Submitted 23 hours ago by ampersandrew@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world
https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/news/todays-layoffs
…in being the industry’s vanguard we have taken a lot of bullets in a battle which is only in the early days of paying off for ourselves and all developers.
Look, at least a little bit of that is true, but fuck right off.
At least it’s a good severance package. They owe their employees at least that much.
This is the moment where Valve should publicly announce they’re not laying people off, because they have enough cash to pay all of their employees by charging a fair 30% of every sale, which makes their business sustainable. Then point to all other platforms that charge 30% and say “they’re not firing anyone either” then get to the only one that charges 12% and say “they’re the only ones losing money on this business by trying to undercut the real cost of doing this business, if they had charged the same 30% as everyone else does they would have enough to keep those employees”. Probably a bullshit argument because Epic surely has enough money to keep them now and it’s just someone looking at a graph and making bullshit decisions, still a very strong point for Valves lawyers to make.
“We’re so sorry to have to lay you off”
wipes tears with fortnite billions
I loved this part of it… “This isn’t our first time being here. Epic survived upheavals in 1990’s with the move from 2D to 3D with Unreal 1; in the 2000’s building console games with Gears of War; and in 2012 moving to online gaming with Paragon and Fortnite. Each time, we rebuilt our foundations and earned a renewed leadership position.”
TLDR “Epic will survive, but your job won’t. So sad.”
How about they stop fucking milking Fortnite and makes something else…
SHOCKER!
How about they stop fucking milking Fortnite and makes something else…
Eh… Epic isn’t really a game development company anymore, Fortnite just happened to pop off before Unreal Engine became the defacto engine for large scale games and CGI in television/movies. They’re gonna keep working on Fortnite but it’s clear their focus is UE6 - I doubt they’re going to make another game ever again.
Unreal was the defacto engine for large scale games long before Fortnite.
It’s kind of wild but Fortnite makes (or made?) way more money than UE royalties, like magnitudes more. UE is a boon to the industry to be sure, but somehow 5% of games’ revenue simply isn’t the same as insane people spending money on stupid skins and dances.
Now is UE was used for 20 games as big as Fortnite, they’d be fine but most AAA companies won’t use UE if they expect a huge haul, with a few exceptions of course.
I remember when there was an Unreal Tournament beta in development that they canned the moment ForkKnife popped off. I’m still sour they stole what might have been a great modern follow-up to my beloved UT2004 (UT3 doesn’t count 😠)
Fortnite 2
And thus the monkey paw curls.
Maybe we get an Overwatch like hero shooter, Fortnite Rivals… But they do not support Linux, therefore I don’t care what happens to Fortnite.
Exactly this. Half of the videos I see about switching to Linux, even if I have never heard the content creator so much as mention fortnite, claim it’s a reason you shouldn’t switch to Linux.
Well, you can’t run this one shitty program popular with twelve year olds so rife with cheating they need kernel level control of your shitty OS to combat it, so no freedom from corporate tyranny for you!
It’s even playable on the phone, so they would not lose complete access to the game. Unless you are really invested into it, it does not matter on what you play. I have a Xbox, so when I wanted to play Fortnite, i would rather play on console than installing Windows on my computer.
1000 layoffs because Fortnite lost popularity? Damn.
Turning Fortnite into Roblox is a major part of the problem. Trying to become the everything game is what stretched them so thin but it came with little payoff
Layoffs going around today
frank@sopuli.xyz 22 hours ago
As much as I hate Epic, those are both better paragraphs than I expected. I feel for the people getting laid off, hopefully they land on their feet
a_non_monotonic_function@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
As far as severance goes there certainly worse.
frank@sopuli.xyz 20 hours ago
In the US especially. It could be a cardboard box.
Duke_Nukem_1990@feddit.org 18 hours ago
He could have paid each of the fired employees 100k for 10 years and still have several billion dollars left.