Game engine maker Unity said it plans to acquire Ironsource, an ad technology company, in a press release this morning. The news arrived just two weeks later Several rounds of layoffs rocked the companywhere the rest of the employees are not really excited about this strategy.
Unity will merge with Ironsource, which they describe as — and prepare for salads in the press release — “the leading business platform empowering mobile content creators to turn their apps into successful businesses , extensible” in an all-goods sale agreement. Once completed, Ironsource will become a part of Unity’s operations, its CEO will gain a seat on Unity’s board.
Perhaps best known for producing the widely used game engine — a set of creative tools used to create video games — of the same name, Unity has undergone a bit of a transformation in the past few years. past year. Last year, Unity bought Weta Digitala visual effects company that has worked on movies like Avatar and Lord of the Rings, for $1.6 billion. It also purchased the game streaming platform Parsec for the north is 300 million dollars.
This spending strategy doesn’t provide much job protection for current employees. Last month, Agree to lay off 4 percent its workforce, totaling hundreds of employees across departments. Following the layoffs, employees questioned and expressed frustration about the company’s priorities, according to internal Slack logs viewed by Kotaku.
“My problem is not with those companies, or any of their employees — you guys are great!” one employee wrote on a Slack channel following the news of the layoffs last month. “My problem is to pretend that we [are a] company with values like ‘in it together’ when employees can be thrown aside. “
It is unclear what safeguards, if any, are in place to prevent Ironsource’s workforce from facing a similar fate. Representatives for Unity and Ironsource did not respond to requests for comment at the time of publication.
If you are familiar with Unity’s business strategy and want to chat, enable or disable saving of content, my inbox is always open: anotis@kotaku.com (Signal and Proton on request).
Ironsource represents a shift in Unity’s strategy that seems to indicate a company is prioritizing profit over product. Previous acquisitions often have anything else related to video games, whether it’s Weta’s VFX expertise or the multiplayer netcode understanding of something like MLAPI, Get unification in 2020. Ironsource is all about making money.
“The general mood at the company is that the entire company is, at this point, horribly mismanaged,” said another former employee. Kotaku, said on condition of anonymity. (Based on the employees I spoke to, this seems to be the general feeling. One even told me their department doesn’t have any deadlines.)
After last month’s layoffs, executives declined to answer questions like, “Have executives ever discussed the size of their exorbitant pay and the potential for cuts to save money?” save the workforce yet?” former employee said. “I guess yes, they did, but dismissed it because they wanted their new beach house in Malibu.”
