16 ms·

Epic Games is laying off 16% of its staff

255 points by mpereira 3y ago

cableshaft 3y ago
Fortnite not quite the cash cow anymore? Or they've been burning too much cash on Epic Games store? Or something else? Article might say but can't tell because of the paywall.
- chankstein38 3y ago
  >Article might say but can't tell because of the paywall. Same but anecdotally I can say I know a ton of people who stopped playing Fortnite these last few seasons because Epic kept making it more and more annoying to play. So your theory might be on the money!
- lfkdev 3y ago
  Fortnite is still a massive cash cow, but man they burn actual billions for the Epic Store which still isn't very epic and is missing most basic features.
  - andersa 3y ago
    It's actually mind blowing how much money they spend on user acquisition while the thing is still full of bugs! Why does it take ages to open? Why did downloading some games launch another launcher that downloaded the game again? Why did it sometimes not switch to idle when in the background and keep wasting CPU? Why does the UI sometimes just randomly not work? Why is every interaction with it so slow? Why does it get exponentially slower the more Unreal Engine assets you have? Why is that even in the same launcher? Why can't I do basic things like open game pages in a new tab? Does anyone at Epic actually use this thing? Most importantly, why did they do the stupidest PR moves imaginable, by "stealing" games that were already announced for another platform? This is basic stuff, it doesn't take 5 years to figure it out! They had a once in forever chance to kill the unnecessary 30% tax booth that is Steam and they blew it by shipping this terrible software.
    - fidotron 3y ago
      There is a curious phenomenon in decent sized companies where the more money they have the more problems they have. When flush with cash the middle managers love to overspend and grow mini empires in the promise that one day the product will be finished, but it never will because the warring empires require it being unfinished to justify their ongoing existence. Things have to get amazingly bad before such empires are dismantled and the product fixed, generally something existential for the company as a whole. The Epic Store almost certainly could not be fixed without simply rebooting with a whole new team with the incentive structure setup to make it work.
      - intelVISA 3y ago
        It's a damn shame the only way to get a good product is to find a company that is still in hustle mode -- once its revenue/moat is secure it all goes to offshore/acquihire hell.
        Pulcinella 3y ago
        Yeah at a certain point it seems like the bean counters really take over and the easiest way to grow profits is to cut costs... except a certain point there is only so much you can logically cut or optimize. After that you are just cutting the product/service/business to the bone. You can remove the suspension in a race car to save weight, but it's a bad idea. I am reminded of a Steve Jobs quote: ""It turns out the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies, like IBM or Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful. So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers."
- kevingadd 3y ago
  Nothing lasts forever, even in video games. The number of games that have stayed strong as long as Fortnite is vanishingly small. It doesn't help that they're no longer on mobile devices, they earned a lot of money there Based on 3rd-party statistics they still have hundreds of millions of players, though.
  - hacoo 3y ago
    Maybe those players hve stopped spending money in the cash shop though ?
  - smugma 3y ago
    Mario is still going strong.
    - kevingadd 3y ago
      That's a franchise, not a single title. Though with live games like Fortnite you could argue they're basically releasing new games constantly with the amount of work that goes into it...
flipgimble 3y ago
https://archive.ph/1sXj9 https://archive.ph/1sXj9
sarchertech 3y ago
Wonder why the waited until after the layoff train was over.
- amsterdorn 3y ago
  Evidently the train is still running.
- paulddraper 3y ago
  It's over?
  - sarchertech 3y ago
    Myself and several of my friends have gotten offers in the last month or so. Also recruiter spam has picked up pretty heavily. I’ve also read in a few places that hiring is picking up.
    - paulddraper 3y ago
      In my network Lucidchart just had a layoff this week. And Qualtrics is rumored to have one soon.
- manicennui 3y ago
  End of year numbers probably.
  - huslage 3y ago
    They aren't public
    - voisin 3y ago
      They still have investors
      - spywaregorilla 3y ago
brendoelfrendo 3y ago
https://archive.ph/1sXj9 https://archive.ph/1sXj9 The article is very brief, basically just an expansion of the headline. I'm curious where the layoffs are occurring. Admin? Epic Games Store? Maybe now that UE5 is mostly baked they're reducing the size of the team? I'd be surprised if they were expecting to make significantly less money this year.
- ToucanLoucan 3y ago
  Layoffs just seem to be standard operating procedure for big corpos these days. Makes the shareholders happy and the executives look like they're actually working.
bluetidepro 3y ago
I wonder if this is related to the class action that is just now finally going through the submission phase for people: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/03/ftc-finalizes-order-requiring-fortnite-maker-epic-games-pay-245-million-tricking-users-making https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/03/...
- jsnell 3y ago
  No, those kinds of one-off events don't cause an otherwise profitable company to lay off people.
  - staticautomatic 3y ago
    There are certainly situations where an adverse result in a lawsuit can lead to layoffs despite being a “one-off event”. I’ve worked on at least a few that were genuine “bet the company” cases. But a $245M loss is typically not in the ballpark for a big company. To trigger layoffs you usually need to be talking about billions or injunctions.
    - bpiche 3y ago
