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[BattleScar]

'Let's split my gaming library across multiple online platforms,' said no sane person ever

Gamers in a few years when a monopoly fucks them over:
"How could this happen to me?!"

If you want an actually consumer-friendly competitive market, you need to embrace competing products or services. Not just rely on a monopoly because its convenient.
Can't rely on the good will of a single person, who can at any moment die or be replaced or simply change their mind.
Because that is all it'd take for the Empire of Steam to fuck you up.

 

[Topher]

I'm not saying corps aren't trying to make ALL the money, but this kind of thread always shows how little people know about business, economics and what exactly profit does.

Three posts in and you've already got a condescending post about an entire thread. You'll fit in fine

 

[SnapShot]

"we noticed a lack of players"

 

[CuteFaceJay]

https://steamcharts.com/app/730

CS2 can hold 1.5 million players. Surely Fortnite is doing double that minimum.

If you've got millions on at any given time spending money on your stuff then you are not needing to cut 1000 people.

Likely AI overtaking roles.

Valve has a reported employee count in the 300 range (Also no investors to worry about or Private equity firms to answer to, they also make fee's from their item market place, Epic doesn't have one of these yet but I could see them maybe trying this once Fortnite is fully completed.)

Epic Games was reported over 4K in 2023, these 1000 people being cut are prolly DEI's that were picked up during 2020 or something. (Epic who seem to be in bed with Chinese money and private equity firms)

You all aren't playing Fortnite enough! I blame this place.

Their support team fucking sucks, After my Alpha account got hijacked somehow and their support team unable to assist I didn't feel the need to start from fresh. Meanwhile Steam Support send out a hit squad after the bad actors and provide video proof of them being neutralized.

 

[asdasdasdbb]

Valve has a reported employee count in the 300 range (Also no investors to worry about or Private equity firms to answer to,)

That's why the talk of them doing Half Life 3 was so strange.

 

[neo raider]

Epic had 4000+ employees?

Yet they cant make a stable engine

 

[Bojji]

You can't be serious.........

I witnessed my game libary (with two games, but hey!) doing this in the past:

It was CDP.pl that was shut down few years ago, it was connected to GOG and CDPR (even older than them). It had games in way better prices compared to GOG, offline installers etc.

Now there is nothing...

 

[Topher]

 

[Magic-DEI-Hire]

Venture capitalists/investors are a cancer to everything they touch. Their quest for unlimited greed ruins everything they try to infect.

 

[MayauMiao]

I'm glad I never spent a single cent on EGS.

 

[Bojji]

I'm not saying corps aren't trying to make ALL the money, but this kind of thread always shows how little people know about business, economics and what exactly profit does.

Sad for all those laid off.

Unless your company is going down and you need to fire people to save it - there is no moral justification in those yearly layoffs.

Rich fucks just want to be richer, late stage capitalism is fucking depressing.

 

[Shin-Ra]

Severance packages and paid health care for those affected. Cloud be a lot worse.

(I'm sorry)

 

[HRK69]

Gamers in a few years when a monopoly fucks them over:
"How could this happen to me?!"

If you want an actually consumer-friendly competitive market, you need to embrace competing products or services. Not just rely on a monopoly because its convenient.
Can't rely on the good will of a single person, who can at any moment die or be replaced or simply change their mind.
Because that is all it'd take for the Empire of Steam to fuck you up.

The only 'monopoly' here is the one where Steam actually earns it by being the best launcher

I'll take Valve's 'good will' over your hypothetical doomsday. When Gabe drops dead and Steam turns evil, I'll split my library.

Until then? One launcher, zero cope.

 

[asdasdasdbb]

Unless your company is going down and you need to fire people to save it - there is no moral justification in those yearly layoffs.

Rich fucks just want to be richer, late stage capitalism is fucking depressing.

Most of the time, layoffs are about getting cheaper employees and not less.

I think this might be one of the exceptions tho.

 

[kpopSuperstar]

Fortnite generates over 80% of Epic's cashflow, so it needs to do very well for Epic to do well.

