19 ms·

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

• HardwareLust 6mo ago
  Fortnite usage fell? Maybe there's hope for humanity after all.
• deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
• adrianhon 6mo ago
  1000 layoffs represents around 25% of Epic's total workforce.
  • Thev00d00 6mo ago
    Ouch, that is huge. I assumed this was more like 10%
• BoredPositron 6mo ago
  I hate that Tim got lucky two times with initiatives of employees that went against his will. I hope epic falters.
  • mdrzn 6mo ago
    More info on this? What are you referring to?
    • MeetingsBrowser 6mo ago
      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 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
    > 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 6mo ago
      Were unions involved in Epic's layoff?
      • tombert 6mo ago
        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 6mo ago
          Is COBRA your only option? Have you checked your state's insurance marketplace?
          • tombert 6mo ago
            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.
• CodingJeebus 6mo ago
  > 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 6mo ago
    > 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 6mo ago
      > it might also be worth pointing out that for a game company there's some risk in that messaging This.
• pram 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
    In fairness, someone has to try. We can't rely on GabeN being (relatively) benign without serious competition.
    • gonzalohm 6mo ago
      Everyone has tried already. EA, Ubisoft, Blizzard, Epic...
      • fidotron 6mo ago
        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 6mo ago
        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 6mo ago
          The main problem with EA Origin was EA itself. They have burnt every single bit of costumer trust EA as a company could have.
• doughnutstracks 6mo ago
  >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 https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/news/todays-layoffs
• edwardsrobbie 6mo ago
  This one is sad for me as a Fortnite player and someone who lives in the town where Epic Games is headquartered.
• rustyhancock 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
    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 6mo ago
    Of course it's enough, the problem is greed. They must perform ritual sacrifices to appease the market gods.
    • leetharris 6mo ago
      They aren't publicly traded.
      • shimman 6mo ago
        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 6mo ago
          Amen.
      • 6mo ago
• OrionSubnet 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
  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-increase https://www.fortnite.com/news/fortnite-v-bucks-price-increas... [2] https://www.fortnite.com/news/fortnite-developers-will-soon-be-able-to-sell-in-game-items https://www.fortnite.com/news/fortnite-developers-will-soon-...
• MisterTea 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
    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 6mo ago
    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 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
    Roblox
    • fidotron 6mo ago
      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 6mo ago
        Technically, you need to include the adult predators as recurring revenue too.
        • iknowstuff 6mo ago
          why is this such a talking point about roblox? couldnt this be said about literally any online platform ever?
          • johnnyanmac 6mo ago
            Because Roblox has had many high profile issues with it and their response is much more tepid than other platforms.
            • iknowstuff 6mo ago
              The response from other platforms is placating regulators by verifying IDs. Is that what we want?
• 4corners4sides 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
    Roblox is indeed eating the world
  • Liftyee 6mo ago
    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 6mo ago
    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".
  • teamonkey 6mo ago
    Roblox accounts for about 50% of total video game play time, it’s insane how big Roblox is. But not just Roblox. People are spending their time and money elsewhere too. Polymarket and sports betting for one.
    • 2postsperday 6mo ago
      [dead]
• jeffreportmill1 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
    Why would the CEO waste his wealth on reviving unnecessary jobs?
    • nozzlegear 6mo ago
      Why wouldn't he? Why isn't he invested in the stakeholders?
      • nailer 6mo ago
        > "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.
        • oblio 6mo ago
          In 1 phrase, the source of most evils in modern society. A minority of people (shareholders) holding the majority of people (employees) at gunpoint.
          • kgwgk 6mo ago
            They are working for money, not coerced with a gun pointing at them. They are free to leave as they please and often do.
            • 6mo ago
• Tsiklon 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
    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.
    • deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
• Ekaros 6mo ago
  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...
• panelpowder 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  • OKRainbowKid 6mo ago
    Is this supposed to be a joke?
• Ekaros 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
    If you are a billion dollar company, 500m are in the lower range
• animal531 6mo ago
  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.
• jeffwask 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  • mvdtnz 6mo ago
    Take it to Reddit.
• ivraatiems 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
    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 6mo ago
      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 6mo ago
        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.