      The total is more like 500mm. If I recall, it was 250mm for refunds, and 250mm in penalties. It's a large amount of $$$ Edit: to be clear, it's the largest fine the FTC has ever imposed, it is a historically large amount of $$$
  - giantg2 3y ago
    Sure it can. If the executives want to hit their performance bonuses they might start axing lower revenue projects or support groups. In a higher rate environment, it's certainly possible that the decision is made to lay people off to reduce the higher cost debt that needs to be incurred or the time it will take to pay it off, even if the company is otherwise profitable.not saying that's the case here though. Of course there are other likely causes of layoffs, like a downturn in industry forecast for particular types of games, their next product didn't test well (or can't charge what they wanted), etc.
thih9 3y ago
Interesting, especially in the context of the earlier Unity pricing news. Is Epic suddenly doing worse financially?
aliljet 3y ago
Could this be because of some of the unionization underway?
Narann 3y ago
Just after Unity reveal they have no long term plan. That was fast.
- intelVISA 3y ago
  Why keep excess headcount when your main competitor just torpedoed itself?
  - Narann 3y ago
    To return a feel of stability and contrast with your main competitor at a moment everyone is reassessing it’s technological choices. Epic actually shows its business model is doubtful.
misterbishop 3y ago
Fingers crossed they kill the Games Store.
- Kiro 3y ago
  Why?
  - misterbishop 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - Kiro 3y ago
      Flagged. You've been here since 2014 and should know better.
      - misterbishop 3y ago
        it's because of my experience that i do know better. wise up.
  - babypuncher 3y ago
    The way they try to push their store is annoying, so people want them to fail outright. I think few people will disagree that letting Valve have a de facto monopoly is a bad thing. But Epic's whole strategy around EGS seems built entirely around appealing to publishers and developers at the expense of making the platform desirable for users. Their marquee feature is that they take a smaller cut of sales on their platform (12% vs Valve's 20-30%), but this savings never gets passed down to the customer. So from a user's perspective, this isn't a feature, it's a footnote with no real bearing on their decision making. Where Valve has invested a lot of time and money into building out platform features that add value for the customer (Steam Play, Steam Input, Workshop, Big Picture Mode, a fairly reasonable refund system), Epic uses all their money to buy exclusivity deals. The platform itself is barebones. The client takes twice as long to load as Steam despite having 1/10th the feature set.
  - tru1ock 3y ago
BadBadJellyBean 3y ago
Is this my fault because of all the free games I claimed?
- voisin 3y ago
  Tim Sweeney would like us all to agree that it is Apple’s fault for their App Store policies.
  - bpiche 3y ago
    And he'd blame Valve, too. EGS might be great for devs, but it's not good for users. It's not a big conspiracy against him. People just don't want to use the store! Whining in the face of obvious failure makes you look like a real loser.
    - spywaregorilla 3y ago
      Can you show evidence of him "blaming" Valve? I'm not aware of that. And it appears as though you are criticizing his character based on a behavior he didn't do. Off the top of my head I can think of him saying the Valve Steamdeck is great: https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1415755678849900546 https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/141575567884990054... And him saying that Valve not demanding crossplay is bad.
      - klik99 3y ago
        Yes, this. I was going to reply with the same thing but thought it wasn't worth. There is a lot of hate towards Epic due to EGS, which I get - but Tim has never said anything about losing income due to other stores existing. Sure he's said a lot of bad things about Apple, but never about Valve. He's actually a really good guy, all the hate towards him really irks me - fine, hate the epic game store, I don't personally but I get it, all this world building where he becomes this stupid generic money grubbing CEO is just wrong. It's just reddit echo chamber stuff.
        3y ago
eigenvalue 3y ago
This is probably just continued post-COVID demand normalization. Basically all software and gaming got a massive bump that was obviously going to have an unsustainable component to it. But in many cases companies planned like it was totally sustainable and would continue. That’s why even super profitable companies like Microsoft and Epic are doing layoffs in 2023. The other reason of course is that they went a bit crazy with the hiring sprees and accumulated some unproductive devs who are probably a net drag. That’s ultimately a healthy force in the economy as those people can do more in smaller firms with less in-house expertise (albeit at lower wages). I wonder also how much of a driver new programmer productivity tools like copilot and ChatGPT are factoring into this. If your top 10% productivity workers just got a 30%+ productivity boost, that means you can easily shed the bottom 20% productive workers and still be ahead of the game.
- n4r9 3y ago
  The first two paras I agree sound fairly likely. Regarding the second para, the interesting part for me is: how do these companies determine which are the unproductive devs? My impression so far is that senior management has no way of measuring this, given how little data is provided to back up decisions to RTO. Not so sure about the third para. Why would one company be more ahead of the game than any other, if indeed LLMs are providing this supposed boost?
  - oblio 3y ago
    They don't. They basically go by highest salaries and various arbitrary measures such as unprofitable division, virtual location, etc.
  - paxys 3y ago
    It's not possible to measure with 100% accuracy, but let's not kid ourselves every company and every division can easily pick out the bottom 10-15% of devs who have close to zero real impact. The actual number in fact is likely far greater than that.
