[HN Gopher] Epic Games to cut more than 1k jobs as Fortnite usag...
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Epic Games to cut more than 1k jobs as Fortnite usage falls
https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/news/todays-layoffs
Author : doughnutstracks
Score : 207 points
Date : 2026-03-24 15:09 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| adrianhon wrote:
| 1000 layoffs represents around 25% of Epic's total workforce.
| Thev00d00 wrote:
| Ouch, that is huge. I assumed this was more like 10%
| BoredPositron wrote:
| I hate that Tim got lucky two times with initiatives of employees
| that went against his will. I hope epic falters.
| mdrzn wrote:
| More info on this? What are you referring to?
| MeetingsBrowser wrote:
| My guess is one of them is Fortnite.
|
| Rumor is Fortnite was stuck in development hell for a decade
| and was used as a punishment assignment for under-performing
| devs.
|
| The Fortnite team added battle royal mode on a whim after a
| mediocre initial release and it has churned out five billion
| a year in revenue every year since.
| xvxvx wrote:
| As far as layoff packages go, this is pretty good. 6 months
| health insurance and at least 4 months pay. The last 2 layoffs I
| experienced were just 1 week pay for every year you worked there
| and zero extended health benefits. And they made sure to note
| that they didn't have to pay out anything at all, legally.
|
| The wording of the announcement is better than the usual
| corporate non-speak too.
| matsemann wrote:
| > _they didn't have to pay out anything at all, legally._
|
| And still the overwhelming sentiment on HN is that unions are
| worthless.. When my company had layoffs the laws (thanks to the
| unions) made it favorable to us without needing the goodwill of
| the company. Additionally, representatives from the union were
| involved in all steps and made sure everything went as it
| should.
| Anvoker wrote:
| Were unions involved in Epic's layoff?
| tombert wrote:
| I think they're arguing that it should not be up to the
| companies being nice. Yeah, Epic's layoffs were nice, but a
| lot of companies give shit or no severance at all.
|
| I've been laid off and I only get paid until the end of the
| week, and for healthcare the only thing I have access to is
| overpriced COBRA.
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| Is COBRA your only option? Have you checked your state's
| insurance marketplace?
| tombert wrote:
| Well I have a job now so it's not as big of a deal. This
| was awhile ago.
|
| I live in NYC, and when I was laid off from a job in
| 2023. I looked into the COBRA options, and they wanted
| something like $3500/month, which is a lot of money. I
| called around around and I was eventually able to do a
| program through NYC where we got insurance for free. It
| actually worked great; we were able to get insurance
| within a week. NYC ain't perfect but every now and then
| they come through.
|
| If I get laid off or fired, I will likely check this
| option again.
| paxys wrote:
| There is a legally required 60 day notice period, and plenty of
| states have their own requirements on top. New Jersey for
| example explicitly requires 1 week of severance for every year
| worked. Yes tech companies are often more generous, but doing a
| mass layoff with no notice and no severance was never an option
| to begin with.
| CodingJeebus wrote:
| > Today we're laying off over 1000 Epic employees. I'm sorry
| we're here again. The downturn in Fortnite engagement that
| started in 2025 means we're spending significantly more than
| we're making, and we have to make major cuts to keep the company
| funded.
|
| Layoffs really, really suck, but at least there's not a whiff of
| the "we're doubling down on AI to boost productivity" cop out
| that we're seeing across the industry.
|
| It's sad that a company being honest about a difficult decision
| is praiseworthy these days, but here we are.
| georgemcbay wrote:
| > Layoffs really, really suck, but at least there's not a whiff
| of the "we're doubling down on AI to boost productivity" cop
| out that we're seeing across the industry.
|
| I agree, though it might also be worth pointing out that for a
| game company there's some risk in that messaging that doesn't
| exist for a normal SaaS company. Investors might like to hear
| it (whether it is the truth or not), but the game-playing
| audience tends to be only slightly less anti-generative-AI than
| say the art community.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > it might also be worth pointing out that for a game company
| there's some risk in that messaging
|
| This.
| pram wrote:
| I've wondered how much money was burned on Tim Sweeneys quixotic
| quest to re-create the Steam store. I know a lot of people who
| would religiously download the "free games" but never spent a
| cent.
| fidotron wrote:
| In fairness, someone has to try. We can't rely on GabeN being
| (relatively) benign without serious competition.
| gonzalohm wrote:
| Everyone has tried already. EA, Ubisoft, Blizzard, Epic...
| fidotron wrote:
| I was at EA during peak Origin mania and the defining
| regret of my career is not having slapped sense into the
| appropriate people when I had the opportunity to do so.
|
| We really did have a far better shot at it than even most
| insiders appreciated (to the point rival companies would
| tell me to my face how confused they were by the apparent
| failure to execute), however, the core team were more
| interested in fighting over who would take credit for it
| when it succeeded than ever ensuring that it would.
| shimman wrote:
| Always thought the hate against EA Origin was unwarranted.
| They 24 hour no questions ask refund policy back in ~2010
| that took steam like 5 years to implement themselves.
|
| Outside of being forced to use a game launcher to launch
| their games, what was the real crime? Not enabling gambling
| on their platform like steam?
| Maken wrote:
| The main problem with EA Origin was EA itself. They have
| burnt every single bit of costumer trust EA as a company
| could have.
| shimman wrote:
| Yes but EA Origin was still very consumer friendly at
| that time. They were one of the only people offering
| digital refunds at the time. Being able to refund a game
| on origin then buying a different one on steam was
| definitely a peak in consumer gaming (that plus the
| humble bundle being good added to the feeling).
| mylies43 wrote:
| I agree with you about the consumer friendlyness at the
| time and honestly it was not bad at first, but the
| problems they had were way more technical with
| difficulties in buying and downloading and hell even just
| friending someone and jumping in. When it first came out
| I thought it was decent and improving but then it
| just....stopped. They could have competed with Valve but
| it really felt like they stopped caring one day
| lreeves wrote:
| I bought Battlefield 2 and it's DLC and one of the
| earlier Dirt games on EA Origin and it was an absolute
| nightmare. My games and the DLC would constantly not be
| authed in my account and I still have like dozens of
| support threads in my old mailbox trying to get things
| working.
|
| At the same time Steam had polished a lot of the rough
| edges like this for their catalog and other publishers so
| there's really no excuse. I've never had to open support
| tickets with any other storefront because the DLC map
| pack for a game would stop loading while the base game
| kept working.
| josephg wrote:
| > Outside of being forced to use a game launcher to
| launch their games, what was the real crime?
|
| To me, this was the crime. Me and my friends played mass
| effect 3 multiplayer around launch, which was an EA
| Origin exclusive. It was a total pain! All of us needed
| to download and install the launcher, then buy & download
| the game through it. Then add each other as "EA origin
| friends". The whole process was riddled with bugs at the
| time - including payment problems and download problems.
| Origin would crash sometimes. Sometimes we couldn't see
| each other in multiplayer, and needed to restart origin
| to fix it. Sometimes another of our friends would join us
| - and it was always "oh god, what do I have to do to make
| this work??".
|
| I really love mass effect 3. But the experience was
| traumatic enough that I never bought or played anything
| through EA Origin ever since then. The quality of Steam
| is table stakes now. And there's so many good games
| coming out that game exclusivity usually isn't enough to
| get you over that initial hump.
|
| The biggest gripe I have with the origin launcher (and to
| a lesser extent, the epic launcher) other than "why does
| it exist at all?" is how laggy all UI actions are. Game
| developers can render a 3d world at 120+fps. Why on earth
| does it take multiple seconds for the UI to respond to a
| button press sometimes? Its completely inexcusable. The
| blizzard launcher is (IMO) the best launcher by this
| metric. You can tell competent people made it, because
| everything responds instantly. (The EA launcher might be
| good now, I wouldn't know. I mostly only play games that
| release on steam.)
| sph wrote:
| Everyone that needs to respond to shareholders has tried
| already, and failed against a privately-owned company.
|
| Gabe Newell is a billionaire and has shown no particular
| need to enshittify his brand just to extract more profit.
| May he blessed with health and a long life.
| CodesInChaos wrote:
| Most of those didn't try to create an open store. They only
| tried to create a store and launcher for their own
| products.
| 0pranav wrote:
| 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
| distribution as easy as steam. 10. A useful in-game overlay
| with at least performance metrics. optionally a web browser
| and notes.
|
| All of the competition has missed either one or more of the
| features, making them feel like only a cash grab trying to
| avoid Valve's cut for providing these features.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| 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.
| Akronymus wrote:
| Missing a few things there: Reviews and working on linux,
| for example.
| mylies43 wrote:
| Reviews for sure but I think you could drop linux and
| just add it whenever everything is stable, I don't think
| Linux is that big of a gaming population( though growing,
| thanks deck! )
| apparatur wrote:
| Those features are important but I think the key things are
| the actual games and friends. You cannot start with empty
| catalog and you also cannot start with older games people
| already own on Steam. You also need friends to be there on
| day 1 for multiplayer.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| If Epic wasn't actively hostile toward Linux (to the point of
| calling Linux cancer) I could be persuaded, but as it is now
| Steam is basically the only company actually trying to make
| gaming on Linux a thing. And because of that Steam will
| always get my money.
| Rapzid wrote:
| It's a noble quest. And realistic; it's almost beyond reason
| how bad EGS is/was for so long with so much money and "the best
| people" thrown at it for a decade+.
|
| Anway, it's not quixotic IMHO.
| fidotron wrote:
| I've been involved enough with a few (mobile and PC) efforts
| in this direction, and now believe the US business culture
| can't create new ones in established markets.
|
| The reason is the highly successful competitor, in that case
| Steam, inspires a sort of megalomania in those aiming to
| compete with them, which leads to spectacular self
| destruction and consumer confusion as stores try to act big
| long before they are self sustaining.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Also really makes me question your average USA based
| developer. Making a program and storefront to manage few
| dozen to few hundred applications can not be that
| complicated problem. I am not here even talking about scale
| of Steam libraries that outlier customers have.
|
| There must be some fundamental problem with either
| developers or management system or both...
| zem wrote:
| my completely uninformed speculation is that they didn't
| want to just build a clean, simple store that got out of
| your way, they wanted to throw in some sort of rent
| extraction or user control at every step.
| fidotron wrote:
| Right, to apparently every MBA wielding PM they are
| actually primarily user ID systems which allow you to buy
| things (including whole games).
|
| And doing this requires including a near complete web
| browser with piles of added hooks, obviously.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > Tim Sweeneys quixotic quest to re-create the Steam store
|
| Building a marketplace or AppStore isn't quixotic - it helps
| build distribution and gives Epic the power needed to drive
| studios to the Unreal Engine, though this strategy clearly went
| to the backburner due to Fortnite and it's entire ecosystem
| becoming the golden goose.
|
| That said, Epic is also significantly more overstaffed than
| it's peers.