• mvdtnz 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
  Discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47503239 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47503239
• deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
• deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
• Anvoker 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
    > "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...
• Quarrelsome 6mo ago
  > "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 6mo ago
    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 6mo ago
      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 6mo ago
        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 6mo ago
        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.
• deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
• geitir 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
    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 6mo ago
    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.
    • johnnyanmac 6mo ago
      I'm sure any studio would trade their entire decade of portfolio to get where Fortnite is. Sony did in fact basically do that to great failure (despite Hell divers 2 being very well received, it's no Fortnite).
  • adrian17 6mo ago
    > 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.
    • Jensson 6mo ago
      That just makes people install it it doesn't make people buy anything. I have installed epic store but I never ever even thought about buying a game there, I installed it since they give me free games so I'd assume most gamers have installed epic store. But getting people to install isn't enough.
• jmpman 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
  "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 6mo ago
    Remove the reference, and that's most "news" in this era
• dgeiser13 6mo ago
  Since when do people refer to game playing as usage?
• oh_fiddlesticks 6mo ago
  > Fortnite "Usage" I like this choice of word, it seems fitting.
• ryguz 6mo ago
  [dead]
• pbrum 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
    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 6mo ago
      Splitgate 1 felt a lot like UT2k4 combined with Halo to me. Really fast, really fun.
  • danpalmer 6mo ago
    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 6mo ago
      Didn't they make the game free? Or was that just UT99?
      • chupasaurus 6mo ago
        They removed all UT games from online stores and added UT 3X which is a free version of UT3 with Epic Online Services baked instead of original ones. The only way one could legally get UT99 is to buy physical. And it's been like that for many years prior to an event above, which also disabled the server browser after 22 years of running intact.
• dgeiser13 6mo ago
  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-million-games/ 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 6mo ago
    I still don't know which is stupider: this, or Unity buying Weta.
• singron 6mo ago
  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-trial-epic-games-exhibit.pdf https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/20696836/epic-apple-t...
  • junon 6mo ago
    Maybe a dumb question but why break down production/hosting as a cost per employee?
  • deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  • tencentshill 6mo ago
    A lot of things have changed in the labor market since 2019.
• justinhj 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
  Duplicate https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47504996 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47504996
• s0ulf3re 6mo ago
  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-increase?lang=en-US https://www.fortnite.com/news/fortnite-v-bucks-price-increas...
• pelorat 6mo ago
  They have way too many employees for what they do.
• wiseowise 6mo ago
  Epic should learn from Valve. The only guy touching TF2 is a cleaning manager who dusts off serves once in a year.
  • johnnyanmac 6mo ago
    And plenty of contractors.
• dana321 6mo ago
  Its kind of a miracle that any working game gets made on unreal engine considering how buggy the editor is.
• whyenot 6mo ago
  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.
  • sjoedev 6mo ago
    Do keep in mind: they also develop, maintain, support, and market Unreal Engine, which is possibly the most advanced and innovative game engine out there. It’s used by tons of other studios (including AAA) and is used in other industries like space flight, automotive, etc.
• rothific 6mo ago
  Does anyone know if this is mainly going to affect people in Cary, NC?
  • reaktion 6mo ago
    Yes, as reported by local media https://www.wral.com/business/epic-games-cary-layoffs-1000-500m-cost-savings-fortnite-decline-mar-2026/ https://www.wral.com/business/epic-games-cary-layoffs-1000-5...
• TheRoque 6mo ago
  Would it be possible that they become less generous with unreal engine and its free tier ? Right now it's 5% beyond 1 million revenue, free before.
  • johnnyanmac 6mo ago
    Probably not. I imagine most people making under 1m won't fund much more overall compared to the big studios. But the contract can always change (look at Unity). That's a part of why it's best to own your tools if you're able to.
• abcde666777 6mo ago
  A lot of folks wax sympathetic for the employees who've been laid off. But rare is the company which grows large and doesn't develop a lot of entropy in the process. Hiring beyond its needs, bloating, and mismanagement of resources. Does the company owe a living to those people that it doesn't actually benefit from having on board? Sometimes it sounds like people think so.