    - jmerz 3y ago
danielvaughn 3y ago
Shouldn't there be games coming out fairly soon (next 1-2 years) that take advantage of Lumen/Nanite/Quixel/Metahuman? From my POV, the future looks bright for Unreal because those technologies give it a pretty crazy edge over its competitors, and that's not even taking into account the Unity fiasco.
- Mistletoe 3y ago
  For people like me that didn't know what this is. https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/metahuman https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/metahuman Pretty amazing. Although I don't know if I even need characters this real in my games. At some point it becomes too much like real life and kind of boring? I think I like the fantasy aspect of games too much and I like to escape.
  - danielvaughn 3y ago
    I should have included links, thank you
  - tarr11 3y ago
    You can also use "Mesh to Metahuman" to make stylized characters but with more interesting facial expressions https://medium.com/locodrome/unreal-filmmaking-building-a-stylized-custom-metahuman-33316cd5e4a6 https://medium.com/locodrome/unreal-filmmaking-building-a-st...
- babypuncher 3y ago
  Immortals of Aveum just shipped last month using UE5's advanced new features. The game tanked though, because it's a new IP and released at a time where we are inundated with high quality, high profile releases. 2023 has been kind of wild for AAA games. The game just needed a more likeable protagonist and a less crowded release window, but I'm sure the takeaway for EA execs is that it shouldn't have been a new IP...
- dijit 3y ago
  Some of this is marketing. Lumen is really nice as long as you never hope to have >60fps and don't want open worlds. The architecture of it is just fundamentally not compatible with the majority of AAA games, especially open world or esports ones. It's not that Epic are stupid it's that they're "optimising" in all directions and it sometimes causes issues. -- marketing advertises features that are not fit for the purpose they're being marketed for. Lumen is excellent for small games that aren't so CPU heavy or alternatively for non-realtime renders such as scene generation VFX. Unreal itself is extremely bound to single-core CPU performance, so the idea of adding extra weight to the main render thread (which is basically the only thread) is unconscionable and was a deeply unwise decision.
mpereira 3y ago
Unity also had 3 recent mass layoffs. I compiled their headcount since 2004 here: https://www.contextualize.ai/mpereira/the-growth-of-unity-into-the-most-popular-game-engine-in-the-world-96cdef6a https://www.contextualize.ai/mpereira/the-growth-of-unity-in...
- KerrAvon 3y ago
  Unity merged with a bizarrely-managed malware company a while back and shouldn't be used as a measure of anything.
- torginus 3y ago
  Great chart! But it's so weird to see companies go on a hiring spree AFTER their product was essentially done. I cannot name a single feature that I use that wasn't present in the 2020 version. Since then, their headcount has more than quadrupled. What are those people doing?
  - tbugrara 3y ago
    Unity is currently redesigning their engine from the ground up using an ECS architecture. They're calling it DOTS or Entities.
rb2e 3y ago
oh No, they sold Bandcamp... According to Jason Schreier https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1707416234461909487 https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1707416234461909487
- 1123581321 3y ago
  That's a bit disappointing. As a user I just want Bandcamp to be owned by someone who gets it and leaves it alone. As far as I could tell, Epic barely touched Bandcamp. I'm unfamiliar with Songtradr but they have more incentive to integrate the core product into their services as they're in the industry and a smaller company (more need to make the acquisition work for them.) I hope it goes well.
  - btown 3y ago
    I'm somewhat hopeful about the synergies here. Giving musicians an easy path to monetize their catalog, as well as market their availability to be commissioned by brands, is a good thing... especially when artists are being dually hammered by Spotify's deci-cents-per-stream industry baseline and live music promoters' anticompetitive behavior. That said, there are ways Songtradr could abuse their new position of trust. I hope they're smart enough not to do that, but I also hope that an archival project for free downloads on long-inactive Bandcamp accounts is underway...
    - btown 3y ago
      Self-reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37696171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37696171 makes me less hopeful that they're operating in good faith...
      - 1123581321 3y ago
        Interesting. I didn’t know about the union aspect and regardless, not retaining staff is a great way to stop understanding what’s important to preserve.
- 3y ago
awill 3y ago
Probably because they're spending hundreds of millions on exclusivity deals to keep games off Steam.
ursuscamp 3y ago
Are they finally letting the legacy ZZT staff go?
- soupfordummies 3y ago
  God I hope not! :)
paxys 3y ago
Why are people still reading tech layoff news and trying to attribute it to specific problems at a company? Remember that Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Salesforce, Shopify etc. laid off large chunks of their workforce while collectively making hundreds of billions of dollars in profit. Companies lay off people because they can, simple as that.
- enriquec 3y ago
  What an awful sample to draw an absurd conclusion
- jayd16 3y ago
  There might be similar external factors but "because they can" seems like incomplete analysis at best.
- boringg 3y ago
  Economy is about to take a nose dive if you haven't been reading the tea leaves. This is both pre-emptive for the coming downturn and a correction for the covid over hiring. Buckle up.
  - tqi 3y ago
    I'm curious what signals you're seeing? (I don't pay much attention to this so I haven't really heard anything)
    - Kye 3y ago
