Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 584 posts

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

#181

Post by foolfoolz »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #95
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…

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…

there’s a huge component to gamers that they are emotional and resistant to change. gamers hated steam when it came out. and now the backlash against epic store is huge. they haven’t done a good job fixing the perception of epic store the way steam did

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

#182

Post by glenstein »

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.

Right. I think one way to think of your relationship to customers is you grow up with them. Trying to be intergenerational can be really hard because you have to keep winning over a new generation for the first time.

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

#183

Post by derektank »

cubefox wrote: post #151
filoleg wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (…

The game store doesn't need a lot of employees. A few years ago it was reported that Valve only needed about 70 employees to run Steam while it generated billions of dollars in Steam fees (30% per game). It's basically free money for Valve. I bet the situation is similar for the AppStore and Google Play. Though Unreal Engine does indeed need quite a few developers. Additionally, using UE is much cheaper (5% on games…

Steam doesn’t really attempt to gatekeep submitted content the same way that Apple or Google do so I would expect those companies to have much larger teams supporting, in mostly non-development roles. Steam support has also historically been kind of a joke (not sure if it’s improved in the last 5 years) though I don’t know if Google/Apple provide a better experience

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

#184

Post by BloondAndDoom »

yifanl wrote: post #92
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…

Because games is simply not a particularly profitable industry. There's a reason why Valve moved on from making games to being a digital landlord.

Games with micro transactions are one of the most profitable things that you can do today and fortnight being fortnight. There are tiny mobile companies being sold for billions and making massive profits with predatory mtx transactions. Gatcha games are doing extremely well, and fortnight is no exception.

Valve is making a killing over CS gambling and MTX as well, so not a good example. Steam is obviously making more but even CS itself would have made Valve a very successful and profitable company. Pretty much all of these build on predatory practices though.

If we are talking about games without MTX, yes that’s a very rough business.

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

#185

Post by yifanl »

anvuong wrote: post #162
yifanl wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at NVidia's stock price during the period when they announced a pivot away from gaming.

This is the worst take I've seen in a while on HN. Nvidia doesn't make games, and for its case, they can either sell the same die as a gaming GPU for $2,000, or as a server GPU for >$30,000, the math is simple and obvious, which is why the stock jumps. Epic doesn't have anything else besides the gaming market. And the gaming market is huge, it's more than music and movies combined , so please just stop spilling bulls…

Is the gaming market huge or is it 1/15th as valuable as an alternative for investors? Even if the answer is both, what's the net effect of this?

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

#186

Post by raincole »

josephg wrote: post #91
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…

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.

The biggest competitor to Unreal engine, Unity, once had ~8000 employees. And Unity doesn't even make games.

(Not saying this is justified, of course. I think Unity is pretty much doomed.)

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

#187

Post by glenstein »

Strom wrote: post #175
filoleg wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The small size of Valve is simultaneously mind boggling but also not, given its very intentional independence. I would have to imagine that they must contract out or have partners at least for their hardware relationships if not for their massively multiplayer online games. At just 350 people that's enough annual revenue to make everyone there a millionaire several times over. Simultaneously plausible but mind boggling.

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

#188

Post by applfanboysbgon »

foolfoolz wrote: post #181
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…

there’s a huge component to gamers that they are emotional and resistant to change. gamers hated steam when it came out. and now the backlash against epic store is huge. they haven’t done a good job fixing the perception of epic store the way steam did

> there’s a huge component to gamers that they are emotional and resistant to change.

This is just wrong. You portray people as being irrational / "emotional", but Steam was actively bad when it first launched. The fact that people changed their opinions on it when it later became actually good is not emotional, that's in fact exactly rational.

The Epic Game Store doesn't need to fix "perception", they need to fix their actual product instead of trying to take shortcuts to gaining users by burning hundreds of millions of dollars per year on exclusivity deals, which are extremely anti-consumer, and will obviously result in rational backlash against somebody blowing money to attempt to force people to use their product for access to a completely unrelated product.

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

#189

Post by [deleted] »

mvdtnz wrote: post #82
0pranav wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the following is the bare minimum to compete with Steam at this point: 1. Store with discoverability, 2. A functional cart feature at launch 3. A wishlist with notifications for discount 4. Relatively high download speeds (500Mbps at least) 5. Friends list and activity feed 6. Achievements 7. An equivalent to steam input API 8. Regional pricing with robust payment options 9. Development/Beta build distributio…

I guess everyone gets different value from different features but I for one would not even notice if Steam removed the overlay, achievements, activity feed, input API or beta distribution. It all seems like bloat to me.

[deleted]

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

#190

Post by jayd16 »

jasondigitized wrote: post #158
yifanl wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because games is simply not a particularly profitable industry. There's a reason why Valve moved on from making games to being a digital landlord.

I'm gonna need someone smarter than me to show me the numbers on that. Fornite by itself is insanely profitable.

A game can be massively popular but many many games fail to hit the mark. Many do not see success and many do not even ship.
Post reply on HN