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

391–400 of 584 posts

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

#391

Post by johnnyanmac »

hamdingers wrote: post #243
bergheim wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everybody says this. It's so weird. How on earth will epic win without exclusives? It's like launching some Facebook competitor "but you get two profile pictures". Noone would switch. All these geeks singing steam and lamenting competition. Competition bad for me mkay, steam good. /me shakes head

How do they win with exclusives? The strategy is nonsense. For Sony, I get it. I want to play Demon Souls, I buy a PS5, now I own a PS5 I'm gonna buy more games for it. But for EGS this doesn't make sense. It costs me nothing to install both stores on my PC. I buy Alan Wake 2 on EGS, great, that doesn't make me any more likely to buy the next game I want there. Nothing about the platform is sticky or requires a sunk…

Historically, exclusives have been the only way to get an edge in. And it only takes one system seller to pull it off.

Or at least, that's how it worked 20 years ago. Thing is, games got so diverse, as well as the rise of "forever games" that there's fee actual "systrlem sellers" these days. It's really just GTA that comes to mind now.

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

#392

Post by johnnyanmac »

hamdingers wrote: post #306
lux-lux-lux wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is definitely wrong, Steam’s stickiness is a massive selling point.

What part? Finish your thought. Steam is sticky (social features, network effects, etc) and EGS is not, so EGS exclusives do not work. What part of this is "definitely wrong"?

It's called a network effect. At some point, you use it because you use it. And without any killer feature, you have no reason to move. It's not "wrong", but it explains why "just do better than Steam" does not work.

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

#393

Post by ganelonhb »

abcde666777 wrote: post #390

A lot of folks wax sympathetic for the employees who've been laid off. But rare is the company which grows large and doesn't develop a lot of entropy in the process. Hiring beyond its needs, bloating, and mismanagement of resources. Does the company owe a living to those people that it doesn't actually benefit from having on board? Sometimes it sounds like people think so.

This will be an unpopular take but I agree with it mostly. Always remember that you are not entitled to a job just because you need it to live. Always make sure you stay sharp and prepared for the worst case

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

#394

Post by johnnyanmac »

usrusr wrote: post #384
johnnyanmac wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steam was first to market and it took forever for competitors to form. It being a good service is secondary.

If Valve started to routinely do Bad Things on Steam they'd be gone pretty quickly. Many would go to GoG, some just stop buying games. Bad Things do occasionally happen (bad things like those "oops, we don't actually have licenses for the music used in the game you bought" revokes), but Valve keeps succeeding in keeping it to a rather low background noise level. Competitors have two decades of being that good or bett…

I heard the same thing for Discord last month, and reddit and Twitter a few years back. It kind of worked for Twitter due to be outstandiningly bad, but it still didn't "kill" Twitter in the colloquial sense.

I don't see it going down any differently with Steam. It may take a dent and open up a competitor, but it won't do a move so catastrophic that it losses its leader status from that alone.

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

#395

Post by bad_haircut72 »

ganelonhb wrote: post #393
abcde666777 wrote: post #390

A lot of folks wax sympathetic for the employees who've been laid off. But rare is the company which grows large and doesn't develop a lot of entropy in the process. Hiring beyond its needs, bloating, and mismanagement of resources. Does the company owe a living to those people that it doesn't actually benefit from having on board? Sometimes it sounds like people think so.

This will be an unpopular take but I agree with it mostly. Always remember that you are not entitled to a job just because you need it to live. Always make sure you stay sharp and prepared for the worst case

If you're not entitled to a job, neither is anyone in the capital class entitled to own shit, they own the best houses, all the means of production - they're not entitled to any of that either.

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

#396

Post by johnnyanmac »

rdtsc wrote: post #131
CodesInChaos wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Wonder how developers working on profitable parts feel about it. I’ve been at an employer who burned their cash on vanity projects and hubris and turned around to people working on the bread and butter profitable parts and said “sorry hard times hit, no bonuses this year, we have to tighten our belts”. It's when I left.

That's pretty much every tech company these days. People wrongly claim they "over hired", but in reality these companies were trying to open up a half dozen new initiatives all at once. I worked at Unity and you'd be surprised what aspects were worked on (publicly, so I can pull it up if interested " that you probably never heard of.

Those all shuttered as companies went into maintenance mode. I'm sure Epic has similar reactions. I remember them going pretty hard on cinema and architecture, but those have been quieter over the years.

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

#397

Post by johnnyanmac »

dylan604 wrote: post #235
raincole wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And which one of them are we reading about laying off employees while admitting they are spending more than they are bringing in?

Google has had plenty of layoffs by now. I don't think Apple has, but they have been not continuing contracts.

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

#398

Post by gverrilla »

uyzstvqs wrote: post #297
yoyohello13 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just make it a nice experience. Haven’t you been paying attention? That’s not how we do things in business anymore…

Steam does. That's why they're the undefeated king. This applies to everything. If you see a product category where users are legitimately unhappy; then enter it, build something actually good, you'll be the biggest and richest in no-time.

> If you see a product category where users are legitimately unhappy; then enter it, build something actually good, you'll be the biggest and richest in no-time.

In what role-playing game?

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

#399

Post by tharkun__ »

wongarsu wrote: post #370
mort96 wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I don't agree. The reason I personally prefer Steam is that all my existing games are on Steam so if I keep buying on Steam I don't have to make and maintain accounts on other stores, if I keep buying my games on Steam I can keep using Steam as my only…

Another big thing is trust. With any of these digital markets I'm not truly buying games, I'm purchasing a revocable license. That requires a certain amount of trust that the platform isn't going to screw me over. Steam isn't perfect: they initially had to be forced to offer refunds, and their item economy enables barely disguised gambling. But by and large they have behaved very predictably and consumer-friendly. So…

The big "test" there for Steam will be when "Gabe goes away". It's gonna happen sooner or later.

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

#400

Post by TitaRusell »

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…

Steam has been around for 20 years and gamers really, really care about their Steam profiles.

Valve has created a kind of gaming Facebook.

You can't replace that.

Post reply on HN