      I don't know about them, but I do know that between rising costs and already insufficient wages and sallaries, a growing number of people are riding on the absolute edge of solvency. All it takes is one big push. Like, for example: an end to pauses on payments for debts, expiring eviction bans/moratoriums, companies looking to dump housing and commercial buildings causing a collapse in prices that other financial instruments depend on, government shutdown (and financial consequences of just the threat) leading an enormous group of already marginal people to fall over the edge. And that's just a few minutes of coming up with plausible things. Something has to give and, historically speaking, something will.
5g45h45j 3y ago
[flagged]
- philipwhiuk 3y ago
  When it's not ridiculously easy to get rehired at a stupidly high salary relative to median wages. Unions happen in industries that are both not fighting for employees and not particularly well paid.
  - pgeorgi 3y ago
    Pilots are pretty well paid and sought after, and have a US/Canada union that is 74000 members strong...
philipwhiuk 3y ago
The Metaverse Is Going Great.
debacle 3y ago
Epic has done a poor job activating its storefront. Steam is ready for a competitor that can pull in AAA titles, but there really is no reason to use Epic if a game is also on Steam - Steam is far and away the better app.
- unethical_ban 3y ago
  I'd argue antitrust should step in and make sure Steam doesn't offer exclusivity agreements or punish studios who utilize more than one distribution. Steam is the big player with network effects, and anything more than "being better" by steam should be construed as anticompetitive.
jzb 3y ago
From the announcement: "The company also announced that it’s divesting Bandcamp, an online audio distribution platform it acquired last year" I don't care a ton about Epic, but I love Bandcamp. It's my primary mechanism these days for discovering and acquiring music. I was puzzled when Epic bought Bandcamp, apparently they were too. They're being kicked over to Songtradr -- I hope that's a neutral to good move, but I don't really know. Anybody know anything that could shed light on that?
- politelemon 3y ago
  I can't see it as a good thing at all. They're effectively being thrown about to yet another operating model which will have a disruptive impact on them. The new company Songtradr focuses on licensing, it's a b2b, while Bandcamp is a b2c. So it can be easy to see how they'd want to make Bandcamp more like themselves. Of course I'm being negative and cynical, apologies. I share the same fondness for Bandcamp.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - Springtime 3y ago
    Looking at their Wikipedia they also apparently bought 7digital, another online music store, earlier this year. Had no idea about this until now. Edit: to clarify meant Songtradr.
    - ericfrazier 3y ago
      Epic probably doesn't know they own it either.
  - jerrycruncher 3y ago
    As someone who also loves Bandcamp, I can't help but assume that enshittification is nigh.
  - JAlexoid 3y ago
    I mean... Bandcamp is also licensing, all of works of art "copy sales" are just licensing agreements. B2C is just commonly a preset non-commercial license. (I believe that Bandcamp also allows you to sell a commercial license) Let alone Bandcamp is a good source for smaller DJs to acquire tracks, which isn't a long shot for Songtradr.
Tiktaalik 3y ago
Sounds to me like general result of the "no one has any money" issue that has caused problems for main street businesses, restaurants and retail. If the wallet is feeling empty, stuff like Fortnite skins are luxuries that are pretty easy to cut back on.
micromacrofoot 3y ago
They're not just selling Bandcamp, they're selling them to a company that licenses music. WTF
tibbydudeza 3y ago
What are all these people doing - it not like they are releasing AAA games yearly like Activision ???. 9000 in 2023 ???.
gmerc 3y ago
Post metaverse drinking binge there’s a headache for all involved. Tim are up the metaverse narrative and doubled down on investing in it.
billconan 3y ago
game engine companies keep me being amazed by what they build, but their businesses don't seem to be very profitable?
Animats 3y ago
“For a while now, we’ve been spending way more money than we earn, investing in the next evolution of Epic and growing Fortnite as a metaverse-inspired ecosystem for creators. I had long been optimistic that we could power through this transition without layoffs, but in retrospect I see that this was unrealistic.” - Sweeney. Epic was actually implementing the Metaverse. But with that dead...
seejayseesjays 3y ago
is this why they rejected my internship app
VikingCoder 3y ago
“For a while now, we’ve been spending way more money than we earn,” wrote Chief Executive Officer Tim Sweeney. Fortnite has generated a revenue of over $26 billion since its release in 2017. How in the world could they possibly have spent more than they make? I mean, how is that remotely possible? 16% of its staff is 870. They had 5,437 staff? That's $797,008 per employee per year. And that's just from Fortnite alone, ignoring all of their other sources of revenue. Imagine spending "way more" than that. What am I missing?
- alephnerd 3y ago
  Their Gross Income (ie. money remaining after Revenue is spent on expenses) has been dropping severely [0]. In 2019 their net income was $1.8B yet by 2022, their net income was $700M. That's a 61% DROP in net income in just 3 years. If your expenses are growing faster than you revenue, you done goofed. If we look at earning statements (can't cuz they're private), this was probably due to overhiring. [0] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/1234193/epic-games-annual-income/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1234193/epic-games-annua...
- meragrin_ 3y ago
  Outside workers(contractors and such), Infrastructure, Sales/Marketing, licensing(Star Wars, NFL, DC, etc.).
justin66 3y ago
A standard step to improve the books if they're intending an IPO in the near future.
AraceliHarker 3y ago
Roblox's woes are a sign of things to come for Fortnite's creator content. Epic will soon be forced to lay off more employees as the platform's growth stalls.

