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

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

#241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Roblox is a product for the Toys R Us crowd. You don't project from products that work for them on to what sells to teens and adults.

Technically, you need to include the adult predators as recurring revenue too.

why is this such a talking point about roblox? couldnt this be said about literally any online platform ever?

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

#242

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…

You know what contractors are?!

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

#243

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…

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 cost.

Unless they're making enough money on the exclusive games to justify the deals on their own (which, given this announcement, seems unlikely) I don't see how they or you think it could work.

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

#244

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…

One thing that steam does better than any other place is create an incredible store experience to sell games on. I don't think any other game distributor has an algorithm as good as theirs, and all the integrations and hookups that come with it. For example, Nintendo's shop page for each game is sparse in detail and lacks so much information buyers have access to in that game's Steam page counterpart. The store search and other store views display games far more efficiently than nintendo's search and store views, making it much easier to find what you're looking for in fewer clicks and fewer minutes.

if you have the time, try to find a game on nintendo vs on steam. Don't google for the pages, go to their base shop page and start from there. Try to avoid directly searching the title, instead search for keywords as if you're a gamer trying to recall a game suggestion you heard from a friend like 2 weeks ago. You'll notice the plethora of differences that combined puts steam on a whole other level of sales and content distribution if you go about it like that

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

#245

> "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…

bingo. At least they didn't use AI as the "excuse" for the layoffs though ...

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

#246
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It's not that hard, stop trying to 'force' me to use your platform. Just make it a nice experience. I feel like this is good advice, and should still be a pillar of building a business: prioritize customer satisfaction, and your happy customers will become repeat customers. But I don't think it's enough. Epic tried to launch a store in 2018, 15 years after the launch of Steam. That's 15 years of customers buying th…

Why did they need to make a store? Seems like there was no need for it...

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

#248
post #211

Not long ago I was looking at my favorite games of decades past. Unreal Tournament figured very prominently, made of course by Epic. So I wondered: why did they stop making Unreal games? I looked at their game chronology. On one hand, they made Gears of War, an Xbox exclusive that never interested me. And the other one? Oh, right: Fortnite. That's where Unreal Tournament went. They made tons of money for sure. But no…

Halo Infinite is the closest I've gotten to the UT feeling nowadays. Simple arena, equal playing field, drop in drop out, tools-not-loadouts design. It's a shame how a variable and strong design gets put off into the corner to wither.

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

#249
post #175

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.

Last I've heard Valve makes use of a lot of contractors however. So the number of people working on their projects is a bit higher than their employee count suggests. Anyone's guess how many though.

I know they're sponsoring a bunch of ARM and Linux projects as well.

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

#250
post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not that hard, stop trying to 'force' me to use your platform. Just make it a nice experience. I feel like this is good advice, and should still be a pillar of building a business: prioritize customer satisfaction, and your happy customers will become repeat customers. But I don't think it's enough. Epic tried to launch a store in 2018, 15 years after the launch of Steam. That's 15 years of customers buying th…

Why did they need to make a store? Seems like there was no need for it...

Maybe they saw the 30% cut Apple and Google were taking on their app stores and wanted in on the action?
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