| b3lvedere wrote:
| The Epic Games store/browser is awful. I have bought one
| (insanely discounted) game on it and get all the free games,
| because i like to collect videogames. But i almost never play
| them, because the application is super slow. Steam has
| absolutely the best application, then (with a huge enormous
| gap) comes Gog, Amazon, Xbox, EA, Ubisoft and Epic at the rock
| bottom. I don't use Blizzards program, so i can't judge on that
| one.
| kgwxd wrote:
| > i like to collect videogames
|
| Starting thinking of it as collection licenses to maybe
| install games, assuming the license is still valid when you
| finally get around to playing it. And your account is still
| valid. And the servers are still running. And your operating
| system will still run it. etc.
|
| Maybe just get off the train. Your numbers add to the awful
| business model these games are built on.
| daedrdev wrote:
| What do you think these game companies should do instead?
| The license lets you make your own copies on your own
| devices while preventing stealing by people who might make
| a copy and then resell, which would absolutely happen if
| allowed.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| The majority of games on Gog offer fully offline
| installers, where the copy you download is enough to run
| forever (assuming Windows and hardware compatibility, of
| coruse).
| tombert wrote:
| Just a note, on Linux at least, if you use the Heroic
| Launcher, you can get your games from the Epic store without
| using their awful launcher. You can just run the games
| through Heroic, which I find less irritating.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| This reminds me that one of the first blog posts I ever wrote
| was about how incredibly bad/shitty Epic games is
|
| epic games doesn't know how to implement oauth (rant) :
| https://smileplease.mataroa.blog/blog/epic-games-doesnt-
| know...
| mzajc wrote:
| > then (with a huge enormous gap) comes Gog
|
| My favourite thing about GOG is that it uniquely does not
| demand that you install their software, instead letting you
| download installers straight from the website.
|
| They're not fake netinstallers either, which doubles as a
| guarantee that I keep all of my games even if GOG goes
| bankrupt/bans my account/wipes my library/etc.
| malfist wrote:
| I was going to say that too. The other day I got annoyed by
| GoG's app constantly harassing me about updates that I just
| uninstalled it.
|
| All my games are still installed and still work.
| kergonath wrote:
| > I don't use Blizzards program, so i can't judge on that
| one.
|
| It's... fine. Unnecessary, if you ask me, but ok. OTOH, it is
| on a completely different scale compared to Steam and GOG. I
| am sure it would be a disaster otherwise, it really is not
| designed for that.
| jeffwask wrote:
| > religiously download the "free games" but never spent a cent.
|
| We are Legion.
| NotGMan wrote:
| My main issue with Epic' Store is that it doesn't have a
| rating/review system just like Steam has.
|
| Since game journos are completely woke and unreliable using
| Steam's game ratings from REAL players is a God-send.
|
| Without it you simply wouldn't know if a game is any good or
| not.
| zzzoom wrote:
| I can't even play the decent free games I got because I can't
| find them in the UI. It doesn't have sort by rating (or any
| other popularity metric) so you have to wade through the junk.
| Imagine paying for that experience...
| doughnutstracks wrote:
| >The folks impacted by the layoffs will receive a severance
| package that includes at least four months of base pay, with more
| based on tenure. We're also extending Epic-paid healthcare
| coverage.
|
| >For example, in the U.S., they'll receive paid coverage for 6
| months. We'll also accelerate their stock options vesting through
| January 2027 and extend equity exercise options for up to two
| years.
|
| https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/news/todays-layoffs
| edwardsrobbie wrote:
| This one is sad for me as a Fortnite player and someone who lives
| in the town where Epic Games is headquartered.
| rustyhancock wrote:
| Quite stunned that Fortnites 5bn per year isn't enough to keep
| them going.
|
| They've been pull about that much in per year since 2019 AFAIK.
|
| I really hope this one have knock ons for Unreal Engine or lead
| to Unity like licensing. Their indie grants are also quite
| generous.
| lentil_soup wrote:
| I also don't understand, this is just a failure from Tim
| Sweeney being blamed on external factors. With that amount of
| money and the IPs they own he should have been able to keep the
| company going but didn't.
| shimman wrote:
| Of course it's enough, the problem is greed. They must perform
| ritual sacrifices to appease the market gods.
| leetharris wrote:
| They aren't publicly traded.
| shimman wrote:
| You're right they don't have a board and definitely weren't
| punished by both the FTC/DOJ for anti-trust and
| manipulative business practices.
|
| Just a small mom and pop shop that somehow seems to elude
| themselves from the typical braindead MBA playbook of
| ruining lives to justify their shitty business decisions.
|
| Hopefully the beloved indie game studio can navigate these
| waters successfully! Lots of sharks out there that like to
| rat fuck the commons for personal gain, wouldn't want that
| to happen to the gaming company that helped normalize
| gambling to children.
| dallen33 wrote:
| Amen.
| malux85 wrote:
| Market in this context doesn't necessarily mean the
| publicly traded markets, it can mean the investor market
| (and their ability to raise), the financial market (their
| ability to get loans or other financial products), all of
| these things are dependent on their overall company
| performance, which can be manipulated in the short term by
| mass firing 1k employees so some executive can hit a KPI
| and get their bonus. Ya know, sociopathic stuff like that.
| a_victorp wrote:
| Just a company with 40%+ of ownership from Tencent, Disney
| and Sony (all public traded companies). You could have
| googled this
| kotaKat wrote:
| They just hiked VBucks prices too... conveniently after they
| "won" their settlement with Google that includes a full on
| anti-disparagement clause against Google but fully allows
| them to keep on attacking Apple as much as they wish.
| ericmay wrote:
| It's really strange too. I thought these settlements and
| 3rd party app stores would lower prices, but prices
| continue to go up! And now as prices are going up, Epic is
| also laying off workers? Hmmm.
| ryandrake wrote:
| To corporations, "enough" is not even a word. Line must go up
| and to the right, forever. There is not even the concept of
| "enough."
| rockyj wrote:
| Line goes up is also not enough anymore. The slope of line
| going up is most important. You made 10bn last year, but
| only 9 bn this year - this means time for some layoffs to
| please "the market". I have no way to explain this world we
| live in.
| mort96 wrote:
| "The line" referenced by "line goes up" is typically
| understood to be revenue or profit, so if you made 10bn
| last year but only 9bn this year, "the line" actually
| went down even if you have more money at the end of this
| year than at the end of last year.
| npinsker wrote:
| Why would the company not doing well in one area lead to more
| generous terms in a different area that is doing well?
| ux266478 wrote:
| One has to wonder what the annual bill of licensing costs looks
| like.
| OrionSubnet wrote:
| Another case of reactive management leaving employees to bear the
| consequences of executive decisions. Forcing 16% job cuts despite
| years of financial warnings says a lot.
| bakugo wrote:
| For context, they recently increased the prices of the game's
| cosmetics significantly to, and I quote, "help pay the bills"
| [1].
|
| Apparently, that wasn't enough, and the billions of dollars in
| revenue the game makes every year are simply too little to keep
| the lights on. So now they're laying off over a thousand people
| and cutting several official gamemodes, so they can continue
| paying hundreds of millions to the creators of AI slop modes like
| Steal the Brainrot [2].
|
| It's becoming increasingly clear that Epic Games is a
| dysfunctional company that simply stumbled onto a golden goose by
| sheer luck, and now that the goose can't lay eggs any faster to
| keep the line going up, they're panicking.
|
| [1] https://www.fortnite.com/news/fortnite-v-bucks-price-
| increas...
|
| [2] https://www.fortnite.com/news/fortnite-developers-will-
| soon-...
| MisterTea wrote:
| There are three other submissions in the queue and likely more on
| this.
|
| I know someone in Epic and they told me that its no secret inside
| Epic that Roblox is killing them. Why? He told me a story where a
| neighbors kid came by and wanted to play Roblox but he told the
| kid he didn't have Roblox. The child replied "It's easy! I'll
| show you!" and this 8 year old sat at his PC, downloaded a few MB
| client, signs in, selects a game and is playing within minutes.
| The game was a brain dead platform jumping game where you jump to
| the top of a tower. No enemies. No items. No anything. Just get
| to the top. Yay. At one point the kid fell down and the game
| offered to move him back to where he was for $3. Yup a fucking
| game hit a kid up for hard cash. The people who makes these games
| are child predators. Scum really.
|
| Epics problem is Unreal can't be easily deployed like Roblox. You
| want to play Lego star-wars? You need to first download the base
| Lego game of 30GB then the 20GB Star Wars pack. A Roblox user
| just downloads a small client, signs in and is ready to play a
| stupid simple game that isn't 50+ GB. Unfortunately most of those
| games are not games but attention stealers that entice users to
| spend real money on NOTHING.
|
| Shame that everything has been boiled down to an attention and
| money milking scam.
| bakugo wrote:
| No, Epic's problem is that they saw Roblox's success and went
| "we deserve that too because we say so, let's go all-in on this
| market that is already dominated by an established player!"
|
| Roblox isn't killing Epic, Epic is killing itself by
| desperately trying to steal Roblox's players when they have no
| reason to stop playing Roblox. Even if they released a 50MB
| Fortnite client that streams low quality assets like Roblox, it
| would be no different because those kids would simply keep
| playing what everyone else is already playing. Tim Sweeney
| making another tweet about his metaverse or whatever isn't
| going to change that.
| drchopchop wrote:
| The difference is that Roblox has a thousand "attention
| stealers" which have enough gameplay and multiplayer fun to
| keep an eight year old entertained for a long time. Fortnite is
| just the same recycled concept over and over, with an interface
| that is difficult for a child on a console. There are a number
| of Roblox games that are genuinely well-designed and fun, don't
| let the graphics fool you.
|
| (Also, eight year olds don't have $3 in Robux unless someone
| buys it for them, so blame the parents as well)
| fidotron wrote:
| With the downturn in Fortnite (and with it the dream of Fortnite
| as a platform), and apparent failure of Meta Horizon (at least on
| the Quest) . . . does that mean the entire concept of a 3D
| metaverse type UI is dead for another generation?
| ido wrote:
| Roblox
| fidotron wrote:
| 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.
| jeffwask wrote:
| Technically, you need to include the adult predators as
| recurring revenue too.
| iknowstuff wrote:
| why is this such a talking point about roblox? couldnt
| this be said about literally any online platform ever?
| ux266478 wrote:
| VRChat seems like it's doing perfectly fine. It's more like
| this concept is more niche than anyone seems willing to admit.
| 4corners4sides wrote:
| Roblox is the elephant in the room here which fills the niche for
| freemium, fun 3D experiences that run on basically any platform
| or device.
| duncancarroll wrote:
| Roblox is indeed eating the world
| Liftyee wrote:
| Can confirm. There are even growing numbers of high-quality
| games/projects on the platform (I explored it recently),
| including a fully interactive+realistic nuclear reactor and 1:1
| DCS-like Airbus A320 simulator.