255 points by mpereira 3y ago

Fortnite not quite the cash cow anymore? Or they've been burning too much cash on Epic Games store? Or something else? Article might say but can't tell because of the paywall.

chankstein38 3y ago
>Article might say but can't tell because of the paywall. Same but anecdotally I can say I know a ton of people who stopped playing Fortnite these last few seasons because Epic kept making it more and more annoying to play. So your theory might be on the money!
lfkdev 3y ago
Fortnite is still a massive cash cow, but man they burn actual billions for the Epic Store which still isn't very epic and is missing most basic features.
- andersa 3y ago
  It's actually mind blowing how much money they spend on user acquisition while the thing is still full of bugs! Why does it take ages to open? Why did downloading some games launch another launcher that downloaded the game again? Why did it sometimes not switch to idle when in the background and keep wasting CPU? Why does the UI sometimes just randomly not work? Why is every interaction with it so slow? Why does it get exponentially slower the more Unreal Engine assets you have? Why is that even in the same launcher? Why can't I do basic things like open game pages in a new tab? Does anyone at Epic actually use this thing? Most importantly, why did they do the stupidest PR moves imaginable, by "stealing" games that were already announced for another platform? This is basic stuff, it doesn't take 5 years to figure it out! They had a once in forever chance to kill the unnecessary 30% tax booth that is Steam and they blew it by shipping this terrible software.
  - fidotron 3y ago
    There is a curious phenomenon in decent sized companies where the more money they have the more problems they have. When flush with cash the middle managers love to overspend and grow mini empires in the promise that one day the product will be finished, but it never will because the warring empires require it being unfinished to justify their ongoing existence. Things have to get amazingly bad before such empires are dismantled and the product fixed, generally something existential for the company as a whole. The Epic Store almost certainly could not be fixed without simply rebooting with a whole new team with the incentive structure setup to make it work.
    - intelVISA 3y ago
      It's a damn shame the only way to get a good product is to find a company that is still in hustle mode -- once its revenue/moat is secure it all goes to offshore/acquihire hell.
      - Pulcinella 3y ago
        Yeah at a certain point it seems like the bean counters really take over and the easiest way to grow profits is to cut costs... except a certain point there is only so much you can logically cut or optimize. After that you are just cutting the product/service/business to the bone. You can remove the suspension in a race car to save weight, but it's a bad idea. I am reminded of a Steve Jobs quote: ""It turns out the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies, like IBM or Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful. So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers."
kevingadd 3y ago
Nothing lasts forever, even in video games. The number of games that have stayed strong as long as Fortnite is vanishingly small. It doesn't help that they're no longer on mobile devices, they earned a lot of money there Based on 3rd-party statistics they still have hundreds of millions of players, though.
- hacoo 3y ago
  Maybe those players hve stopped spending money in the cash shop though ?
- smugma 3y ago
  Mario is still going strong.
  - kevingadd 3y ago
    That's a franchise, not a single title. Though with live games like Fortnite you could argue they're basically releasing new games constantly with the amount of work that goes into it...

flipgimble 3y ago

https://archive.ph/1sXj9 https://archive.ph/1sXj9

sarchertech 3y ago

Wonder why the waited until after the layoff train was over.

amsterdorn 3y ago
Evidently the train is still running.
paulddraper 3y ago
It's over?
- sarchertech 3y ago
  Myself and several of my friends have gotten offers in the last month or so. Also recruiter spam has picked up pretty heavily. I’ve also read in a few places that hiring is picking up.
  - paulddraper 3y ago
    In my network Lucidchart just had a layoff this week. And Qualtrics is rumored to have one soon.
manicennui 3y ago
End of year numbers probably.
- huslage 3y ago
  They aren't public
  - voisin 3y ago
    They still have investors
    - spywaregorilla 3y ago

brendoelfrendo 3y ago

https://archive.ph/1sXj9 https://archive.ph/1sXj9 The article is very brief, basically just an expansion of the headline. I'm curious where the layoffs are occurring. Admin? Epic Games Store? Maybe now that UE5 is mostly baked they're reducing the size of the team? I'd be surprised if they were expecting to make significantly less money this year.

ToucanLoucan 3y ago
Layoffs just seem to be standard operating procedure for big corpos these days. Makes the shareholders happy and the executives look like they're actually working.

bluetidepro 3y ago

I wonder if this is related to the class action that is just now finally going through the submission phase for people: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/03/ftc-finalizes-order-requiring-fortnite-maker-epic-games-pay-245-million-tricking-users-making https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/03/...

