Comment on Epic Games is reportedly laying off around 900 employees | Said to be roughly 16% of its workforce.

SeeJayEmm@lemmy.procrastinati.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

• CaptDust@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  ~20 game studios, unreal engine (probably has 15 divisions itself across games, films, ads, etc), epic games store, artstation, sketchfab, quixel, metaverse projects… how many employees should they have?

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  • SeeJayEmm@lemmy.procrastinati.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    how many employees should they have?

    No idea, that’s why I asked. I wasn’t aware of much of what your listed.

    Thanks for taking the time to answer tho instead of assuming I was

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    • schmidtster@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      The article covers all of what we answered quite well, so if you read the article why else would you be asking, and if you didn’t read the article, why are you participating in the comments?

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      • Nythos@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Why are you so hostile to someone that in the end is promoting a healthy discussion?

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      • SeeJayEmm@lemmy.procrastinati.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        I’ll concede the article lists a bunch of brands. That’s doesn’t explain to me why it takes 5500 people to run a game studio.

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  • mx_smith@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    And don’t they also own Bandcamp which I think they are selling.

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    • Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Yes and yes.

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• schmidtster@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  They have a game engine, they make games, they have a store front.

  Why would the amount matter?

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  • SeeJayEmm@lemmy.procrastinati.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Because I’m curious?

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    • schmidtster@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Article covered it.

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• Varyk@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Goddamn, so many unhelpful answers.

  There are lots of threads online about this, and no clear firsthand answers, but as far as I could parse the Internet consensus:

  1. Hired too many people, that’s why they’re laying people off right now

  2. Unity engine team is the same size as unreal, but unity is constantly trying to sell ads and services to the point that their engine department is just another department of many departments that are all trying to hoover up revenue, rather than the engine being their main focus.

  Here’s an example thread with a bunch of snooty assholes and a couple reasonable answers: reddit.com/…/7700_employees_at_unity_can_someone_…

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• anlumo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Unity has 7700 employees, and they only create a game engine.

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  • SeeJayEmm@lemmy.procrastinati.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I have a hard time wrapping my brain around it taking 7700 people to create a game engine. But I’m not in that industry and have no idea what’s involved.

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    • filcuk@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Me neither, but iirc Valve has 300 employees total. It seems massively out of proportion.

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      • SMT42@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Yeah like Twitter had 7500+ employees before Elon went and fired 90% of them. Sure the site is worse off for it, but it still runs. Clearly most of that 90% were nonessential to the function of the company.

        A lot of these tech companies are bloated like that

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    • anlumo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      AFAIK most of them are salespeople.

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    • scarabic@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      An engine is not just a kernel of 3 dimensionality logic and lighting principles. Engines are there to speed the development of games, and so are composed of lots of tooling and infrastructure for game developers to use. I’ll bet the core technology engineers and testers number 2000 and the rest are researchers, customer relations people, advertising, marketing, sales, lawyers, international market specialists, website managers, HR, corpdev (large deals / mergers) and of course the management layer. Really a lot of large corporations need a lot of the same apparatus. It would be great if you could find out, company by company, how many people it takes to actually build the product but the total number has to do with how many it takes to run the business.

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      • SeeJayEmm@lemmy.procrastinati.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        It’s hard for me to wrap my brain around since I’ve never worked in an org that large. Even when I works at a large company my org was small compared to that.

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  • coconautti@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Not just a game engine, Unity is a software company with numerous services. Mainly game related though. There’s the Unity ads platform which probably employs hundreds in Finland alone. Unity is used from entertainment to manufacturing industry.

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• BURN@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Fortnite alone had >2k people working on it at once when it was at its peak. Add in a bunch of extra departments and that makes a little more sense

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  • SeeJayEmm@lemmy.procrastinati.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    🤯 Tho I suppose the customer facing side of the house would be so be sizeable for something as big as Fortnite.

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• qooqie@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  If they see value in it I don’t see why employing more people is exactly a bad thing

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  • SeeJayEmm@lemmy.procrastinati.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Didn’t say it was.

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• birdcurtains@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Corpo bloat.

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