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Epic Games to cut more than 1k jobs as Fortnite usage falls

reuters.com

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Re: Epic Games to cut more than 1k jobs as Fortnite usage falls

#171

Post by torginus »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #87

> "We're spending significantly more than we're making, and we have to make major cuts to keep the company funded," he said. Sorry, HOW?!? How can a company like Epic games with one of the most successful gaming products of the last few decades be losing money with a product that is so mature? Almost every other games developer would love to be in their position on Fortnite but they've somehow turned that into a loss…

Kids who play video games grow up, and get off Fortnite, and you have to convince the next generation to sign up.

And anyways, the population who plays these kind of live service shooters is relatively constant imo, and there are new games on the block nowadays.

Actually what's an anomaly is how long Fortnite continued to be popular.

Re: Epic Games to cut more than 1k jobs as Fortnite usage falls

#172

Post by [deleted] »

bakugo wrote: post #38
Tsiklon wrote: post #28

Fortnite is 9 years old this year. Epic brought in biblical amounts of money from just this one property over this time. Where and how did they spend this money?

Let's see... - Millions spent rushing out huge amounts of Fortnite content at a breakneck pace - Millions spent organizing, designing and marketing 5 new Fortnite collabs every week - Millions spent trying to wrangle Fortnite's spaghetti codebase as it crumbles under more than a decade of tech debt - Millions spent trying and failing to keep the content pipeline flowing at a constant speed despite the tech debt - Mil…

[deleted]

Re: Epic Games to cut more than 1k jobs as Fortnite usage falls

#173

Post by ryandrake »

littlecranky67 wrote: post #138
duped wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortnite is almost 10 years old, I'd be interested to see the average age of the playerbase. People have less time for games when they get older.

My nephew was deep into Fornite for years - now at 15 he (and his friends) moved on to GTA V. Imagine what a treasure trove of gaming you can discover as a teenager today, looking back at a pool of 15-20years of great games.

I started playing in my late 40s, but it got stale pretty quickly. Epic keeps changing things to try to keep it fresh, but they change the wrong things: usually making the game harder and more frustrating for casual players, in order to cater to pros and streamers. When I started playing, I could win a few matches if I got lucky. Three chapters / 15+ seasons later, I get spanked within 5 minutes of joining a match by people who live and breathe the game. I stopped playing because it's just not very fun for someone who just logs on once a week to play for a half an hour or so.

Re: Epic Games to cut more than 1k jobs as Fortnite usage falls

#174

Post by glenstein »

Ethee wrote: post #130
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren't losing money on Fortnite, they're losing money on vanity projects like the Epic Game Store where they spend tens of millions of dollars for exclusivity deals with developers, and give away free games to try to poach Steam users with an otherwise inferior product. Unfortunately it is their employees that are paying the price of leadership making it rain with their overflowing coffers they couldn't help but…

It's still funny to me that they would rather burn 9 figures in cash on these silly deals to try and 'trap' gamers on their platform instead of just... I don't know... making a better platform? The reason nobody competes with Steam is simply the sheer number of integration and platform features that make it easy to buy, play and share games with my friends. It's not that hard, stop trying to 'force' me to use your pl…

One of the more fascinating parts of the Xbox plan of attack for its new console is its apparent marriage of Xbox, Steam, and Epic among possibly others in a unified console experience. Having a true console like experience with a variety of PC game stores plugged in I think is a rare lane available for Xbox to try and do something other than reproduce Steam but worse, and I'm curious how it's going to go.

Re: Epic Games to cut more than 1k jobs as Fortnite usage falls

#175

Post by Strom »

filoleg wrote: post #111
josephg wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have ~5000 employees. Most game companies are a tiny fraction of that size. Even most AAA games are made by teams of hundreds. Not teams of thousands.