jsnell 3y ago
No, those kinds of one-off events don't cause an otherwise profitable company to lay off people.
- staticautomatic 3y ago
  There are certainly situations where an adverse result in a lawsuit can lead to layoffs despite being a “one-off event”. I’ve worked on at least a few that were genuine “bet the company” cases. But a $245M loss is typically not in the ballpark for a big company. To trigger layoffs you usually need to be talking about billions or injunctions.
  - bpiche 3y ago
    The total is more like 500mm. If I recall, it was 250mm for refunds, and 250mm in penalties. It's a large amount of $$$ Edit: to be clear, it's the largest fine the FTC has ever imposed, it is a historically large amount of $$$
- giantg2 3y ago
  Sure it can. If the executives want to hit their performance bonuses they might start axing lower revenue projects or support groups. In a higher rate environment, it's certainly possible that the decision is made to lay people off to reduce the higher cost debt that needs to be incurred or the time it will take to pay it off, even if the company is otherwise profitable.not saying that's the case here though. Of course there are other likely causes of layoffs, like a downturn in industry forecast for particular types of games, their next product didn't test well (or can't charge what they wanted), etc.

thih9 3y ago

Interesting, especially in the context of the earlier Unity pricing news. Is Epic suddenly doing worse financially?

aliljet 3y ago

Could this be because of some of the unionization underway?

Narann 3y ago

Just after Unity reveal they have no long term plan. That was fast.

intelVISA 3y ago
Why keep excess headcount when your main competitor just torpedoed itself?
- Narann 3y ago
  To return a feel of stability and contrast with your main competitor at a moment everyone is reassessing it’s technological choices. Epic actually shows its business model is doubtful.

misterbishop 3y ago

Fingers crossed they kill the Games Store.

Kiro 3y ago
Why?
- misterbishop 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - Kiro 3y ago
    Flagged. You've been here since 2014 and should know better.
    - misterbishop 3y ago
      it's because of my experience that i do know better. wise up.
- babypuncher 3y ago
  The way they try to push their store is annoying, so people want them to fail outright. I think few people will disagree that letting Valve have a de facto monopoly is a bad thing. But Epic's whole strategy around EGS seems built entirely around appealing to publishers and developers at the expense of making the platform desirable for users. Their marquee feature is that they take a smaller cut of sales on their platform (12% vs Valve's 20-30%), but this savings never gets passed down to the customer. So from a user's perspective, this isn't a feature, it's a footnote with no real bearing on their decision making. Where Valve has invested a lot of time and money into building out platform features that add value for the customer (Steam Play, Steam Input, Workshop, Big Picture Mode, a fairly reasonable refund system), Epic uses all their money to buy exclusivity deals. The platform itself is barebones. The client takes twice as long to load as Steam despite having 1/10th the feature set.
- tru1ock 3y ago

BadBadJellyBean 3y ago

Is this my fault because of all the free games I claimed?

voisin 3y ago
Tim Sweeney would like us all to agree that it is Apple’s fault for their App Store policies.
- bpiche 3y ago
  And he'd blame Valve, too. EGS might be great for devs, but it's not good for users. It's not a big conspiracy against him. People just don't want to use the store! Whining in the face of obvious failure makes you look like a real loser.
  - spywaregorilla 3y ago
    Can you show evidence of him "blaming" Valve? I'm not aware of that. And it appears as though you are criticizing his character based on a behavior he didn't do. Off the top of my head I can think of him saying the Valve Steamdeck is great: https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1415755678849900546 https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/141575567884990054... And him saying that Valve not demanding crossplay is bad.
    - klik99 3y ago
      Yes, this. I was going to reply with the same thing but thought it wasn't worth. There is a lot of hate towards Epic due to EGS, which I get - but Tim has never said anything about losing income due to other stores existing. Sure he's said a lot of bad things about Apple, but never about Valve. He's actually a really good guy, all the hate towards him really irks me - fine, hate the epic game store, I don't personally but I get it, all this world building where he becomes this stupid generic money grubbing CEO is just wrong. It's just reddit echo chamber stuff.
      - 3y ago

eigenvalue 3y ago

This is probably just continued post-COVID demand normalization. Basically all software and gaming got a massive bump that was obviously going to have an unsustainable component to it. But in many cases companies planned like it was totally sustainable and would continue. That’s why even super profitable companies like Microsoft and Epic are doing layoffs in 2023. The other reason of course is that they went a bit crazy with the hiring sprees and accumulated some unproductive devs who are probably a net drag. That’s ultimately a healthy force in the economy as those people can do more in smaller firms with less in-house expertise (albeit at lower wages). I wonder also how much of a driver new programmer productivity tools like copilot and ChatGPT are factoring into this. If your top 10% productivity workers just got a 30%+ productivity boost, that means you can easily shed the bottom 20% productive workers and still be ahead of the game.

n4r9 3y ago
The first two paras I agree sound fairly likely. Regarding the second para, the interesting part for me is: how do these companies determine which are the unproductive devs? My impression so far is that senior management has no way of measuring this, given how little data is provided to back up decisions to RTO. Not so sure about the third para. Why would one company be more ahead of the game than any other, if indeed LLMs are providing this supposed boost?
- oblio 3y ago
  They don't. They basically go by highest salaries and various arbitrary measures such as unprofitable division, virtual location, etc.
- paxys 3y ago
  It's not possible to measure with 100% accuracy, but let's not kid ourselves every company and every division can easily pick out the bottom 10-15% of devs who have close to zero real impact. The actual number in fact is likely far greater than that.
  - jmerz 3y ago

danielvaughn 3y ago

Shouldn't there be games coming out fairly soon (next 1-2 years) that take advantage of Lumen/Nanite/Quixel/Metahuman? From my POV, the future looks bright for Unreal because those technologies give it a pretty crazy edge over its competitors, and that's not even taking into account the Unity fiasco.