|
| I suspect the popularity and ease of distribution/development
| on the platform makes it very attractive for developers with a
| dream.
| zaptrem wrote:
| Many of the games that actual kids spend time on are the purest
| expression of gaming slop (half-broken microtransaction
| gambling hell with schizophrenic flashing colors). Roblox and
| Fortnite's Islands system are both guilty of this. The problem
| is kids don't know any better and don't yet understand the
| value of money. The obvious response is "parents should handle
| this" and while I agree, there is no system to let them say
| "here are Robux/V-Bucks you can spend on quality content (e.g.,
| Fortnite's Battle Pass is very well designed, quality content),
| but gambling slop is disabled".
| jeffreportmill1 wrote:
| The CEO is worth 7B+. 1000 employees at 100k/yr would cost him
| 100M - less than his net worth fluctuates on any given day and
| only 20% of other costs savings they have identified.
|
| Executives care little about the stakeholders: the employees, the
| customers, the community. It's their company, too. They only care
| about investors and themselves. People who "own" pay a lower tax
| rate than those that "work". Let's fix that and make things great
| again.
| nailer wrote:
| Why would the CEO waste his wealth on reviving unnecessary
| jobs?
| nozzlegear wrote:
| Why wouldn't he? Why isn't he invested in the stakeholders?
| nailer wrote:
| > "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.
| FatherOfCurses wrote:
| Why keep the goose that lays the golden eggs alive when you
| can kill it and get all the golden eggs today?
| LunaSea wrote:
| Isn't he responsible for this downturn?
| xenadu02 wrote:
| Is that not an admission that his poor management and lack of
| vision cannot foresee _any_ way to make profitable use of
| those people 's labor?
|
| A company raking in 5-6 billion per year can't find _any_
| profitable bets to make? Possibilities to invest in? All they
| can do is cut?
|
| LOL. If you're that bad at capitalism then please resign and
| let someone else give it a try.
|
| Reminds me of PG&E. So bad at being a for-profit electric
| company they need constant state handouts to guarantee
| profits. They made bad contracts so they need a PCIA fee for
| _not_ selling me electricity. Hedging? Severing contracts?
| Arbitrage? Forecasting? Never heard of those, now make with
| the free coin! My son... if you are that bad at capitalism
| shut it down!
|
| I agree with Warren Buffet's take here. A company that cuts
| or can only pump dividends is basically saying "we can't
| figure out how to make productive use of people and/or cash".
| What an unbelievable joke.
| guywithahat wrote:
| This is 25% of their workforce; this isn't some sort of greed
| thing it's a serious cut to the companies operational ability
| due to the downturn of their product line.
|
| Maybe he could destroy his wealth to keep the employees around
| a bit longer but it's better for everyone if they move on and
| the company has a legitimate opportunity to survive. Besides
| people don't want to be on corporate welfare anyways, they'd
| rather be part of a company where they can add meaningful
| value.
| lentil_soup wrote:
| > downturn of their product line
|
| a product line that is still expected to make $6B this year
| plus a bunch of other massive IPs. Come on, if he can't keep
| the team together with that budget then he should step aside
| and let someone in charge who can.
| MeetingsBrowser wrote:
| If Fortnite were the only product with revenue, they would
| have $1.5 million in revenue per employee before layoffs
| salawat wrote:
| >Besides people don't want to be on corporate welfare
| anyways, they'd rather be part of a company where they can
| add meaningful value.
|
| Funny. Those companies don't seem to be hiring. Everyone is
| doing layoffs. Maybe you said that wrong? People running
| companies don't feel obligated to employ, therefore everyone
| is now Someone Else's Problem.
| guywithahat wrote:
| As far as I can tell job postings in software are up this
| year. Executives love expanding, it's the most exciting
| part of the job. While there are many sectors inside
| software which may be doing better/worse, I can say my
| company is hiring, and I have no trouble getting interviews
| elsewhere if I want them.
|
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE
| MeetingsBrowser wrote:
| The difference is pay.
|
| Although there is a slight (almost negligible) uptick in
| job postings, the salaries for those jobs is rapidly
| declining.
| guywithahat wrote:
| I'm not sure if that's true? There are a few companies in
| every industry who pay well above average, and then most
| jobs pay a more normal salary (110-150 would be my
| estimate). Maybe you're just not looking at the top
| companies anymore? Even if it was dropping through I
| don't see how that's relevant
| alex0015 wrote:
| I think you should reconsider the cost there. $100k/yr is
| likely well under the average for the people they're letting
| go. In addition, pretax salary represents only a portion, say
| 2/3 or so very roughly of what it costs a company to have an
| employee. Benefits packages and payroll taxes can cost a huge
| amount too.
| Tsiklon wrote:
| 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?
| bakugo wrote:
| 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
|
| - Millions spent developing a failed Roblox competitor inside
| Fortnite
|
| - Millions spent paying people to create awful AI generated
| games in their failed Roblox competitor
|
| - Millions spent developing their own "metaverse" of brand-
| focused modes that nobody plays in their failed Roblox
| competitor
|
| - Millions spent developing a failed Steam competitor
|
| - Millions spent paying off developers to release their games
| exclusively on their failed Steam competitor
|
| - Millions spent giving away free games every week on their
| failed Steam competitor
|
| - Millions spent lining executives' pockets
|
| It's really not hard to see where all that money is going.
| Ekaros wrote:
| 500 millions in savings? They seem to have been burning lot of
| money. And relying on single game seems to not be working.
|
| Also I wonder if their low cut on EGS is doing part of these
| problems...
| Ekaros wrote:
| 500M in savings seems like huge amount. Just how unstable is
| their income? And just what else have they been burning money on
| to look at that sort of cost saving goal.
| KellyCriterion wrote:
| If you are a billion dollar company, 500m are in the lower
| range
| animal531 wrote:
| And yet somehow the stats show that most likely 2026 is easily on
| track to be a bumper gaming year, surpassing 2025.
|
| Revenue wise they might be down from the 6bn in 2025 to somewhere
| in the mid 5's, so might as well get rid of 1000 employees while
| handing out bigger bonuses to senior staff.
| ivraatiems wrote:
| 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 got big because of Fortnite but
| nothing lasts forever. They would have been better off building a
| war chest and pulling a Valve (though I'm sure they'd hate
| hearing it that way): going silent and making whatever they
| wanted for a while, and then trying to repeat the cycle,
| rebuilding the chest, and then going on. Video games are the
| exact opposite of Infinite Growth Forever. People get bored and
| move on.
|
| Meanwhile, Epic has many stable and valuable businesses - Unreal,
| the game store, etc. - which are perfectly capable of sustaining
| a sizable company. Just not one as sizable as Epic is. The best
| case for them is they figure that out, and manage to make a
| sustainable go of it doing that.
| tombert wrote:
| I broadly agree, though it does seem like Minecraft has some
| plot armor here. I think people are still buying and playing
| Minecraft a lot. I like Minecraft, I play it occasionally, but
| I guess it's a game that has much more staying power than
| average.
|
| I though my grievances with Epic are primarily because we never
| got Jazz Jackrabbit 3.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| There are some grievances with minecraft recently
|
| Someone is suing mojang because they break EU/Swedish law (It
| was a youtube video worth watching)
|
| Minecraft bedrock is having some incredibly shitty tactics to
| move people towards their marketplace while community calling
| it bugrock
|
| I don't think that many people who play Minecraft really
| appreciate Mojang being bought by Microsoft. Many are
| oblivious to the fact sure but overall, community's sentiment
| is negative towards Microsoft buying Mojang imo.
| tombert wrote:
| I don't own a Windows computer so I only play the Java
| Edition, which still shockingly gets regularly updates and
| is very mod-friendly even still. When MS bought Minecraft I
| assumed that they were going to drop support for the Java
| version but I was clearly wrong about that.
|
| Didn't know about the lawsuit though, I will give that a
| look.
| bombcar wrote:
| Mojang and apparently someone at Microsoft who listens
| are smart enough to know that while most of the Minecraft
| revenue comes from bugrock, 99% of _YouTube content_
| comes from Java.
|
| They need that and the modding community to keep the game
| alive so that new players buy a copy on
| phone/console/etc.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| > When MS bought Minecraft I assumed that they were going
| to drop support for the Java version but I was clearly
| wrong about that
|
| Oh they sure wish that but the community loves java and
| for a good reason actually but their first step towards
| this was migrating mojang accounts into microsoft
| accounts as previously bedrock had microsoft accounts
| iirc and java had mojang accounts and microsoft accounts
| both but they have now blocked mojang accounts
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_UF_4gZclI (Mojang
| screwed us, now we're suing them)
| debugnik wrote:
| > which still shockingly gets regularly updates
|
| AFAIK Java Edition is still the actual development
| branch. Mojang develops new updates for Java Edition
| first, then lets another team port them to Bedrock.
| shakna wrote:
| I assume you're referring to Kian Brose v. Mojang? [0]
|
| A class action, where the EULA was updated without full
| consent being sought correctly.
|
| [0] https://tribune.com.pk/story/2567759/minecraft-faces-a-
| class...
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Yes, relevant video part1 :
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5RvoPQZQeM (Suing
| Minecraft Because They Broke The Law & Pissed Me Off)
|
| part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_UF_4gZclI
| (Mojang screwed us, now we're suing them)
| acheron wrote:
| Time for them to pivot to their strength: ZZT
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| I haven't thought about ZZT for many many years, and didn't
| realize it was a Tim Sweeney joint. Thank you very much for
| the intense hit of nostalgia!
| drcongo wrote:
| My kids have a PS5 and a Switch 2 and really only use either
| of them for Minecraft.
| ecshafer wrote:
| Minecraft is kind of a perfect storm for longevity. It is a
| sandbox game, that has a lot of depth. But its also extremely
| easy to jump into casually (unlike idk Kenshi or Rimworld).
| Its also family friendly but not in a way that makes it off
| putting to adults so anyone 5-500 could play it. Its also not
| so expensive that people refrain from rebuying it on
| different platforms.
| influx wrote:
| Aren't they trying to do a Valve with their store?
| zzzoom wrote:
| They did try to pull a Valve and use their successful game to
| fund a game store that prints money.
| jmyeet wrote:
| You see this trap in tech companies as well as game studios. I
| call it "acting like Google before you're Google". And in fact
| virtually nobody becomes Google.
|
| Google has been a money printing machine for 20+ years almost
| unparalleled in human history. That's allowed Google to write
| bespoke software for _everything_ , which has been useful
| because almost nobody has Google's problems. It's also allowed
| Google to contribute a bunch to open source and engage in
| vanity projects. They can afford it.
|
| Then you see the likes of Twitter a decade or more ago who
| dedicated possibly hundreds of engineers to make Cassandra
| work. That's doing Google shit. But they aren't Google. And
| eventually those chickens come home to roost.
|
| Games are like any content business where the owners and
| leadership are trying to create a formula that can be repeated
| infinitely. Content business actually hate the creative people
| who make their content because creativity doesn't scale. This
| is why movie studios churn out sequels and superhero movies.
