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Epic Games is laying off 16% of its staff

bloomberg.com

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Re: Epic Games is laying off 16% of its staff

#291

Post by danielvaughn »

danbolt wrote: post #285
danielvaughn wrote: post #30

Shouldn'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.

If those tools can give a productivity edge for the sort of experiences you’d see in AAA games, then perhaps! Tech demos don’t always translate into compelling interactive art, which can be challenging! I haven’t studied Unreal enough to say for sure, but I think those tools can be a boon if they enable a less technical developer to do things that normally took a lot more time.

Yeah this is a good point. It all hinges on what happens during real development.

Re: Epic Games is laying off 16% of its staff

#292

Post by Cloudef »

jzb wrote: post #95

From the announcement: "The company also announced that it’s divesting Bandcamp, an online audio distribution platform it acquired last year" I don't care a ton about Epic, but I love Bandcamp. It's my primary mechanism these days for discovering and acquiring music. I was puzzled when Epic bought Bandcamp, apparently they were too. They're being kicked over to Songtradr -- I hope that's a neutral to good move, but I…

Guess we can say goodbye to bandcamp then, sigh...

Re: Epic Games is laying off 16% of its staff

#293

Post by AraceliHarker »

jzb wrote: post #95

From the announcement: "The company also announced that it’s divesting Bandcamp, an online audio distribution platform it acquired last year" I don't care a ton about Epic, but I love Bandcamp. It's my primary mechanism these days for discovering and acquiring music. I was puzzled when Epic bought Bandcamp, apparently they were too. They're being kicked over to Songtradr -- I hope that's a neutral to good move, but I…

I think they were trying to expand the concert business on Fortnite.

Re: Epic Games is laying off 16% of its staff

#294

Post by xgkickt »

Reticularas wrote: post #135
eigenvalue wrote: post #26

This 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 cr…

No one in game and game engine development is using ChatGPT. It doesn't even work, even if it was productive, as barely any problems the average gamedev faces on a day-to-day have been surfaced to the training data of an LLM.

Not until legal approve it, which doesn't seem like any time soon.

Re: Epic Games is laying off 16% of its staff

#295

Post by kevingadd »

smugma wrote: post #50
kevingadd wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Mario is still going strong.

That's a franchise, not a single title. Though with live games like Fortnite you could argue they're basically releasing new games constantly with the amount of work that goes into it...

Re: Epic Games is laying off 16% of its staff

#296

Post by hucker »

jzb wrote: post #213
JAlexoid wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean... Bandcamp is also licensing, all of works of art "copy sales" are just licensing agreements. B2C is just commonly a preset non-commercial license. (I believe that Bandcamp also allows you to sell a commercial license) Let alone Bandcamp is a good source for smaller DJs to acquire tracks, which isn't a long shot for Songtradr.

Is it popular with DJs, over something like Beatport?

For some more leftfield genres Bandcamp is the only game in town

Re: Epic Games is laying off 16% of its staff

#297

Post by ddorian43 »

delfinom wrote: post #280
enriquec wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well... How are medical prices? Education prices? Food? Energy? Savings? Rent? Housing? What about the massive layoffs? Even if you're not struggling - many others objectively are dealing with the realities of a harsh economic downturn.

Food prices and related prices have been proven for awhile now to be mostly corporations massively increasing profit margins instead of inflation. Housing prices will continue to be an indefinite bubble due to boomer economics. Healthcare is a disaster in this country and will never be fixed because of Citizens United. None of this is due to the economic downturn.

What about the interest rates?

What is boomer economics?

Re: Epic Games is laying off 16% of its staff

#298

Post by sofixa »

enriquec wrote: post #202
johnvanommen wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might be the most succinct description of where we're at right now, that I've read all year.

Kind of - but it ignores the fact that the tightening was to fight inflation due to insane amounts of government spending. And the government just upped the ante and is spending more. Right now the national debt is growing faster than the economy. Expect everything to get a lot worse.

How do you explain the inflation found in EU countries, even ones with vastly different government spend and national debt profiles?

You're overfocusing on one single component of a fairly complex system. Government spending, COVID impacts (pent up demand, supply chain disruptions), a massive war in Europe impacting multiple crucial raw materials - they all have a part in the stagnation / borderline recession we're seeing. Anyone claiming it's "simple" or due to one single factor either has an agenda or doesn't understand how complex economics are.

Re: Epic Games is laying off 16% of its staff

#299

Post by HellDunkel »

3minus1 wrote: post #192
paxys wrote: post #60

Why are people still reading tech layoff news and trying to attribute it to specific problems at a company? Remember that Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Salesforce, Shopify etc. laid off large chunks of their workforce while collectively making hundreds of billions of dollars in profit. Companies lay off people because they can, simple as that.

> Companies lay off people because they can, simple as that Pretty cynical and unfair IMO. Meta layoffs were the first time the company did layoffs in its entire history. Layoffs are super unpopular with employees. It's not like they wanted to do it. This argument is lazy. Like suddenly there's a huge wave of layoffs, and your explanation is "they could." That really offers no explanation for why it happened now vs.…

In banking and consulting this is not unusual. Some let go the lowest perfoming 10% every year. They do it because it is beneficial to their case and there is no resistance.

Scaling quickly has risks and the current wave of layoffs is just a way to minimize risk. It is probably better this way than raising tons of cash until things are falling apart and you are forced into panic mode.

Re: Epic Games is laying off 16% of its staff

#300

Post by currymj »

skydhash wrote: post #236
currymj wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you're developing code for a large codebase with stable requirements in a company with good engineering practices, and your work output is the working code itself, it's hard to see that it would be very useful. if you have to glue together multiple unfamiliar APIs and packages, maybe even seeing a couple new ones per day, you often throw away your code, and your work output is something else with writing code only…

> if you have to glue together multiple unfamiliar APIs and packages, maybe even seeing a couple new ones per day, you often throw away your code,... Maybe take the time to be familiar with them? I think that is a description of an unhealthy job. It's like asking an average mechanic to handle optimizing for an f1 car in day 1, then asking him to improve the endurance of a rally car the next day! Then telling them the…

i don't think the car analogy is good because cars are expensive to build and maintain, usually are used more than once, and it's very bad if they crash. these properties are true of some software but not the kind of software i'm talking about.

maybe a better analogy would be if you travel to new cities a lot, and have to navigate, you don't want to memorize a map of all the city streets and learn in detail the transit schedules on each rail and bus line, you just care about a few routes a few times. and Google Maps can make your life a lot easier. on the other hand if you lived in that city, it would quickly become pointless to take out your phone all the time to plan a commute to work.

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