Fingers crossed they kill the Games Store.
Why?
Epic Games is laying off 16% of its staff
21–30 of 312 posts
Re: Epic Games is laying off 16% of its staff
#22Fingers crossed they kill the Games Store.
I love Unreal/Epic but I agree, feels like a distraction. Go back to 100% focus on making the best game engine possible by developing great games in house by using said engine.
Re: Epic Games is laying off 16% of its staff
#23Fortnite not quite the cash cow anymore? Or they've been burning too much cash on Epic Games store? Or something else? Article might say but can't tell because of the paywall.
Nothing lasts forever, even in video games. The number of games that have stayed strong as long as Fortnite is vanishingly small. It doesn't help that they're no longer on mobile devices, they earned a lot of money there Based on 3rd-party statistics they still have hundreds of millions of players, though.
Maybe those players hve stopped spending money in the cash shop though ?
Re: Epic Games is laying off 16% of its staff
#24I wonder if this is related to the class action that is just now finally going through the submission phase for people: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/03/...
No, those kinds of one-off events don't cause an otherwise profitable company to lay off people.
There are certainly situations where an adverse result in a lawsuit can lead to layoffs despite being a “one-off event”. I’ve worked on at least a few that were genuine “bet the company” cases. But a $245M loss is typically not in the ballpark for a big company. To trigger layoffs you usually need to be talking about billions or injunctions.
Re: Epic Games is laying off 16% of its staff
#25Fortnite not quite the cash cow anymore? Or they've been burning too much cash on Epic Games store? Or something else? Article might say but can't tell because of the paywall.
Fortnite is still a massive cash cow, but man they burn actual billions for the Epic Store which still isn't very epic and is missing most basic features.
It's actually mind blowing how much money they spend on user acquisition while the thing is still full of bugs!
Why does it take ages to open? Why did downloading some games launch another launcher that downloaded the game again? Why did it sometimes not switch to idle when in the background and keep wasting CPU? Why does the UI sometimes just randomly not work? Why is every interaction with it so slow? Why does it get exponentially slower the more Unreal Engine assets you have? Why is that even in the same launcher? Why can't I do basic things like open game pages in a new tab? Does anyone at Epic actually use this thing?
Most importantly, why did they do the stupidest PR moves imaginable, by "stealing" games that were already announced for another platform?
This is basic stuff, it doesn't take 5 years to figure it out! They had a once in forever chance to kill the unnecessary 30% tax booth that is Steam and they blew it by shipping this terrible software.
Re: Epic Games is laying off 16% of its staff
#26This is probably just continued post-COVID demand normalization. Basically all software and gaming got a massive bump that was obviously going to have an unsustainable component to it. But in many cases companies planned like it was totally sustainable and would continue. That’s why even super profitable companies like Microsoft and Epic are doing layoffs in 2023.
The other reason of course is that they went a bit crazy with the hiring sprees and accumulated some unproductive devs who are probably a net drag. That’s ultimately a healthy force in the economy as those people can do more in smaller firms with less in-house expertise (albeit at lower wages).
I wonder also how much of a driver new programmer productivity tools like copilot and ChatGPT are factoring into this. If your top 10% productivity workers just got a 30%+ productivity boost, that means you can easily shed the bottom 20% productive workers and still be ahead of the game.
Re: Epic Games is laying off 16% of its staff
#27Is this my fault because of all the free games I claimed?
Tim Sweeney would like us all to agree that it is Apple’s fault for their App Store policies.
Re: Epic Games is laying off 16% of its staff
#28Is this my fault because of all the free games I claimed?
Expect to be charged for their full price retroactively :)
Re: Epic Games is laying off 16% of its staff
#29Re: Epic Games is laying off 16% of its staff
#30Shouldn't there be games coming out fairly soon (next 1-2 years) that take advantage of Lumen/Nanite/Quixel/Metahuman? From my POV, the future looks bright for Unreal because those technologies give it a pretty crazy edge over its competitors, and that's not even taking into account the Unity fiasco.