| It's a formula.
|
| Games eventually fall out of favor as genres get stale and new
| genres get created. Minecraft is an almost unique exception to
| this. There's a reason it sold for ~$2 billion. It's still
| popular. It's crazy. But that kind of example is so incredibly
| rare you should assume it's never going to happen.
|
| The hubris at Epic was that they could challenge the Apple and
| Google app store monopolies. They were wrong. And they wasted
| an extraordinary amount of time, money and opportunity chasing
| that. That was a strategic mistake, even though I agree with
| their philosophical position.
|
| I'm reminded of id software. John Carmack was legendary for
| years. Wolfenstein was groundbreaking. So was Doom then Quake.
| But eventually (IMHO) id games ceased to be games but because
| tech demos to sell engine licenses before ultimately being
| acquired and swallowed.
|
| I feel like Epic is the same with the Unreal Engine. Fortnite
| is a success while it's popular and people buy cosmetics but
| when that popularity wanes, they have a huge revenue problem.
| Cpoll wrote:
| > Then you see the likes of Twitter a decade or more ago who
| dedicated possibly hundreds of engineers to make Cassandra
| work. That's doing Google shit. But they aren't Google. And
| eventually those chickens come home to roost.
|
| Isn't it the other way around? Using off-the-shelf solutions
| like Cassandra didn't work, so they had to resort to doing
| actual Google shit, a custom solution, to meet their needs.
| jmyeet wrote:
| Look at Facebook/Meta. They use MySQL (plus some other
| stuff on top). Twitter was at the peak of being trendy and
| trying to make NoSQL work. It was quite literally an
| idoelogical vanity project.
| deepthaw wrote:
| At least they're doing severance, health insurance, etc.
| Nowadays if I got laid off at a company I'd expect to just find
| that my key didn't work and a "check's in the mail" letter to
| the wrong address.
| darkteflon wrote:
| 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.com/gaming-industry/epic-ceo-and-billion...
| ronsor wrote:
| 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.
| darkteflon wrote:
| I understand that that's generally the case; I'm saying
| that in this specific instance, there's reason to suspect
| that it is actually a contributing factor - one of many.
| matt_s wrote:
| > Epic has many stable and valuable businesses
|
| I don't think their approach is getting to stable, valuable
| businesses and keeping them that way. Their company name is
| Epic, not Mediocre BlueChipGameCo. I think their approach has
| been to make big investments into things, almost like Amazon's
| earlier approach where they would re-invest everything into the
| business and that might be where Epic now has to react to the
| market slowing for them and pull back.
|
| I have to imagine AI is having an impact but not in the way
| people jump to about them using AI. How many people out there
| have ideas for games and can't execute them because they don't
| know the tech? How many people in the software industry were
| drawn to computing because of gaming?
|
| If they built AI _into_ Unreal Engine so that someone could
| approach it from a Game Producer /Designer role and not have to
| get deep into C++ programming or shaders and art assets, and
| produce games, games that go to the Epic Game Store and they
| take a cut? That would move the market in a way that would be
| more fitting for their company name.
| HerbManic wrote:
| Pool the money then make the dream game. Announce Unreal Engine
| 6 with Jazz the Jackrabbit 3!
| ReptileMan wrote:
| Even better - give Klei Entertainment right to develop a Jazz
| game. Mark of the ninja showed they have the perfect 2d
| engine.
| 2001zhaozhao wrote:
| > 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 can create minigames inside Fortnite that work similarly
| to Roblox.
|
| They even had the right idea for a while - refusing in-app
| transactions in their Fortnite Creative platform to encourage
| actually fun games rather than greedy games that prey on
| players. Unfortunately they had to walk back that system
| recently, which I now assume to be for the same financial
| reason as this new layoff.
|
| I think their idea didn't work for two reasons. First, they
| locked down the UEFN platform too hard, leaving not a lot of
| options for developers to modify core gameplay features like
| movement and player controller. Devs like me who wanted more
| control over the player character and game mechanics were
| really severely restricted - if it was intentional, it was a
| bad call, and if it was unintentional then it shows that UEFN
| was too half-baked technically when they launched it. Second,
| Fortnite already had the reputation of being "just that Battle
| Royale game", so people didn't innovate too far beyond the
| game's base gameplay, rather than Roblox which was more like a
| true game engine / platform where every genre was possible.
| This kind of doomed their plan to compete head-to-head with
| Roblox from the start.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > They would have been better off building a war chest and
| pulling a Valve (though I'm sure they'd hate hearing it that
| way)
|
| Isn't that _exactly_ what they were trying to do with the Epic
| Game Store?
|
| Steam is _the_ thing that has made Valve successful. They were
| great as a game company, but as you said, the games don 't
| last. Steam does, and I don't think Valve would be that
| successful in a business sense without it.
| oliyoung wrote:
| > better off building a war chest and pulling a Valve
|
| They tried, it's called the Epic Game Store
| mvdtnz wrote:
| It's a very straight forward letter without all of the usual
| fluff, which I appreciate. Bit it's concerning how much Epic
| still seems to be hanging their hat on Fortnite. Trends come and
| go and it seems unlikely to me that Fortnite will grow
| significantly in the future. It had its moment, they should be
| focusing on the next big thing.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Discussion on source:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47503239
| Anvoker wrote:
| Often when I see layoffs like this, I can't help but think "Wow
| that company has so many employees and yet, in practice, does so
| little". This perhaps a rather uncharitable sentiment, but I
| can't help but have it.
|
| Yes, Unreal Engine keeps getting improved, more Fortnite content
| gets produced. But there is a general lack of innovation, one
| that I find personally painful when I look at Epic's recent-ish
| track record. Needing to fire this many employees is not just a
| result of market conditions, but also a straightforward
| consequence of not being able to leverage them for sufficiently
| lucrative outcomes.
|
| Companies with this amount of capital are well positioned to take
| multiple strategic bets which aren't at all safe bets, but pose
| no real financial risk for the company in aggregate. Why do these
| bets end up being taken instead by indies with much more to lose?
| Well, partly because indies often _need_ to take riskier bets to
| carve a niche. But the other side of the coin is, what I can only
| surmise, a lack of imagination and adventurousness on the part of
| management. They could be funding many experiments and seek to
| have another hit like Fortnite, perhaps in a somewhat different
| market. Having to seek another hit while your finances are
| declining is less pleasant.
|
| When a company loses its edge in this way, as long as it hasn't
| _really_ captured a demographic or created some very sticky
| ecosystem, it's bound to get whittled down repeatedly. I doubt
| that Epic will suddenly get more creative and adventurous at this
| point, but perhaps necessity will have its part to play.
|
| (Aside from all of that, I agree with most commenters here that
| the layoff is being handled about as gracefully as one could
| reasonably hope.)
| genthree wrote:
| > "Wow that company has so many employees and yet, in practice,
| does so little"
|
| _Some of it_ is real need for things like support, payments,
| and compliance in a bunch of languages and jurisdictions and
| across a bunch of platforms and combinations of platforms.
|
| A lot of it's just that large businesses tend to be shockingly
| inefficient, often taking literally many hundreds of person-
| hours to do things that a small company or small team might do
| in low-tens. Coordination costs are high, processes are often
| really bad in ways that nobody who could fix them is empowered
| to, serious principal-agent problems are the norm rather than
| the exception, et c.
|
| One of the weirdest things to me about the AI craze is that I
| don't see how it fixes organizational problems, and most big
| orgs are _already_ burning more cash on waste due to those than
| they could possibly gain from fairly-optimistic LLM gains.
| Like, if they wanted to 5x development speed, they _already
| can_ without a single LLM involved, by managing better. They
| could have done that ten years ago. All the more wild that they
| 're flipping out over LLMs. You can't even come close to
| efficiently organizing the resources you already have...
| _cs2017_ wrote:
| > if they wanted to 5x development speed, they already can
| without a single LLM involved, by managing better.
|
| True, but leaders of large organizations always want to fix
| inefficiencies and presumably failing to. Kinda like saying
| "if humans stopped fighting wars, most of them would have
| better quality of life" -- people whose life quality is
| better at peacetime are _already_ trying to avoid wars, and
| there 's not much more they can do.
|
| OTOH, AI is a practical step a CTO (or CEO or Board or
| whoever) can take to make the company more efficient
| (assuming the hype works out).
| irishcoffee wrote:
| > "Wow that company has so many employees and yet, in practice,
| does so little"
|
| Twitter. I despise musk, ftr.
| bsimpson wrote:
| I suspect the way you get to that size is having a team of 5
| people doing X for Fortnite going "man, we could do our
| specific job a bit better if we has 7 people." Scale that to a
| whole corp.
|
| Each job is justified in isolation to do a specific thing, at
| least at the hiring time. I suspect there aren't a lot of
| people thinking at a high level as you are "we have this many
| gajillion dollars - what are we betting on?"
| bombcar wrote:
| Also as you get bigger you need more and more "glue" people,
| HR, accounting, etc. A five-man team can avoid all that, but
| you can't take them to 25 and have 5 5-people teams anymore.
| Some amount is just management.
| TGower wrote:
| Nanite is a good counterexample, very impressive and innovative
| technology. Even more impressive that they released the
| technical details instead of going the software patent route. I
| think trying to leverage the war chest to go after Steam's
| monopoly was exactly the type of adventurous plan you are
| talking about, the safe play would have been to make minimal
| investments and continue churning out games hoping for another
| big hit.
| ex-aws-dude wrote:
| How is there a lack of innovation?
|
| Nanite? Lumen? Metahuman?
|
| They are bleeding edge when it comes to real-time rendering
| tech
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| > "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 making proposition?!? I'm
| baffled.
| josephg wrote:
| 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.
| filoleg wrote:
| 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 (League of Legends, Valorant) - 4,500
|
| Roblox - 3,500
| daedrdev wrote:
| Epic games store is likely a main culprit as they really
| have not succeeded while spending tons for free games
|
| Mihoyo literally prints money with predatory gacha
|
| Riot has had several layoffs in recent years
|
| Roblox loses tons of money every year
| cubefox wrote:
| 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 exceeding 1 milion USD gross revenue) than using
| Steam (30% on every game). So they not only need more
| developers than Valve, they also earn less money.
| derektank wrote:
| 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
| mxfh wrote:
| You know what contractors are?!
| Strom wrote:
| 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.
| glenstein wrote:
| 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.
| _345 wrote:
| They contract out all the time, they've admitted to it in
| lots of interviews. So I think through the amount of
| contracting they're able to keep their core hires down.
| bsimpson wrote:
| It's well-known that most of the work on SteamOS is done
| by vendors on behalf of Valve (both individual kernel
| authors and agencies like Igalia).
| Herbstluft wrote:
| Yeah but Valve is not publicly traded, so that comparison
| is of course totally unfair! /s
|
| Having skilled and happy employees that aren't constantly
| changing and do not spend _all_ of their time on ways to
| fuck over customers and chase trends is simply
| impossible. Releasing a piece of hardware and leaving it
| open for customers to do with what they want? Linux? Not
| hiring people the second line goes up and then
| immediately firing them when line stagnates?
| Preposterous.
| KaiMagnus wrote:
| 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.
| raincole wrote:
| 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.)
| yifanl wrote:
| 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.
| sph wrote:
| Citation needed.
| yifanl wrote:
| Look at NVidia's stock price during the period when they
| announced a pivot away from gaming.
| applfanboysbgon wrote:
| Nvidia doesn't make games, this is one of the worst takes
| I've ever seen on this site.
| yifanl wrote:
| They made products that were effectively only targeted at
| the gaming audience, and when they pivoted, they were
| rewarded substantially, as the wider market recognizes
| how small the niche they used to be in was compared to
| where they are now.
| applfanboysbgon wrote:
| You have literally no fucking clue what you're talking
| about. The games industry is ~200 billion dollars per
| year. Film is 30, music is 60. Not only are games the
| largest entertainment sector, nothing else is even
| _close_.
|
| A hardware company pivoting to the AI bubble has
| literally nothing to do with the profitability of
| software.
| jasondigitized wrote:
| Because of basic economics. The opportunity size of AI
| for NVidia is unlike anything we have ever seen. Of
| course they pivoted.
| anvuong wrote:
| 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 bullshit.
| yifanl wrote:
| 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?