These layoffs are no surprise if Fortnite makes less than before, but that is still a huge amount of people, wild stuff.

 

[DeepEnigma]

 

[ShadyAcshuns]

Sorry for the employees, but not the villainous corporation. Fuck epic.

 

[CuteFaceJay]

That's why the talk of them doing Half Life 3 was so strange.

The fact they moved into the hardware space and made their own OS distro was even harder to believe at the time but with Valve least you know they actually give a shit and hire the right people to get stuff done.

Plus they were able to make Half-Life: Alyx with such a small team.

 

[Buggy Loop]

Did anything happen? Or is this just corporate greed?
Or another case of people getting replaced with AI?

Yes

 

[drotahorror]

Not enough

 

[Topher]

Gamers in a few years when a monopoly fucks them over:
"How could this happen to me?!"

If you want an actually consumer-friendly competitive market, you need to embrace competing products or services. Not just rely on a monopoly because its convenient.
Can't rely on the good will of a single person, who can at any moment die or be replaced or simply change their mind.
Because that is all it'd take for the Empire of Steam to fuck you up.

Why "embrace" an inferior product over a clearly superior product? That makes no sense.

 

[MiguelItUp]

"we noticed a lack of players"

Not gonna lie, while I hate layoffs and always sympathize with those affected. I can't help but smile at any decline Epic has after what they've done with Unreal Tournament, lmao. Petty, I know, but hey at least I admit it.

 

[pqueue]

Gamers in a few years when a monopoly fucks them over:
"How could this happen to me?!"

If you want an actually consumer-friendly competitive market, you need to embrace competing products or services. Not just rely on a monopoly because its convenient.
Can't rely on the good will of a single person, who can at any moment die or be replaced or simply change their mind.
Because that is all it'd take for the Empire of Steam to fuck you up.

Epic has NOTHING I want or need. But Steam has everything.

Seems the problem here is not Valve.

 

[MMaRsu]

Sorry guys we spent over 700 million on streamers and influencers, no more job for you!

 

[Topher]

Sorry guys we spent over 700 million on streamers and influencers, no more job for you!

And lawyers

 

[StreetsofBeige]

By the looks of it they're an all or nothing company based off Fortnite. I dont think Epic store makes them any money. But they surely make money off UE fees.

As someone said above, they probably still got 3.5-4k employees.

Who knows how much money Fortnite makes now but years back I remember articles saying (not sure if official data or not), Fortnite was scooping up like $300-400M/mth. Thats about $3.5-5B alone.

 

[Paasei]

That amount of employees being sacked surely is.... epic.

 

[StreetsofBeige]

Maybe should had charged more that 12% cut on games sold.

 

[Laptop1991]

I have bought 1 game off Epic, The Outer Worlds 1 back in 2019, when it was an Epic exclusive, i have even stopped getting the free games in recent times, most of them i don't want or will ever play, and i don't think many buy games off them anyway, if not for Fortnite, Epic wouldn't still be relevant, so laying off employees, while a shame for them is not new, every game company nearly has been doing this in the last couple of years due to low sales,

The suits will always put their profit's and money first, employees and gamers 2nd or even lower, unless your Ubisoft!, they are just incredibly stupid lol.

 

[ReyBrujo]

So, 1000 without AI involvement. Just imagine once they enforce AI usage, they will probably lay off another 1000.

 

[\m/etalStorm]

Meanwhile, they showered Fortnite slop developers with money. Good points here.

 

[CamHostage]

Nowhere close to the old days when games felt distinctly different, even now I can almost immediately tell whether a game is made in UE5, despite a different coat of paint

I don't know what your idea of the "old days" was (we were talking about the UE3 bald marines and piss-filters in the time when middleware really took over, and even the "Renderware look" was a thing back in the PS2 days, so how much further can we go?), but what you're taking about us more training and familiar ways if doing things than the engine specifically.

