Thread by @willgoldstone

Hey all, as promised I wanted to take some time to discuss how I feel things are with #Unity lately. I’ll make a thread of thoughts-as always, if you disagree with something- I’m not gonna try to win you over, your opinion is yours and valid based on your experiences. 🧵

Let’s do this one more time. My name is Will, I got bitten by a radioactive game engine, and for the past 11 years, I’ve been working at Unity doing everything from Support, to Education, to Product Management and now Product Design. I love my job because I help people create.

My opinions on this account are my own, and I do not always agree with every move the company makes. When I joined in 2011 I was employee 102, and it was easy to be involved in lots of decisions if you so wished, nowadays with around 7k employees, that’s less realistic.

I am someone however who has been around a long time, and have relationships with people at all levels from individuals on teams to executive leadership, so I’m often in discussions about what we do, and try to offer a perspective in return that I hope represents some of you.

In my time at Unity, we have historically done some things I am super proud of - we changed an industry, taught hundreds of thousands of people new skills and helped them build careers around our tech. That’s not me patting us collectively on the back, it’s just how I see things.

The games, apps, films - everything I’ve seen #madewithunity in my time working with and at Unity is why I still work here. It’s not what we do, it’s what you do with it.

The past few years I believe we’ve made some missteps, and I’d like to take a moment to acknowledge them, and of course please chime in if you have any thoughts on anything in this thread - now we’re 3 minutes in and finally getting down to it (what is this, a YouTube video?)

I’ll share a quick disclaimer here that I love all of my colleagues, and that none of what I am about to share is a criticism of their work, or their talents. They are also just my opinions from my vantage point that won’t match others internally.

Our launch of SRP wasn’t good enough. We didn’t resource teams involved adequately and focus on delivering the right mix of tools and tech. This has led to a lot of loss of faith as we created a lot of problems for you to work around, and for that I’m sorry, it sucks.

We added package management to Unity without product discipline for how we would ship features that way, which led to a loss of trust in our ability to ship quality & focus on the right things. I believe we’re in a better place now, but it added stress to you, I’m sorry for that.

We were premature announcing and promoting DOTS, and failed to communicate adequately. This compounded uncertainty for you, and I’m sorry for that. We had to get through several learning/breaking iterations, but we are now seeing your games shipping using that tech which is ace.

Pre-pandemic, there was a fatigue around new features and unfinished areas - you felt it, as did I. Around that time we made a change in leadership/direction to address that, and we got our bug count way down, and began to focus on improving foundations to honor your needs.

From late 2019 we also ramped up and built a Product Design community internally. It’s the group I’m now part of, and we’re having a real impact on our UX and more. I hope you start to feel the effects of this in many parts of what you see day to day in the coming years.

Nowadays I’m able to reach out to another member of our design community and find someone with active development work on the UX of most of our features. It’s a big shift-as a group of designers, researchers and technical artists we offer a good balance within our teams I think.

This is where you’ll hopefully start to see the fruits of that and updates to the things we have historically needed to improve. Things like Input, UI, Build Systems, Multiplayer, Collaboration (thanks Plastic!) are all getting a lot more love and have strong teams behind them.

But some of you didn’t come here to read all this stuff. You probably want my take on the last few weeks at Unity. I’ll start by saying again, whatever you feel about the product, the company and the people behind it, is not my place to disagree with - and I won’t be doing so.

First off - Communication - we have such a broad team at Unity these days from a ton of backgrounds. Sometimes we speak with our marketing voice first which can feel like we are selling you something you know perfectly well about. This often leads to a feeling of inauthenticity.

The reaction to this is often warranted - feedback that we aren’t speaking or listening properly, and combined with some of the missteps leads to an understandable mistrust. It is also compounded by an assumption I see from some that a public company is suddenly an evil entity.

The reality is we are a group of 7000 people. Not the other labels which I feel don’t create a useful discourse. We need a clear and concise discourse with you, and it’s something we are actively talking a lot about how to improve internally.

Next topic is Layoffs - Obviously this sucked. It was the first time in our history which made it more shocking. As these tweets are of course my personal opinion-I didn’t agree with many of the layoffs (I didn’t ‘agree’ with some, I just don’t know everyone or have the context)

One of the biggest frustrations was of course Productions team. I know some affected but none as well as @andytouch whom I’ve known for a long time, since he was one of my students pre-Unity. He's one of the hardest working, most talented people and I’m gutted his role got cut.

@andytouch Something you won’t hear in the press as it's not inflammatory enough was that of the 263 people, we managed to find nearly half of them new roles, which doesn’t make up for laying off a single person, but I’m relieved some people found new roles where projects were shuttered.

@andytouch The optics for you are that in laying off a Productions team, we don’t care about game development, or improving Unity. The reality is we have a lot of people working with studios, and working to create projects internally w/Unity. Gigaya was simply the newest/most well known.

Now, do I think we should have kept the team and adjusted what they were focused on? Absolutely. When we started Learn team in 2012, this was all we did- build things, critique the editor, make you tutorials. I still think it’s critical to our success and hope we hire more devs.

Next is ironSource. I think some of the negativity was that this is news not about the Engine / Editor. This felt extra jarring because this latest news came so soon after layoffs. So I totally get why it feels off.

The reality is, biz wise, our services are part of our revenue, and bolstering it is really important especially in an economic downturn for the tech industry. It’s not all about the company though, the tech will mean a lot of opportunity for many of you too.

This said, if you’re making something that doesn’t leverage things like Unity Game Services, perhaps you’re indifferent. That’s fair! I think with any announcement that doesn’t speak to you, if you’re waiting to hear news about what you care about, you’re going to feel left out.

I’d caution here about falling into the trap of assuming that just because we haven’t announced something about it, we are neglecting what you do care about. We need more balance in our comms, and to be way more open and direct about the core engine work we’re doing.

Next is John. What to say? I was gutted. I gave him the feedback that I was shocked and angry at his words last week. So was he. I doubt people who only know the cartoon of him will believe me but he felt genuinely bad, and embarrassed by the words he chose to speak about it.

That said, some of the memes you made are dynamite so fair play.

The frustrating part for teams involved in this is that the poor comms overshadowed the work they’re doing - solving the challenge of play-testing and learning from your players, that’s the exciting work being done I’m looking forward to anyway.

In summary, we have a lot of work to do. There is awareness of this not only at the individual but leadership too. We are working on some of our biggest challenges- silos, planning & communication, & much like me, we’re all always listening and trying to find ways to take action.

That sign-off is admittedly broad, so I’ll sssh now and start to pick up on the replies you all might have. Wish me luck ;) Oh check it out tho, all my i's are capitalized. Sweet.