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Is it games overall or specific genres? I always regard games
| that have stores and strong at UA as something else.
| applfanboysbgon wrote:
| Games are an obscenely, absurdly profitable industry.
| Particularly the successful ones.
| whatever1 wrote:
| Lottery is obscenely, absurdly profitable employment.
| Particularly for the ones who win it.
| applfanboysbgon wrote:
| The person I was replying to is asserting that the
| winners of the metaphorical lottery are not in profitable
| employment, so you aren't making the point you think
| you're making.
| MeetingsBrowser wrote:
| Fortnite alone is estimated to produce more than five billion
| USD in annual revenue every year since 2018
| yifanl wrote:
| Every year the licensing fees add up as they add more
| collaborations, while revenue is not rising to match.
| jasondigitized wrote:
| They didn't need to do any of that by the way.
| pesus wrote:
| They're also paying out hundreds of millions to map
| "creators", the majority of which are pumping out low
| effort game modes like Steal The Brainrot. I can't help
| but feel this isn't helping their situation at all. Then
| again, Steal The Brainrot often surpasses the actual
| Fortnite game modes in player count, so maybe it is worth
| it. It doesn't seem like a sign of good health for
| Fortnite overall, though.
| yakattak wrote:
| Steam works on the top 2 most played games on Steam right
| now.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| Right now even Valve realizes that Steam will literally run
| out of steam. This is why they have been trying to become
| more like Nintendo and selling their own hardware (with
| varying success) .
| indubioprorubik wrote:
| Valve wants a boat that is independent of microsoft. Not to
| go down with that Tit.A.I.nic seems like a smart move.
| bombcar wrote:
| Exactly, and they've not been quiet about it. It's why
| Steam works on Mac and Linux and they work so hard on
| being independent of all of those.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Hardly when their business depends on running Windows
| games on top of Proton.
|
| Independence of paying Windows licenses or Microsoft
| store taxes, sure.
| treyd wrote:
| Because of Oracle v Google, supporting applications
| running in the Win32 userspace isn't necessarily leaving
| yourself open to threats of Microsoft meddling.
|
| There's tons and tons of older software that people still
| want to run that might never be ported to Linux. And
| that's fine, because there's no problem with building
| compatibility layers to make it work. Microsoft can't do
| anything about that.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Sure, if the goal is like doing retrogaming with Windows
| games as if it was WinUAE.
| tadfisher wrote:
| I believe they have proved that very few games are
| actually Windows games. The few remaining are mostly
| those which require Windows kernel drivers to run or
| connect to online services.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Really, where are those Linux builds?
| jayd16 wrote:
| The point is that Proton puts them in a win win position.
| If Windows stays popular, they're fine. If Windows tanks,
| they're fine.
| pjmlp wrote:
| If Windows tanks their fountain runs dry.
| jayd16 wrote:
| What is the scenario where windows becomes so unpopular,
| computer games stop being made entirely instead of
| another OS filling that gap?
| instig007 wrote:
| The industry will adapt quickly, especially the part
| that's using multiplatform mainstream engines like
| UE/Unity.
|
| Lots of new/recent native MacOS releases nowadays:
| https://store.steampowered.com/macos
| darkteflon wrote:
| Hmm, citation needed on that one imo. Consensus is that
| their hardware strategy is in service of selling more
| games. Hardware revenues for Steam Deck are proportionally
| tiny; Frame and Machine aren't going to meaningfully change
| that.
| michens wrote:
| It absolutely is a profitable industry, maybe not as
| profitable as todays greedy shareholders would like it to be.
| Just look at the CD Projekt that releases 1 game per 10 years
| and still makes a fortune through Netflix colabs and selling
| merch.
| pjmlp wrote:
| It is full of street performers, some manage to strike a
| deal with a label, and tour the world once.
|
| Afterwards depends on how they manage to keep surfing the
| success wave.
|
| Basically.
| raincole wrote:
| Fortnite is exactly the guy who tour the world once and
| twice and thrice.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Indeed, pity are all the others that haven't.
| tcmart14 wrote:
| I agree with your sentiment, but I also don't know if CD
| Projekt is a great example because its not their original
| IP. I am sure the games saw a boast in sales from awareness
| given by the TV show. But I am assuming Andrzej Sapkowski
| is probably the one who gets most of the money from
| licensing from Netflix. Although I will say, I don't 100%
| know all the details for the Netflix deals. And due to
| lawsuits and what not, exactly what Andrzej has the ability
| to sell rights to isn't very easy to find out with quick
| searches.
|
| Edit: Ah, maybe CD Projekt does own the rights completely?
| They may have bought the right completely from Andrzej? So
| Andrzej may not have been the primary party selling the
| rights? Or maybe not? Andrzej may have retained film/tv
| rights and not sold those to CD Projekt.
| indubioprorubik wrote:
| Well, you goto be good nowadays, you compete against the
| whole worlds dreamy eyed teeangers wanting to make
| "their"game. A wellfunded, pig-trough-slop-mill ala hollywood
| can not compete against that when it comes to fun, art and
| experiences. They fled into gambling, but gamers actively
| ostracize lootboxers nowadays.
| applfanboysbgon wrote:
| > gamers actively ostracize lootboxers nowadays.
|
| Gamers love, love, _love_ lootboxes. Can 't get enough of
| them. There are many lootbox games with 10-100s of millions
| of players. The Reddit/HN vocal minority who hate lootboxes
| (myself included) probably represent <5%, if that.
| duped wrote:
| It's the leading entertainment industry, beating
| tv/film/music. If you can't find profit there then you're not
| doing your job.
| yifanl wrote:
| If you think Epic Games is unique in doing layoffs this
| year, I don't think you're paying particularly close
| attention to the games industry.
| duped wrote:
| Did I say that? I'm just attacking your thesis that games
| aren't profitable.
|
| Discretionary spending is the first victim in a
| recession.
| darkteflon wrote:
| It's a power law distribution.
| jasondigitized wrote:
| I'm gonna need someone smarter than me to show me the numbers
| on that. Fornite by itself is insanely profitable.
| jayd16 wrote:
| 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.
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| Ok, but Fortnite is a massively popular success, even as
| its popularity slips. Fortnite's run so far could have
| sustained Epic for years, even without other revenue they
| get from things like Unreal Engine. Games as a whole may
| be a risky venture, but we're talking about Epic here;
| the mystery is not how to succeed in games, but how a
| company that had an earth-shattering run of success in
| games is now in such a position.
| lylejantzi3rd wrote:
| Just because it's popular, doesn't mean it's financially
| successful. Take a look at YouTube. They lost money hand
| over fist for decades.
| piker wrote:
| That's like saying playing baseball must be profitable
| because of how much money A-Rod made. The returns are
| skewed.
| BloondAndDoom wrote:
| 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.
| CodesInChaos wrote:
| The epic store with its giveaways and exclusivity deals is
| probably burning money.
| frakt0x90 wrote:
| They explicitly stated this as a reason during their last
| layoff cycle.
| rdtsc wrote:
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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?
| raincole wrote:
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| And which one of them are we reading about laying off
| employees while admitting they are spending more than
| they are bringing in?
| kevinh wrote:
| The one that doesn't have a monopoly on the market.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| No percentage will make it profitable when they are giving
| away the games.
| applfanboysbgon wrote:
| 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 burn.
| Ethee wrote:
| 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 platform. Just make it a nice experience.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| > Just make it a nice experience.
|
| Haven't you been paying attention? That's not how we do
| things in business anymore...
| lacy_tinpot wrote:
| It's truly incredible how difficult business people make
| doing business.
|
| Doing business is very simple, easy, and straightforward,
| but I suspect in a lot of cases the individual behavioral
| aspects of the executives get in the way of doing good
| business.
|
| Direction and leadership is something that these
| companies never seem to get right.
| malfist wrote:
| Well, we might make it a nice experience until we've
| attracted enough of you people to have a network affect.
| And then it's a steady march of price increases,
| additional revenue streams (including selling your data!)
| and reduction in features because they were "too
| expensive to maintain"
| uyzstvqs wrote:
| 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.
| troosevelt wrote:
| Steam has a lot of issues but there are too just lots of
| areas where better products don't win out over inferior
| products, that's just not how the world works for lots of
| reasons.
| jrozner wrote:
| 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 another store and they
| aren't doing anything to improve gamer's experience other
| than giving away games and having some exclusives.
| They'll never hit the critical mass needed that way.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Steam was first to market and it took forever for
| competitors to form.
|
| It being a good service is secondary.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| The irony here should be lost on no one.
|
| The the lawsuit with apple:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Games_v._Apple
|
| The massive set of fines...
|
| https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-
| releases/2022/12/...
|
| > Just make it a nice experience.
|
| That might get in the way of greed and hubris.
| slumberlust wrote:
| I think sweeny is an awful person overall. The lawsuit
| against apple and google is a net positive for consumers
| though. Having someone as big as Epic stand up to these
| digital silos is a good thing.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| Assume for one moment that they were all great people
| over there.
|
| I suspect that they would STILL be in the same boat that
| they are in. You see a silo where I see a service
| provider.
|
| Does apple make money on doing what they do.. You bet.
|
| But the lesson here is that they make that money because
| of scale, and without it replacing payment processing,
| fraud management, and the customer service you need with
| it is a HARD problem. Epic needs more than Fortnite to
| justify running all that on their own or it's going to
| turn into a black hole: because payment processing for
| "digital goods" is a nightmare.
|
| I suspect that both apple and googles extension into
| payments at point of sale, has contractual ties to their
| App Store payment processing. Something Epic will always
| lack.
|
| The real pain in the ass here is the incumbent card
| processors, and their fee structures.
|
| I suspect that the industry is going to need to go back
| and re-visit micro transactions in the coming years.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I think he's still at heart a developer. That's why all
| his initiatives that aren't Fortnite are so developer
| friendly.
|
| But he still is a CEO. So there will naturally be some
| evils he seeps into to make the company (and himself)
| richer. He still has his own interests, but my second
| hand experience is that even these layoffs are relatively
| respectful compared to most of the industry.
|
| I recognize that CEO side. But it's a real shame many
| people mostly turned on him in order to defend Steam.
| Steam sure isn't a saint either.
| butterlesstoast wrote:
| Anyone else find it interesting the massive set of fines
| financially lines up with their "Savings findings"?
|
| > together with over $500 million of identified cost
| savings in contracting, marketing, and closing some open
| roles puts us in a more stable place.
| glenstein wrote:
| 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.