Mistletoe 3y ago
For people like me that didn't know what this is. https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/metahuman https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/metahuman Pretty amazing. Although I don't know if I even need characters this real in my games. At some point it becomes too much like real life and kind of boring? I think I like the fantasy aspect of games too much and I like to escape.
- danielvaughn 3y ago
  I should have included links, thank you
- tarr11 3y ago
  You can also use "Mesh to Metahuman" to make stylized characters but with more interesting facial expressions https://medium.com/locodrome/unreal-filmmaking-building-a-stylized-custom-metahuman-33316cd5e4a6 https://medium.com/locodrome/unreal-filmmaking-building-a-st...
babypuncher 3y ago
Immortals of Aveum just shipped last month using UE5's advanced new features. The game tanked though, because it's a new IP and released at a time where we are inundated with high quality, high profile releases. 2023 has been kind of wild for AAA games. The game just needed a more likeable protagonist and a less crowded release window, but I'm sure the takeaway for EA execs is that it shouldn't have been a new IP...
dijit 3y ago
Some of this is marketing. Lumen is really nice as long as you never hope to have >60fps and don't want open worlds. The architecture of it is just fundamentally not compatible with the majority of AAA games, especially open world or esports ones. It's not that Epic are stupid it's that they're "optimising" in all directions and it sometimes causes issues. -- marketing advertises features that are not fit for the purpose they're being marketed for. Lumen is excellent for small games that aren't so CPU heavy or alternatively for non-realtime renders such as scene generation VFX. Unreal itself is extremely bound to single-core CPU performance, so the idea of adding extra weight to the main render thread (which is basically the only thread) is unconscionable and was a deeply unwise decision.

mpereira 3y ago

Unity also had 3 recent mass layoffs. I compiled their headcount since 2004 here: https://www.contextualize.ai/mpereira/the-growth-of-unity-into-the-most-popular-game-engine-in-the-world-96cdef6a https://www.contextualize.ai/mpereira/the-growth-of-unity-in...

KerrAvon 3y ago
Unity merged with a bizarrely-managed malware company a while back and shouldn't be used as a measure of anything.
torginus 3y ago
Great chart! But it's so weird to see companies go on a hiring spree AFTER their product was essentially done. I cannot name a single feature that I use that wasn't present in the 2020 version. Since then, their headcount has more than quadrupled. What are those people doing?
- tbugrara 3y ago
  Unity is currently redesigning their engine from the ground up using an ECS architecture. They're calling it DOTS or Entities.

rb2e 3y ago

oh No, they sold Bandcamp... According to Jason Schreier https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1707416234461909487 https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1707416234461909487

1123581321 3y ago
That's a bit disappointing. As a user I just want Bandcamp to be owned by someone who gets it and leaves it alone. As far as I could tell, Epic barely touched Bandcamp. I'm unfamiliar with Songtradr but they have more incentive to integrate the core product into their services as they're in the industry and a smaller company (more need to make the acquisition work for them.) I hope it goes well.
- btown 3y ago
  I'm somewhat hopeful about the synergies here. Giving musicians an easy path to monetize their catalog, as well as market their availability to be commissioned by brands, is a good thing... especially when artists are being dually hammered by Spotify's deci-cents-per-stream industry baseline and live music promoters' anticompetitive behavior. That said, there are ways Songtradr could abuse their new position of trust. I hope they're smart enough not to do that, but I also hope that an archival project for free downloads on long-inactive Bandcamp accounts is underway...
  - btown 3y ago
    Self-reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37696171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37696171 makes me less hopeful that they're operating in good faith...
    - 1123581321 3y ago
      Interesting. I didn’t know about the union aspect and regardless, not retaining staff is a great way to stop understanding what’s important to preserve.
3y ago

awill 3y ago

Probably because they're spending hundreds of millions on exclusivity deals to keep games off Steam.

ursuscamp 3y ago

Are they finally letting the legacy ZZT staff go?

soupfordummies 3y ago
God I hope not! :)

paxys 3y ago

Why are people still reading tech layoff news and trying to attribute it to specific problems at a company? Remember that Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Salesforce, Shopify etc. laid off large chunks of their workforce while collectively making hundreds of billions of dollars in profit. Companies lay off people because they can, simple as that.

enriquec 3y ago
What an awful sample to draw an absurd conclusion
jayd16 3y ago
There might be similar external factors but "because they can" seems like incomplete analysis at best.
boringg 3y ago
Economy is about to take a nose dive if you haven't been reading the tea leaves. This is both pre-emptive for the coming downturn and a correction for the covid over hiring. Buckle up.
- tqi 3y ago
  I'm curious what signals you're seeing? (I don't pay much attention to this so I haven't really heard anything)
  - Kye 3y ago
    I don't know about them, but I do know that between rising costs and already insufficient wages and sallaries, a growing number of people are riding on the absolute edge of solvency. All it takes is one big push. Like, for example: an end to pauses on payments for debts, expiring eviction bans/moratoriums, companies looking to dump housing and commercial buildings causing a collapse in prices that other financial instruments depend on, government shutdown (and financial consequences of just the threat) leading an enormous group of already marginal people to fall over the edge. And that's just a few minutes of coming up with plausible things. Something has to give and, historically speaking, something will.

