to support 7000 people without massive growth.

It's a bit of an apples to oranges but Epic for instance "only" has around ~4,5 employees yet just Fornite alone is reportedly bringing almost 2x more revenue than Unity's entire business...

Of course that might just be an indication that you can't really make much money (or even be profitable) from selling a game engine (licensing Unreal is just a side-gig to Epic after all, they made less than $300 mil from it last year).

[whywhywhywhy]

Epic did exist and make money shipping Unreal Engine before Fortnite, although Fortnite became a huge success I'd say that having people in the same building having to actually build a real product with the tools you make in that building is also the right attitude to being able to make tools that are profitable and work for real people.

Heard from a comment on here that all Unity tech demos use extreme custom tweaks on the base engine and then when that demo ships it all gets thrown out because it doesn't really function beyond what was demoed in a modular way an end user could benefit from it.

[qwebfdzsh]

But doesn't change the fact that financially Unreal is a side business for Epic (IIRC even their storefront somehow makes more money..). What's the point in making those tools if you can make significantly more money arguably in a much easier way?

This is way Unity pivoted into ads and is/was(?) trying to entire other areas like VFX/industrial etc. stuff. Charging per seat is just a terrible business model for a game engine.

> Heard from a comment on here that all Unity tech demos use extreme custom tweaks on the base engine and then when that demo ships it all gets thrown out

That's true, they didn't even throw out that stuff, demos were made on a separate branch of the engine by team(s) completely separate from the people working on the engine. That and most of the stuff they were doing in their demos is irrelevant for pretty much all of their users anyway (and obviously they weren't very effective at attracting VFX and AAA clients..). IIRC they canned most of their in house demo team back in 2022.

> building having to actually build a real product with the tools you make in that building

Honestly I'm not 100% sure about that. It's not like all teams have the same problems and workflows and it's not like Unity is not getting enough feedback from their users.