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| My guess is it doesn't go well -- with Gamepass they've
| taught Xbox gamers not to buy games, and with Steam
| integration they've given Xbox gamers a competing place
| to buy games (where Microsoft will pay a percentage to
| steam!)
|
| It'll probably turn a division of Microsoft that usually
| loses money into one that loses...more money.
| hiccuphippo wrote:
| I can run Epic and GoG games in Steamdeck. All Steam had
| to do is not block them.
| fcsp wrote:
| This being microsoft, my expectation UX wise is that
| similar to those Xbox ROG devices you'll have to drop to
| the windows desktop to install updates, and they'll
| probably also throw in some copilot to help you through
| the process. I don't think they have it in them to
| innovate here and make it pleasant in any meaningful way
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| > 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 their games on steam,
| building a friends list, and getting used to making Steam
| their PC gaming "home." How do you convince someone who
| might have hundreds of games tied to one online account,
| that it is in their interest to open a new online account
| with a new merchant and start over from scratch? Your
| experience can't just be nicer, it needs to have some level
| of appeal that convinces customers to peel themselves away
| from whatever platform is their current default.
|
| I don't have a good answer for how to accomplish this. Epic
| tried it by paying devs for exclusives and freebies,
| litigation, and a PR campaign that Valve and Apple and
| Google were ripping people off. Their approach was hostile
| and didn't prioritize making a nice experience, and it
| seems to have failed. But I think these platforms are
| sticker than we give them credit for, and just making a
| nice experience isn't enough.
| tayo42 wrote:
| Why did they need to make a store? Seems like there was
| no need for it...
| saalweachter wrote:
| Maybe they saw the 30% cut Apple and Google were taking
| on their app stores and wanted in on the action?
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| Why does anyone need to make a store? Walmart and Target
| both exist. Generally, consumer choice and industry
| competition are considered good things that drive
| innovation and the nicer experiences we're talking about.
| IshKebab wrote:
| > Your experience can't just be nicer,
|
| No but it has to be _at least_ nicer and they didn 't
| manage that.
| vablings wrote:
| 15 years is not some insane gap that you can't get
| around. The biggest issue is that the EGS is just an
| inferior experience compared to steam, that's simply it.
|
| If Epic games really wanted to start eating away at
| steams market share, they would do one thing. Make EGS
| not shitty for the user
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| 15 years is a humongous gap. Almost an entire generation.
| Do you expect to make a Facebook killer in 2022? A WOW
| killer in 2017? Make a DOTA killer right now?
|
| There's so many people who aren't even your market, they
| are an "one game player". You can't target that
| realistically unless that one game shits the bed.
| toast0 wrote:
| Freebies and discounts helps get people in the door.
| Having an experience that people don't hate might keep
| them there.
|
| I don't buy a lot of games, but when I do, I don't
| usually look at Epic. I'd rather buy on GOG or Steam.
| Steam is probably from inertia, but if Epic provided a
| better than Steam experience on the games I've gotten for
| free, than I might consider it. I don't really know what
| would qualify as better than steam though... maybe faster
| startup, less dumb prompts?
|
| I don't even consider buying games on the Microsoft store
| though, so Epic has a leg up --- if it's sale season, I
| will look to see if Epic has a bigger sale than Steam.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| The litigation angle to legitmatize a mobile storefront
| was smart. Having a company able to offer premium mobile
| games with a proven track record could have had it stand
| out from Steam, or at least open on an untapped market.
|
| But it seems that gamble slowed as the economy did. Worse
| yet, China and Korea have gotten much more attractive to
| get people into their casinos. Competition is stiffer
| than ever.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Not only does Epic refuse to make their game store any
| better, Tim Sweeney will continue to whine about how
| Steam's 30% cut is way too much. Surely if it's too much,
| Epic Games should be able to provide the same service for
| their cut? But no, they continue selling a moped while
| saying how all of the motorcycle manufacturers are ripping
| you off.
| tcmart14 wrote:
| And lets not forget Tim Sweeney's dishonest
| representation. Sure, Steam can take a 30% cut, but they
| also offer a lot of avenues to avoid that. With Steam, a
| publisher can get a ton of activation codes and sell
| those activation codes on their site and not get hit with
| the 30% cut. No fee on in-game transactions, and as you
| build a user base for your games, Steam also lowers the
| 30%.
| keyringlight wrote:
| I can't help thinking the battle was lost before it even
| started, no matter how good the offering was because the PC
| and mobile platforms (where epic operate their store) have
| 99.9% already decided who owns them. The way I see it Epic
| wanted to copy what Counter-strike and HL2 was to Steam,
| but using Fortnite to push their store for a fresh
| generation of gamers. The problem is they couldn't replace
| or exist alongside the incumbents while trying to bring in
| more than a trivial amount of income. The only way I can
| see the outcome being different is if they were in the
| position Valve were in around 25 years ago with a fresh or
| poorly served market or something other than video games,
| few remember Stardock Desktop as a place they got their
| games.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| They could totally carve their niche if they focused in
| making their store better.
|
| Could it surpass Steam? Probably not. But you don't need
| to surpass Steam to have a viable, profitable store. GoG
| is the alternative that proves the rule - it is smaller,
| but they have their niche offering.
|
| EGS is shit, and relied on exclusives (which everyone
| typically hates, especially on PC).
| keyringlight wrote:
| IIRC GoG has a pretty poor history in actually turning a
| profit with the exception of when CD Projekt release on
| of their own games, and even then they do the vast
| majority of their business on steam or the console
| stores. If GoG was a decent money-spinner then CP projekt
| wouldn't have split if off. Even a niche has a cost to
| operate, and that's with GoG being a pretty plain service
| on top of game downloads.
| tcmart14 wrote:
| As much as I love steam, some of this isn't even a high
| bar. I've always had issues with stuff loading slow or odd
| behavior on the steam store tab in the application. My
| understanding is it's because the store tab in the steam
| application is essentially a web browser, and it sorta
| works like ass.
| 9x39 wrote:
| It does use Chromium.
|
| Any web browser can seem slow vs a native app, though.
| ericd wrote:
| I think you're massively underestimating the network
| effects in play. Steam has an enormous moat.
| mort96 wrote:
| > 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 game launcher, and all my friends are on
| Steam so games with Steam multiplayer integration are
| easier to play if I too play it through Steam.
|
| The Epic Games Store client and game integration could be
| significantly better from a technical perspective in every
| possible way, and I would not be interested in moving to
| it. Steam is good enough and switching has a _massive_
| cost. I can 't really imagine much that would make me use
| the Epic Games Store other than exclusivity or the promise
| of free games. Though I would be more likely to just not
| play a particular game if it's only available through the
| Epic Games Store.
| zem wrote:
| agreed, the epic games store is crappy enough that i will
| not use it even for free and/or exclusive games. I might
| have if it was marketed as a clean, unobtrusive
| experience, but we all know that will never happen.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| It's both things, really.
|
| But other platforms really are rather pathetic in terms
| of feature set compared to Steam. Steam has a bajillion
| features, and it looks like other platforms aren't even
| trying to compete to provide a good user experience.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Network effects disagree, sadly. You don't get market share
| from the leader by simply "being better". There's way
| better netowkrs than Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit out
| there. But some habits are as harder to break than they
| were to form.
| Ethee wrote:
| I don't disagree with what you're saying. But for
| technical platforms it needs to be a combination of both.
| Discord is the perfect example of this, plenty of people
| I know of were completely fine with their
| Mumble/Teamspeak/Ventrilo setups, and in a lot of cases
| some of those were better than what Discord was offering
| for individual features, but the overall feature set and
| platform ease-of-use that Discord was offering drew in a
| large initial user base which then created the network
| effect you describe. A lot of my friends feel 'locked in'
| to Discord now and with their age verification roll out
| fiasco a lot of people want to leave, but there isn't a
| single offering that matches Discord's platform features
| and integrations. There definitely needs to be an
| incentive to leave sometimes and break away from that
| network effect, but if there's no actual competition then
| obviously yeah you're always going to be stuck.
| motbus3 wrote:
| Let me make a disclaimer, I don't if it is true as CEO
| speech truthfulness seems to be made by ai.
|
| But once I saw the interview with the guy from epic or
| someone big there, I don't remember and they said the money
| for developers was from marketing campaigns which makes
| sense to me. They said that they wanted to make a better
| experience so the developers themselves would try to help
| being people to the platform but that never happened.
|
| It seems that the technology behind the epic store is,
| epically broken, pun intended. I've read somewhere that
| they tried to decouple chunks of the store and restart but
| the thing was so poorly done that it would be more
| expensive than just let it fade away and at some point they
| had a new epic store 2 created from scratch but to develop
| it to the end would be too expensive.
|
| As a swe myself, maybe they were trying to scale to steam
| level before being steam? I don't know.
|
| My last experience trying to use epic was trying to buy a
| game. But being greeted by a store login, then a loader of
| a store then a initial store that tried very hard to sell
| me call of duty and EA stuff. I found whatever I was trying
| to buy but I couldn't due to some bug in the payment.
|
| And never again. Not for any particular reason. I just
| didn't spend more time there.
|
| And now, with these layoffs what are they going to do? Are
| they revoke all the licenses for the games they gave and
| sold?
| foolfoolz wrote:
| 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
| applfanboysbgon wrote:
| > 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.
| ecshafer wrote:
| 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 games), and run very smooth. Is a
| very different beat. Valve earned trust.
| dgeiser13 wrote:
| You are correct. Steam was actively bad at launch when it
| only had Valve games on it. And they fixed the platform
| and then started allowing other devs to put their games
| on it.
|
| EGS is currently bad and trying to position themselves as
| a Steam alternative when they simply are not even close
| to the same quality.
| PowerElectronix wrote:
| I certainly still hold a grudge against tim sweeney for
| saying piracy made them not release stuff on pc and after a
| while going back to releasing on pc while whining about
| valve fees and then launching epic games with similar fees
| and way worse service for the developers...