5g45h45j 3y ago

[flagged]

philipwhiuk 3y ago
When it's not ridiculously easy to get rehired at a stupidly high salary relative to median wages. Unions happen in industries that are both not fighting for employees and not particularly well paid.
- pgeorgi 3y ago
  Pilots are pretty well paid and sought after, and have a US/Canada union that is 74000 members strong...

philipwhiuk 3y ago

The Metaverse Is Going Great.

debacle 3y ago

Epic has done a poor job activating its storefront. Steam is ready for a competitor that can pull in AAA titles, but there really is no reason to use Epic if a game is also on Steam - Steam is far and away the better app.

unethical_ban 3y ago
I'd argue antitrust should step in and make sure Steam doesn't offer exclusivity agreements or punish studios who utilize more than one distribution. Steam is the big player with network effects, and anything more than "being better" by steam should be construed as anticompetitive.

jzb 3y ago

From the announcement: "The company also announced that it’s divesting Bandcamp, an online audio distribution platform it acquired last year" I don't care a ton about Epic, but I love Bandcamp. It's my primary mechanism these days for discovering and acquiring music. I was puzzled when Epic bought Bandcamp, apparently they were too. They're being kicked over to Songtradr -- I hope that's a neutral to good move, but I don't really know. Anybody know anything that could shed light on that?

politelemon 3y ago
I can't see it as a good thing at all. They're effectively being thrown about to yet another operating model which will have a disruptive impact on them. The new company Songtradr focuses on licensing, it's a b2b, while Bandcamp is a b2c. So it can be easy to see how they'd want to make Bandcamp more like themselves. Of course I'm being negative and cynical, apologies. I share the same fondness for Bandcamp.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Springtime 3y ago
  Looking at their Wikipedia they also apparently bought 7digital, another online music store, earlier this year. Had no idea about this until now. Edit: to clarify meant Songtradr.
  - ericfrazier 3y ago
    Epic probably doesn't know they own it either.
- jerrycruncher 3y ago
  As someone who also loves Bandcamp, I can't help but assume that enshittification is nigh.
- JAlexoid 3y ago
  I mean... Bandcamp is also licensing, all of works of art "copy sales" are just licensing agreements. B2C is just commonly a preset non-commercial license. (I believe that Bandcamp also allows you to sell a commercial license) Let alone Bandcamp is a good source for smaller DJs to acquire tracks, which isn't a long shot for Songtradr.

Tiktaalik 3y ago

Sounds to me like general result of the "no one has any money" issue that has caused problems for main street businesses, restaurants and retail. If the wallet is feeling empty, stuff like Fortnite skins are luxuries that are pretty easy to cut back on.

micromacrofoot 3y ago

They're not just selling Bandcamp, they're selling them to a company that licenses music. WTF

tibbydudeza 3y ago

What are all these people doing - it not like they are releasing AAA games yearly like Activision ???. 9000 in 2023 ???.

gmerc 3y ago

Post metaverse drinking binge there’s a headache for all involved. Tim are up the metaverse narrative and doubled down on investing in it.

billconan 3y ago

game engine companies keep me being amazed by what they build, but their businesses don't seem to be very profitable?

Animats 3y ago

“For a while now, we’ve been spending way more money than we earn, investing in the next evolution of Epic and growing Fortnite as a metaverse-inspired ecosystem for creators. I had long been optimistic that we could power through this transition without layoffs, but in retrospect I see that this was unrealistic.” - Sweeney. Epic was actually implementing the Metaverse. But with that dead...

seejayseesjays 3y ago

is this why they rejected my internship app

VikingCoder 3y ago

“For a while now, we’ve been spending way more money than we earn,” wrote Chief Executive Officer Tim Sweeney. Fortnite has generated a revenue of over $26 billion since its release in 2017. How in the world could they possibly have spent more than they make? I mean, how is that remotely possible? 16% of its staff is 870. They had 5,437 staff? That's $797,008 per employee per year. And that's just from Fortnite alone, ignoring all of their other sources of revenue. Imagine spending "way more" than that. What am I missing?

alephnerd 3y ago
Their Gross Income (ie. money remaining after Revenue is spent on expenses) has been dropping severely [0]. In 2019 their net income was $1.8B yet by 2022, their net income was $700M. That's a 61% DROP in net income in just 3 years. If your expenses are growing faster than you revenue, you done goofed. If we look at earning statements (can't cuz they're private), this was probably due to overhiring. [0] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/1234193/epic-games-annual-income/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1234193/epic-games-annua...
meragrin_ 3y ago
Outside workers(contractors and such), Infrastructure, Sales/Marketing, licensing(Star Wars, NFL, DC, etc.).

justin66 3y ago

A standard step to improve the books if they're intending an IPO in the near future.

AraceliHarker 3y ago

Roblox's woes are a sign of things to come for Fortnite's creator content. Epic will soon be forced to lay off more employees as the platform's growth stalls.