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Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite and Unreal Engine, is laying off a whopping 16% of employees (or around 900 people)

Nvzman

Member
Tim blames Fortnite but I think reason why he's blaming Fortnite is because it's not making enough revenue to cover the absolute money pit that is the Epic Games Store. Wasn't it discovered that Epic was bleeding money like crazy on it the whole Apple v Epic trial? Fortnite was likely the thing keeping those costs sustainable.
 

OGM_Madness

Member
Maybe they figured out AI tools could do the work of 900 people?

I wonder what areas got fired.

As a huge fan of Rock Band, I wonder how this could impact the life support machine connected to RB4, which is still receiving DLC and still has a Rivals schedule running.

I will only accept the death of RB4 when RB5 gets announced.
 

Varteras

Member
A layoff of epic proportions.
Stop It And You GIF
 

ReBurn

Gold Member
It's crazy that Epic ever got that big in the first place. They had to know Fortnite money wouldn't last forever.
 

violence

Gold Member
Oh, this isn’t the Fortnite team. It’s epic as a whole. 900 people being 16% seemed like a shit load of people.
 

Robb

Gold Member
With slow Fortnite growth maybe they’ll get off their asses and make a new game for once.

Couldn’t really care less for Epic but sucks for the people affected, of course. Happy to hear they got a six month severance at least.
 

Danknugz

Member
What are the roles / positions of these people? I hate when articles mention tech layoffs but don't bother to distinguish between laying off real developers, vs fresh junior devs, versus middle managers, project leads, "content creators", and down the list into a ton of roles that are barely work in the first place.
windows admins with leet poweshell skills and other low level dev jobs that chat gpt can do
 

StereoVsn

Gold Member
  • Basically positioning Fortnite as “Metaverse” kind of failed.
  • Then bunch of money wasted on EGS which is completely pointless from income perspective
  • Tilting at windmills, fighting the 30% Google and Apple fees. Lawyers aren’t cheap at that high end.
  • Loss of income from iOS due to above.

Basically a bunch of of stupid decisions leading to the layoffs. Not to mentions unnecessary acquisitions they are dumping.

That said Tim Epic isn’t wrong about layoffs at MS, Google, Amazon and Meta. Most of they were complete bullshit.
 
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TIL Epic owns Mediatonic

Would be weird if they shut down Fall Guys before the FFXIV collaboration is out next year
 
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Tim Sweeney, a man worth 4 billion + decided today that he needs to layoff close to 1000 people from a company taking in billions a year…this will always be the biggest load of shit in cooperate culture. Laying off employees while you are making profit but not enough profit so your billionaire owners can have a bit more.
 

skit_data

Member
Could it be that UE5 is starting to come together and that at this point in time there is no need to be fully staffed in the same way? It does sound like a lot of people though.

One would think that that a sudden influx of developers that abandon the Unity-ship (I can't imagine it not happening to some extent, at least among those that are in the earlier stages of production) would result in them hiring people.

WTF, this can't be real!? All the devs from Mediatonic (Fall Guys devs) laid off?


Yeah, that's unexpected af. I might be completely wrong but Fall guys can't be a very resource intensive operation to maintain in relation to its popularity/profitability?
 
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NickFire

Member
I feel like Fortnite's slower growth or lower profit margins is way too convenient to be the main reason for such a massive layoff. But on the other hand, there has to be a point where kids have enough skins to tide them over since they don't really benefit the player in a meaningful way.
 

StueyDuck

Member
I wonder if it was just a late social media and community manager purge like we saw earlier this year

Or if their in serious trouble financially

Edit: media tonic too hmm seems more serious
 
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IFireflyl

Gold Member
Who? Never heard of 'em.

Also you:

EA Play 2020: Defund the Epic Games Store Edition
XWbyvID.png


All fine except for Diabotical which actually got refunded as they moved their business over to Epic Game Store. Glad I got my money back as that game is pretty much dead now.

I also backed Mavericks: Proving Grounds (for some reason the website is still up) which was a valuable lesson in telltale signs of overpromising and being far too ambitious for their own good. Basically 30eu down the drain as that game got cancelled before it even made it to a decent playable state.
Imagine if Sony and MS finally team up to take on #1: Nintendo.

Although I reckon they'd need a third party for that (along the lines of Epic Games) to really stand a chance imo.

Old Men Laughing GIF by ABC Network


P.S. Let EGS burn.
 

Thick Thighs Save Lives

NeoGAF's Physical Games Advocate Extraordinaire
Looks like not everyone working at Mediatonic were laid off, however, they were still heavily impacted by today's round of layoffs.

 

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
It'd be interesting to know what kind of overall profitability Epic has because on Fortnite alone googlng it, they've probably made about $15-20B in sales alone since it came out.
 
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Quite a few of the responses in this thread are my weekly reminder that the GAF bubble is a very real thing.

Loads of respect to those of you here actually willing to do the research and run the numbers.
 
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