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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

#411

Post by thunky »

ryandrake wrote: post #173
littlecranky67 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> they change the wrong things: usually making the game harder and more frustrating for casual players, in order to cater to pros and streamers

Interestingly the pros and streamers have the exact opposite complaint: that they dumb the game down for casuals.

Can't please everyone/anyone.

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

#412

Post by johnnyanmac »

2001zhaozhao wrote: post #326
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…

> pulling a Valve > Video games are the exact opposite of Infinite Growth Forever. People get bored and move on. To me, Epic Games were clearly trying to "pull a Valve" and capture the platform magic that allows Valve and other platforms like Roblox to be sustainably profitable. Obviously they have their own game store, but they also have a Fortnite Creative / UEFN (Unreal Editor for Fortnite) platform where people c…

Yeah, UEFN when you dig past the surface is rough. I think it's a mix of both your reasons. UEFN seems to be a spinoff of their Fortnite Creator workshop while making use of their new Verse scripting. If this was originally only meant to mod Fortnite, I can see why it's so half baked as a Roblox competitor. You really are pulling teeth if you want to make anything other than "Fortnite but X".

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

#413

Post by oblio »

nailer wrote: post #320
nozzlegear wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn't he? Why isn't he invested in the stakeholders?

> "The downturn in Fortnite engagement that started in 2025 means we're spending significantly more than we're making" He is - the stakeholders are his shareholders, who don't want him to run a loss, and to whom he is responsible.

In 1 phrase, the source of most evils in modern society.

A minority of people (shareholders) holding the majority of people (employees) at gunpoint.

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

#414

Post by laughing_man »

aaron425 wrote: post #360
bradleybuda wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunately it is their employees that are paying the price of leadership making it rain [...] Epic's employees reaped the gains while it rained in the form of paychecks. While it sucks that people are losing their jobs, those individuals received (much of) the upside of this investment and their jobs never would have existed in the first place had the investment not been made. Their paychecks are not being clawe…

For what it’s worth, Epic is a private company and employee upside has been capped in the sense that compensation has been mostly cash (and not Netflix tier cash). Exposure to equity may been a better way to share in upside and ensure some buy-in. IMO investing in a marketplace was fine, but hemorrhaging money for 7 years on non-performant software + free game bundles is probably not defensible from an executive stan…

In my experience the buy-in you get from employee stock programs scales inversely with the head count. I worked for a huge company that gave out stock options. Nobody was really motivated by the stocks, because the company was so large your individual contribution meant exactly nothing unless you were at least a VP. A vesting bonus of some kind would have done just as much.

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

#415

Post by abcde666777 »

bad_haircut72 wrote: post #395
ganelonhb wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You think they didn't have to apply themselves to be able to acquire those things? They just got it handed to them for free?

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

#417

Post by mikkupikku »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #366
mikkupikku wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could at the very least just package it up to run with Wine, but Sweeney is stubbornly set in his linux hating ways. I could use their store through the Heroic launcher, as I do with GoG, but I won't because fuck you Tim.

If we're being realistic from a business standpoint: Linux is at best, 3% market share. A very passionate 3%, but 3%. Using resources to support such a niche sector is a hard sell.

It's a glorified wrapper around curl, wine and a webview, a few interns could knock this out in a few months. For "3% market share" (growing every day, thanks to Valve) its a no brainer, but Sweeney has no brain.

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

#418

Post by laughing_man »

zaptrem wrote: post #194
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…

In my experience, the Epic Games Store downloads faster, installs more efficiently, and launches games faster than Steam. The social features I actually use (i.e., add a friend, join them in a game) work fine. I'm not aware of any features Steam has that EGS lacks that I actually use frequently (Valve's VR, streaming tech, and Proton are great, but I don't use those frequently). It's not just me, many indie game deve…

People are generally okay with monopolies as long as they feel they're benefiting from the monopoly instead of being taken advantage of.

Epic garnered a lot of ill will with all the early exclusives. If I have part 1 and part 2 of some franchise on Steam, and then part 3 comes out as an Epic exclusive, it's going to irritate me.

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

#419

Post by rounce »

ChoGGi wrote: post #379
jrozner wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People hated steam when it launched but you needed it to play CS 1.6. It made installing mods easier. Then HL2 released, orange box, and they were able to get a critical mass as they provided platforms support for other games. Steam got better. It’s still not great but they have so much market share that basically any PC gamer already has it. Epic wants some of that money. The problem is nobody wants to install anoth…

> People hated steam when it launched but you needed it to play CS 1.6. I thought CSS was the first release on steam beta? I remember playing the crap out of it, then the actual steam release happened, and it somehow turned into a laggy buggy hunk of crap for months.

No, it was 1.6 that was on the Steam beta. That was years before HL2 and CS:S were even leaked let alone released.

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

#420

Post by cyberrock »

ecshafer wrote: post #199
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

Exactly. Steam an launch was some other program you had to have running on your machine, that was buggy, taking up resources when most people were barely running most games (people upgraded computers to play Half Life 2!), and had no point. Steam with thousands of games, that regularly has (or had) massively deep sales that let you get games for cheap, barely uses resources (most players are not struggling now to run…

Without commenting on any other part of this exciting console war, I don't know if this is true. Steam on my machine still always consumes nonzero CPU when minimized, possibly because it opens to the busy animation/video-filled front page then its WebView doesn't detect minimization. It's funny how Steam never comes up in the "stop making WebView/Electron apps" discussion when they were the original sinner (yes I know they were using IE originally).
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