  • ganelonhb 6mo ago
    This will be an unpopular take but I agree with it mostly. Always remember that you are not entitled to a job just because you need it to live. Always make sure you stay sharp and prepared for the worst case
    • bad_haircut72 6mo ago
      If you're not entitled to a job, neither is anyone in the capital class entitled to own shit, they own the best houses, all the means of production - they're not entitled to any of that either.
      • abcde666777 6mo ago
        You think they didn't have to apply themselves to be able to acquire those things? They just got it handed to them for free?
        • johnnyanmac 6mo ago
          Many of them, no. Tim's been in the weeds, but most billionaires inherited millions and had the money make money for them. They start in positions with more money than many will see in a full career.
        • linehedonist 6mo ago
          Of course they did. It’s called inheritance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ellison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ellison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walton_family https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walton_family https://www.forbes.com/profile/haas/ https://www.forbes.com/profile/haas/ And the list goes on.
• RobRivera 6mo ago
  Oh no, the poor shareholders
• tills13 6mo ago
  Fortnite made more money than God during its prime years. Where did that money go? Just to hazard a guess: the majority of this money went to investors and executives and now, when the pot is empty, the employees pay the price.
• porcoda 6mo ago
  Interesting how not many comments talk about the game itself and how Epic may have driven their own players away with changes that players dislike. I’ve played for most of the life of the game pretty regularly and I’ve found myself growing tired of “yet another season full of movie/TV crossover junk”. You can tell they’re focusing on pulling money in via partnerships, and not paying much attention to “is this what players want”. Unsurprising you’d see player numbers drop.
• sitzkrieg 6mo ago
  constant growth for stockholders ruins all it touches
• istillcantcode 6mo ago
  Game is a little bloated and loads slow especially compared to Roblox. The other games are not as fun as the ones in Roblox either. Both have a lot of doo doo, but Roblox does have some neat indie gems. It reminds me of BYOND but in 3D. The launcher sucks, and there is nothing like Steam Input or RSS feeds for everything. I added steam RSS feeds for some games to my feed reader and I still use the client to check for updates for other games. There are a lot of small features that none of the other stores really have.
• platevoltage 6mo ago
  Imagine if Nintendo cut 20% of their workforce because a 9 year old game started to lose popularity.
• moomoo11 6mo ago
  Imagine if they spent less time complaining about App Store and more time on increasing revenue?
• mawadev 6mo ago
  If you look at the technical state of Unreal Engine 5, then how modern GPUs can barely run games without frame generation which also makes them look blurry, then you are not surprised. Its not just gamers but also developers who are fed up with the status quo of how games are done these days. The big use case for UE moved from technical excellence to churning through people who can work on your game for hiring convenience, because you don't have to train them on an inhouse engine. Its unhealthy to have this much fluctuation with hiring people, then if the game fails or succeeds (it doesn't matter), people are laid off anyway. It is just mismanagement of the money they earned with fortnite, they failed to keep the momentum and stopped taking risks. The technical incompetency doesn't stop with UE5, it shows in the store, which is laughably bad and inefficient since forever. I think its good these people get a new chance to start working for companies who can put their skills and time to good use and value their expertise. Long term nobody working there would be happy with the way the software portfolio is moving downwards.
  • nrjames 6mo ago
    > ... they failed to keep the momentum and stopped taking risks. This is a problem that infects all of the large studios now, from Epic to EA, Ubisoft, etc. My read on it is that it feels less risky to double-down on an exiting successful live service game like Fortnite or Rainbow Six Siege. That's probably true for ~5 years. After those ~5 years, it's far riskier to continue investing in the game than it is to start winding it down into maintenance mode while working on new titles or IP. The related risk is assuming that since the one title was huge that players are going to crave other titles in the same brand or franchise. For example, Ubisoft's assumption that Rainbow Six Extraction would naturally follow the success of Rainbow Six Siege. These companies get addicted to the recurring revenue stream and pivot their businesses under the incorrect assumption they will last forever, at the expense of new projects.
• vintermann 6mo ago
  Is there any reason Fortnite should be a "forever game" like Minecraft or Roblox? I haven't played it since it's so Linux-hostile, but isn't it still just a battle royale game with a building element?