| lux-lux-lux wrote:
| > similar fees
|
| No? Epic charges 12% (with the first $1m free) vs.
| Valve's frankly extortionate (i.e. industry standard)
| 30%.
| tcmart14 wrote:
| Steam will also provide publishers with free activation
| keys that they can sell direct to customer without the
| 30% charge.
| npinsker wrote:
| If you are a large game, they will not provide you an
| appreciable portion of your sales as keys. Sales made
| this way also likely hurt your organic distribution.
|
| Re: value propositions: Steam's 30% reduces to 25% after
| $10M made, and 20% after $50M.
| PowerElectronix wrote:
| As I understand it, epic charges less but also offers
| less services that a developer can need like the gamehub
| and steam's 30% i think is tiered and reduces with sales
| volume? I'm not sure, though, don't take my word for it.
| zaptrem wrote:
| 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 developers are also big fans of EGS (most recent
| example that comes to mind are Jeff Kaplan's remarks during
| his 10 hour stream a week or two ago). Gamers' vehement
| defense of what is effectively a monopoly continues to
| confuse me.
| dgeiser13 wrote:
| If this were true than Epic would have eaten Steam's lunch.
| crummy wrote:
| or network effects are keeping people on a worse
| platform?
| Rapzid wrote:
| I try out the Launcher every couple years to see if it's
| improved. I just installed and logged in for the first time
| since 2023.
|
| Looks like they have _finally_ fixed lag and freeze jank
| that occured on every action, blocked scrolling, and etc.
|
| Unfortunately just clicking on the "Featured Discounts"
| items on the store home page.. 3-4+(more like 4-5+ on
| further testing) FULL seconds of blank until the game
| details load. An ecommerce site where the items take 3-4
| seconds to display!? I flipped over to Steam and everything
| in the store loads "instantly".
|
| _Sigh_ , I'll check back in 2028.
|
| Edit: It boggles the mind and defies reason that they can't
| get a handle on table-stakes UX after all this time,
| energy, and hundreds of millions of dollars sunk into it.
| Nepotism; gotta be, yeah?
| thereitgoes456 wrote:
| Gamers complain about layoffs, but the largest invisible
| cause behind them is Steam's 30% cut, which nobody
| acknowledges.
| dwringer wrote:
| In my experience, the Epic downloader would frequently lead
| to degraded performance and/or system instability when I'd
| leave it running; I've never noticed such problems at all
| with the Steam client.
| _345 wrote:
| 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
| IshKebab wrote:
| > Gamers' vehement defense of what is effectively a
| monopoly continues to confuse me.
|
| It is a monopoly but that can be a good thing sometimes.
| Steam is really good! Is it 30% cut good? Maybe not but I
| do think Valve has managed to keep Steam good for a very
| long time and if they lose their monopoly they're going to
| have a strong incentive to fuck things up.
|
| Another example is WhatsApp. Sure, sucks for Google and
| Apple that WhatsApp have a watertight monopoly in most of
| Europe (and probably much of the rest of the world; I
| haven't checked). But it's pretty great for actually users.
| We've had at least a decade of totally free messaging that
| everyone has with no ads and e2e encryption.
|
| Meta are _just_ about starting to fuck it up but it 's been
| a pretty great run.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Why would Apple care if WhatsApp has a monopoly? They
| don't make money from iMessage
| JambalayaJimbo wrote:
| Network effects on iMessage mean people buy iPhones
| IshKebab wrote:
| That must be why they're so happy to open up iMessage to
| Android in the US!
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| iMessage works fine with SMS and RCS. How would "opening
| iMessage" benefit Android users?
| Brybry wrote:
| Nearly every time I add the free EGS games to my cart the
| checkout fails. I frequently have to restart the EGS client
| for checkout to work (and even then it fails often).
|
| I launched EGS just now to time some comparisons and it's a
| black rectangle on my screen with no GUI (probably self-
| updating). I had to kill the process and restart it.
|
| The Look and Feel for the EGS client just _feels_ slow. Not
| that Steam is always amazing in this regard either but it
| 's way better than EGS. Go to your EGS library and click
| between "favorites" and "all games". Switching from
| favorites to all games takes me ~4 seconds, every time (if
| you have any meaningful number of games).
|
| The search/sort is slow. Steam's feels instant.
|
| The library list has a ton of wasted space. In terms of
| vertical space, the Steam library lists three games for
| every game EGS lists.
|
| The EGS social features compared to Steam are downright
| anemic (and Steam is pretty bad compared to something like
| Discord). You can't even set an avatar in EGS. Even EA's
| Store app (whatever they call Origin now) lets you do that.
|
| I'll stop there. I could rant for much longer.
| JeremyNT wrote:
| EGS doesn't even have a Linux version.
|
| Steam is always going to be my first choice because Linux
| support is better. If I buy on Steam I know it's going to
| work.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| 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.
| slumberlust wrote:
| How is steam a monopoly? People would be excited for EGS
| just like they are for GoG, except EGS has a track record
| of anticonsumer behavior.
|
| I fear for valve in a post gaben world, and they certainly
| aren't blameless. They also aren't a monopoly. Hell,
| steamOS is the opposite of a locked ecosystem.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >How is steam a monopoly
|
| It has 90% marketshare and has been shown to use its
| monopoly uncompetitively to force price parity on devs.
| Textbook definition.
|
| >People would be excited for EGS just like they are for
| GoG,
|
| People "like" GOG. I woildnt say they are "excited for
| it". The revenue of GOG these years don't reflect the
| supposed enthusiasm.
|
| >EGS has a track record of anticonsumer behavior.
|
| Anticonsumer isn't anti competitive. Especially not as a
| new player in the game. They can't brute force this stuff
| with money like a trillion dollar company could.
|
| > Hell, steamOS is the opposite of a locked ecosystem.
|
| I'll believe that when they release a full distro with
| all the feature the Steam Deck enjoys.
| dleslie wrote:
| The major feature that EGS lacks and which makes it
| appealing to indies and repulsive to gamers is user
| reviews. User reviews are a major influence on consumer
| choice; and Steam even shows recent vs long term, which
| signals if a recent change was received well or not.
|
| User reviews, guides, discussions, workshop and shared
| screenshots and videos: bold social features that are an
| incredible source of agony for mediocre and bad indie
| games.
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| The exclusivity deals they struck early on are an albatross
| that still drags them down. I think the audience would have
| been much more receptive to deals like Alan Wake 2, where
| that money spigot got turned into something totally unique
| that wouldn't have existed without that capital investment.
| bergheim wrote:
| 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
| hamdingers wrote:
| 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.
| lux-lux-lux wrote:
| This is definitely wrong, Steam's stickiness is a massive
| selling point.
| hamdingers wrote:
| 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"?
| array_key_first wrote:
| Competition is good, the EGS is bad and anti-consumer.
|
| Two anti-consumer products is probably better than one, but
| I also hate Epic as a company, so I would just prefer for
| Steam to win. At least I like half-life.
| bobafett-9902 wrote:
| bingo. At least they didn't use AI as the "excuse" for the
| layoffs though ...
| sergiotapia wrote:
| It's hilarious how I must have like 80 games there, with zero
| intention of ever installing Epic, or even playing those
| games. Yet I must "claim" them... just in case. I bet the
| majority of users do that hahaha
| surgical_fire wrote:
| Interestingly, I don't even think that the Epic Game Store
| was a vanity project. It was probably a good idea, they had a
| successful product and could build up their store out of it.
| Basically what Valve did originally.
|
| But instead of focusing, you know, in making their story
| desirable to use, they focused on shit like exclusives. And
| for that, they should fail.
|
| I prefer GoG over Steam, even while I am super grateful for
| Steam making gaming on Linux possible. And GoG didn't need to
| rely on exclusives for this.
| bradleybuda wrote:
| > 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 clawed back. Shareholders (including executives
| who are largely paid via out-of-the money options) are
| bearing the costs. Consumers also benefit from increased
| competitive pressure on Valve and subsidized game prices.
|
| Would it be "better" if Epic had not invested in the Epic
| Game Store and paid a dividend or conducted a share buyback?
| aaron425 wrote:
| 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
| standpoint.
| DiskoHexyl wrote:
| A truly fascinating part is that feature and quality-wise EGS
| is still, after years of development, miles behind Steam.
|
| Epic likely has talented devs and clearly invests a lot of
| money into all of this, but it took them years to finally
| implement a cart. It's not the end of the world to not have
| one, but not if you are a digital store!
|
| It doesn't have (or at least didn't the last time I checked)
| a review system. Steam isn't just a store anymore- it's
| closer to a social network with communities, discussions, mod
| workshop (which makes it stupid easy to install mods if a
| game supports this). With forums dying and reddit turning
| into whatever it is turning into, Steam forums is IT for a
| lot of gamers. If I see a game on sale the first thing I turn
| to is a review section- more often than not it's enough to
| gauge whether I'll buy this thing or not.
|
| EGS is (or least was) really damn slow to start (never mind
| to launch an actual game). Linux support is non-existent.
|
| Sure, it is extremely difficult to tackle a leader when a
| headstart is this large, and when people already have massive
| libraries of their own on Steam, but it's been what- 7 years
| of development? Epic had a clean slate, no compatibility to
| worry about and all the features their main competitor mapped
| out to copy- and they didn't even try to reach feature-
| parity.
|
| Giving out free games only takes you so far when people lack
| the necessities to stay at your platform
| duped wrote:
| 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.