There are traits specific to UE, but mostly what makes these games not feel distinctly different is that developers start with the same open empty level and the same genetic avatar, then you decorate that world with assets sculpted in and paint them with PBR materials and flock the world with procedural plants and use the locomotion tool to make characters move and so on. That's not just UE, and so even games made on custom engines have familiar elements, and it's just a matter of l balance and optimization/advancement when they look better than similar UE titles.

Developers go to school to learn how to make products one way. Their resume then prioritizes mastery of those tools; they may have additional skills in breaking those tools to do something out of the norm, but when it takes hundreds of people to make a game and when photorealism is most often the consumer expectation, it takes a real leap of faith to build a new team around bucking the norm and using uncommon approaches.

UE can make games feel distinctly different just fine, but training and team dynamics and economics tend to pull productions towards the middle. (And it's still a massive middle, UE has tons of celshaded and Pixar'ish and 2.5D and whatever other graphical style was done in the "old days", but even those looks are defined now and fall into that big stew of games looking "the same".)

 

[nkarafo]

slower growth, weaker spending, and tougher cost economics

Good. The sooner publishers realize this business model is volatile and non sustainable the better for videogames as a whole.

 

[archangelmorph]

Freeing up more money to buy trees Tim?

 

[General Lee]

It's only a matter of time when the rest will have to go too. Tim is terrible with money. They've overspent so much on EGS and Fortnite and all the lawsuits keeping Fortnite out of mobile stores. I don't mind them pushing Apple and Google or even Valve to stay fair, but it certainly comes with a real cost.

 

[ThroatPie]

corporatism at its finest.

 

[StueyDuck]

How many of those basically just did dances and skins

 

[zaga]

Epic is so crazy profitable. Makes no sense to do layoffs. Maybe Tencent is putting pressure on them

 

[Topher]

 

[diffusionx]

I don't like Tim Sweeney, but I don't know if I'd call it "mismanagement". Even with the licensing thing, there's a strong argument that these fees have shot through the roof because of overall industry trends, and that Fortnite probably wouldn't have lasted ~10 years without it.

A ~decade of cumulatively paying 1000+ people counts for a lot.

it's more about the vision of the game that he restructured the company around a few years ago. It clearly didn't work out. The core Fortnite fan base is starting to age out of playing it and younger people see Roblox as the platform not Fortnite.

 

[MarV0]

Dayum. The number of people who have lost their jobs in this industry over the last 2-3 years is crazy.

Far more need to go for the industry to start healing.

 

[Shin-Ra]

If even they're losing money on the biggest GaaS outside of Roblox, then the industry as we know it really is fucked.

Hopefully that means we get the industry as we used to know it back, along with Unreal Tournament.

At this moment you know they'd GaaS-ify UT too.

I guess these are going away too.

More content for the garbage disposal. If you actually liked this stuff, tough luck and anyone sensible is thinking twice about building a bond with future online service-reliant content.

 

[Lith808]

Couple of years ago they laid off 900 people. How many people work at Epic??

https://www.neogaf.com/threads/epic...16-of-employees-or-around-900-people.1661749/

 

[The_hunter]

World of warcraft fell, and now Fortnite will fall.

Empathy to the employees.

 

[Eesha]

Looks like the Fortnite's money well is running dry.....

 

[AJUMP23]

Couple of years ago they laid off 900 people. How many people work at Epic??

https://www.neogaf.com/threads/epic...16-of-employees-or-around-900-people.1661749/

Answered above. This lays off a quarter of the workforce.

 

[asdasdasdbb]

it's more about the vision of the game that he restructured the company around a few years ago. It clearly didn't work out. The core Fortnite fan base is starting to age out of playing it and younger people see Roblox as the platform not Fortnite.

Roblox doesn't turn a profit either.

 

[MiguelItUp]

Sorry guys we spent over 700 million on streamers and influencers, no more job for you!

And lawyers

AND collabs.

Lord knows they're slinging all kinds of money on all of that.

 

[Unknown Soldier]

For what exactly do they need that many people in the first place?

Not a whole lot, that's why they are being laid off......

 

[LuxFixxins]

Three posts in and you've already got a condescending post about an entire thread. You'll fit in fine

LOL

Long time listener, first time caller.