Epic Games does way more than just purely making games. They also have their own Steam competitor (Epic Games Store) and, more importantly, they develop and support Unreal Engine used by tons of other game dev companies. If you want an apples to apples comparison (i.e., other big live-service game companies) in terms of the employee count, you got: Mihoyo (Genshin Impact, Honkai Star Rail) - ~5,000-6,000 Riot Games (…

What about Valve itself? They have ~350 employees. They make Steam, SteamOS, Steam Deck, Steam Machine, Steam Frame, the Source engine, and run four actively successful live service games: CS2, Dota2, TF2, Deadlock.

Re: Epic Games to cut more than 1k jobs as Fortnite usage falls

#176

Post by raincole »

dylan604 wrote: post #152
CodesInChaos wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The epic store with its giveaways and exclusivity deals is probably burning money.

So I guess they are finding out that running an app store isn't very profitable and dare I say suggests that the percentage Apple charges was not unjustified?

Seriously? Are you seriously making this argument?

Are you seriously comparing running a PC app store vs App Store? One is the most open platform and the other has only one (1, uno, sole, single) app store.

Re: Epic Games to cut more than 1k jobs as Fortnite usage falls

#177

Post by sysworld »

jasondigitized wrote: post #142
Quarrelsome wrote: post #87

> "We're spending significantly more than we're making, and we have to make major cuts to keep the company funded," he said. Sorry, HOW?!? How can a company like Epic games with one of the most successful gaming products of the last few decades be losing money with a product that is so mature? Almost every other games developer would love to be in their position on Fortnite but they've somehow turned that into a loss…

This. You need to fire your CFO immediately if you don't have billions of dollars in cash after the run you just had on Fortnite.

They should've setup an endowment fund, could've been self sustainable by now.

Re: Epic Games to cut more than 1k jobs as Fortnite usage falls

#178

Post by lazyasciiart »

dylan604 wrote: post #152
CodesInChaos wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The epic store with its giveaways and exclusivity deals is probably burning money.

So I guess they are finding out that running an app store isn't very profitable and dare I say suggests that the percentage Apple charges was not unjustified?

No percentage will make it profitable when they are giving away the games.

Re: Epic Games to cut more than 1k jobs as Fortnite usage falls

#179

Post by MeetingsBrowser »

torginus wrote: post #171
Quarrelsome wrote: post #87

> "We're spending significantly more than we're making, and we have to make major cuts to keep the company funded," he said. Sorry, HOW?!? How can a company like Epic games with one of the most successful gaming products of the last few decades be losing money with a product that is so mature? Almost every other games developer would love to be in their position on Fortnite but they've somehow turned that into a loss…

Kids who play video games grow up, and get off Fortnite, and you have to convince the next generation to sign up. And anyways, the population who plays these kind of live service shooters is relatively constant imo, and there are new games on the block nowadays. Actually what's an anomaly is how long Fortnite continued to be popular.

I don’t think this is necessarily what is happening.

Roblox predates Fortnite by a decade and is only getting more popular over time

Re: Epic Games to cut more than 1k jobs as Fortnite usage falls

#180

Post by ronsor »

darkteflon wrote: post #168
ivraatiems wrote: post #65

I am not Tim Sweeney's biggest fan. I know he and his company have many detractors. Please read this comment with that in mind, because while I don't love them, I also think that as layoff announcements go, this is good. No beating around the bush, explicitly NOT blaming AI, taking responsibility, taking care of those impacted. If you are gonna do it, this is as good as it can get. I think the reality is that Epic go…

It’s a reasonable take, but I do think there is a wrinkle: Tim is an AI proponent, but also understands the current politics of it. Personally, I doubt that AI has nothing to do with this: Tim just knows not to admit it. Re Tim the man: I have no opinion on him, but I follow gaming news closely and know that he is polarising. However, I saw this recently in PC Gamer and thought it was admirable: https://www.pcgamer.c…

Companies fire people all the time. Layoffs are regular. To the extent that AI has much to do with layoffs in the past few years, it's mostly AI being used as an excuse, rather than it being the true reason.
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