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| 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.
| ryandrake wrote:
| 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.
| duderific wrote:
| My 11 year old son plays Fortnite almost daily. He plays
| other games too but Fortnite is what he plays with his
| friends online.
| jasondigitized wrote:
| 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.
| sysworld wrote:
| They should've setup an endowment fund, could've been self
| sustainable by now.
| recursivecaveat wrote:
| I think big media companies are just structurally unable to
| stop trying to double their revenue. They just keep pushing out
| more products and over-extend at the same time everyone is
| losing interest in them. That's how you end up with say the MCU
| producing at quadruple the old pace and the movies making less
| than ever. At some point there's just nowhere to go.
| someperson wrote:
| The Marvel Cinematic Universe is no longer "producing at
| quadruple the old pace". That peaked around 2022.
| HerbManic wrote:
| Epic is funny like that. They arent a publicly traded company
| and yet they act like one.
| someperson wrote:
| Epic is 40% owned by Chinese conglomerate Tencent, which is
| publicly traded.
| torginus wrote:
| 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.
| MeetingsBrowser wrote:
| I don't think this is necessarily what is happening.
|
| Roblox predates Fortnite by a decade and is only getting more
| popular over time
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| Tbf, "just make the next Roblox" is kind of an insane
| business proposition. Roblox has enjoyed _unprecedented_
| success at engaging the same age range for 20 years. Most
| games that are anywhere near that old have for the most
| part followed their playerbase as they aged. Runescape is a
| great example, where enough of their playerbase in 2013
| were the same people who were playing 2007 that they
| demanded a reversion.
|
| Roblox, in contrast, has been extremely popular with 7-16
| year olds for 20 years. They're funneling in new players
| faster than old players age out. It's pretty wild.
|
| My personal theory is that Roblox largely stepped into the
| amateur game dev hole that Flash left.
| lylejantzi3rd wrote:
| > I don't think this is necessarily what is happening.
|
| This is exactly what happened with my niece, my nephew, and
| all of their friends.
|
| Which isn't to say they've outgrown all of the games they
| played when they were younger. They still play minecraft,
| stardew valley, kirby, mario, etc. I don't know why, but
| they all bounced off of Fortnite after they hit a certain
| age. I wonder why.
| glenstein wrote:
| 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.
| jayd16 wrote:
| It might be a case where they're projecting costs and a
| pessimistic Fortnite market a few years out. I doubt this
| something you do after the money is gone. You'd look ahead and
| see your runway in a down market is way too short and cut
| costs.
|
| You can't just bet the farm on dropping a new $5B/year game.
| burnte wrote:
| > "We're spending significantly more than we're making, and we
| have to make major cuts to keep the company funded," he said.
|
| The chances this is accurate are extremely small. This is
| either anticipating AI coding goals, the CFO proved they were
| overloaded on developers, or they're just cutting to hit
| quarterly numbers.
| keerthiko wrote:
| I'd be sad if "quarterly numbers" is a reason for a privately
| held company with 40% controlling stake still held by Sweeney
| to lay off 1K folks.
|
| As an indie dev, I generally like the guy's stance on
| shifting the PC gaming industry's support and financial
| incentive structures, so I'd be a bit surprised if he just
| did mass layoffs like Embracer and co.
|
| That said, the article implies things that aren't necessarily
| canon: "cut jobs _as_ Fortnite engagement falls " doesn't
| mean "cutting people _because_ Fortnite is flagging ". It's
| much more likely because the Epic Game Store struggles to
| push enough volume to recover the cost of developer
| acquisition on the platform.
| Reason077 wrote:
| > _"Sorry, HOW?!? How can a company like Epic games ... be
| losing money with a product that is so mature?"_
|
| I've been playing Fortnite a bit lately, after my nieces got me
| into it.
|
| One thing is that although the player counts are high (always
| hundreds of thousands of players online, just in the main
| Battle Royale game), the average revenue per player can't be
| that high.
|
| For one thing, once you've bought the $10 battle pass _once_ ,
| you only need to average maybe 1 or 2 games per day to earn
| enough vbucks to buy the _next_ season's battle pass with
| vbucks. So if you stay active you can pay once then play the
| game free forever and still get access to a huge amount of free
| cosmetics. And much of the player base is kids who are just
| begging their parents /uncles to buy them stuff in the game
| rather than spend money themselves because they don't have
| credit cards to link to their Epic accounts.
|
| Compare this to something like Hearthstone which is similarly
| mature. They have a similar battle pass but there's also a
| strong incentive to pay real $ for extra card packs and
| cosmetics. And there are clearly plenty of adult whales buying
| this stuff. For example, there's a new mythic Deathwing skin on
| a gacha wheel that costs, on average, about $200 (!!) to get.
| It's only been out a few days and I've run into multiple
| players who have it.
| bogdan wrote:
| Hearthstone battle pass isn't really comparable to Fortnite
| cosmetics. Hearthstone is pay 2 win where the majority of new
| cards are better than old ones.
| downrightmike wrote:
| All the lawsuits they are doing
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >"We've had challenges delivering consistent Fortnite magic,"
| Sweeney said, adding "market conditions today are the most
| extreme" since the early days of the company founded in 1991.
|
| Probably the closest way to say "we're in a recession and
| gaming isn't resistant to this one" I've heard yet. But it
| makes sense: a "free" service that entices with cosmetics is
| easy to cut when parent money gets tight.
|
| And if kids lose interest they will move to another game. Or
| more likely, TikTok and its medium. Just increasing the
| dopamine.
| VoidWarranty wrote:
| The store is quite a cost. They also have a billion engineers
| working in every different direction contributing to UE.
| LocalH wrote:
| They pay out tons to "creators" of brainrot slop UEFN maps.
| geitir wrote:
| Speaking personally, the move to unreal engine 5 ruined the feel
| of the game. Somehow it had a very unique and polished gameplay
| loop that was as addicting as CS and the unreal 5 launch changed
| it, at least for the hardware I was running
| LiamhCryptokeys wrote:
| The Valve comparison is apt. The difference is Valve built Steam
| as infrastructure first, then quietly stepped back from games.
| Epic did it backwards -- they built the game first, then tried to
| force the infrastructure (EGS) into existence with money. Much
| harder to do it that way.
| darkteflon wrote:
| I remember when Steam was just something I had to crack to play
| HL2 as a broke uni student. In the intervening decades I've
| shelled out for over 500 games on Gabe's little experiment.
| Wild.
| modeless wrote:
| Valve built more games than Epic in the past 10 years. Epic
| essentially only released Robo Recall and Fortnite + extra
| content, plus a spinoff of Rocket League which was an
| acquisition. Valve released a couple of duds (Artifact, Dota
| Underlords) but also some good games: Half-Life: Alyx, Counter-
| Strike 2, and Deadlock. They also did "The Lab" and "Aperture
| Desk Job" which, while not full games, were quite good as demos
| for their hardware.
| adrian17 wrote:
| > Epic did it backwards -- they built the game first, then
| tried to force the infrastructure (EGS) into existence with
| money.
|
| Didn't Valve push Steam through HL2? It's a different kind of
| forcing of course, but still.
| jmpman wrote:
| Seems like Epic won the battle against Apple, but lost the war.
| My kids haven't played Fortnite since it was dropped from the
| Apple Store.
| OSaMaBiNLoGiN wrote:
| "As the first-person shooter game Fortnite"
|
| What? If the person writing the article is so unfamiliar with the
| subject they are writing about, they likely should not be writing
| about it.
| bsimpson wrote:
| Remove the reference, and that's most "news" in this era
| dgeiser13 wrote:
| Since when do people refer to game playing as usage?
| oh_fiddlesticks wrote:
| > Fortnite "Usage"
|
| I like this choice of word, it seems fitting.
| pbrum wrote:
| 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 company, including Epic,
| has made a competitive FPS + CTF game as solid as UT, UT2003, or
| UT2004 since that era
| roncinephile wrote:
| 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.
| archagon wrote:
| Splitgate 1 felt a lot like UT2k4 combined with Halo to me.
| Really fast, really fun.
| danpalmer wrote:
| I wanted to play UT2004 for some nostalgia recently. Turns out
| even though I own it on the Epic game store, I can't play it
| because Epic removed it from the Epic game store.
| Narishma wrote:
| Didn't they make the game free? Or was that just UT99?
| justinhj wrote:
| I think the problem is also that there are many FPS multiplayer
| CTF games even if they are not all great, they all compete for
| attention in a crowded market. Destiny, Call of Duty and all
| their variants.
| hapticmonkey wrote:
| They had Unreal Tournament 4 in development around 2018 but it
| never gained much traction in the pre-alpha phase. Once
| Fortnite blew up they seemed to just focus on that and their
| app store.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3botRkqnwk
| dgeiser13 wrote:
| Epic gave away 662 Million free games in 2025 alone. They pay the
| game devs for each copy they give away. They've been doing this
| for 8+ years.
|
| https://insider-gaming.com/epic-games-store-give-away-662-mi...
|
| In addition they've payed other game devs for Epic Game Store
| exclusivity so games would be available for 1 year before being
| released on Steam.
|
| The whole company has been mismanaged into the side of a
| mountain.
| raincole wrote:
| I still don't know which is stupider: this, or Unity buying
| Weta.
| HardwareLust wrote:
| Fortnite usage fell? Maybe there's hope for humanity after all.
| singron wrote:
| Epic's 2019 P&L was published as part of Epic v. Apple. According
| to that:
|
| * Fortnight revenue was $5.5B in 2018 and $3.8B in 2019
|
| * Employee counts in those years: 1063 and 1932
|
| * Average "People" cost per employee: $141K, $142K (CPI adjusted
| is $182K in 2026).
|
| * Average "Production & Hosting" cost per employee: $189K, $150K
| (CPI $248K, $194K)
|
| * Platform royalty expenses were 25% of total game revenue
|
| * Slightly under half their Operating Expenses were people
|
| * Fortnight was >90% of revenue
|
| I have a strong guess that "People" costs doesn't include all
| salaries, and that many employees are categorized under
| "Production & Hosting", although I expect that also includes
| other costs. I'll guess 75% is people, which makes total CPI
| adjusted average cost per employee somewhere around $320K-$370K,
| but I'll say $320K.
|
| This means 5000 employees cost around $1.6B and cutting 1000
| saved around $320M/year in addition to $500M of other costs.
|
| Most estimates of Fortnight revenue claim it's roughly flat or
| falling between 2020 and 2025 fluctuating between $3B and $6B.
|
| Unless Unreal Engine or EGS revenue took off, it's kind of weird
| to quadruple headcount while keeping revenue basically flat or
| falling. If fortnight only makes $2B next year, then they would
| be underwater on just royalties and salaries.
|
| https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/20696836/epic-apple-t...
| justinhj wrote:
| Epic was very lucky with Fortnite. Originally they showed the
| game at GDC as more of a mining, resource collection and building
| game. Frankly it looked boring.
|
| Changing that to a shooter with the Battle Royale mechanic was a
| $10 billion win. They have managed it pretty well, but it seems
| they just over extended without innovating to attract and retain
| players.
| arealaccount wrote:
| Wow and I thought the amount of money my son pays for skins alone
| would be more than enough to keep the entire company afloat
| grandpoobah wrote:
| Not a single comment mentioning UEFN? Epic's failed attempt at
| copying Roblox?
|
| Epic has been pissing money away paying "creators" to churn out
| slop "red versus blue" modes/maps for Epic's meta-verse.
|
| A lot of these maps are effectively hello world applications.
| Like the lowest of low quality. You add in a few weapon spawns, a
| few prefab buildings, and you're done. Time to get yourself a few
| thousand a month.
| Noaidi wrote:
| Duplicate
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47504996
| s0ulf3re wrote:
| Coupled with the recent price increase of V-Bucks, things do not
| look like they are shaping up well.
|
| https://www.fortnite.com/news/fortnite-v-bucks-price-increas...
| pelorat wrote:
| They have way too many employees for what they do.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Epic should learn from Valve. The only guy touching TF2 is a
| cleaning manager who dusts off serves once in a year.
| dana321 wrote:
| Its kind of a miracle that any working game gets made on unreal
| engine considering how buggy the editor is.
| whyenot wrote:
| There are (were) ~5,000 employees at Epic. That seems like a huge
| number for company that has produced little more than various
| flavors of Fortnite and a failure of a store in the last 10
| years.
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