> "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.
They aren't losing money on Fortnite, they're losing money on vanity projects like the Epic Game Store where they spend tens of millions of dollars for exclusivity deals with developers, and give away free games to try to poach Steam users with an otherwise inferior product. Unfortunately it is their employees that are paying the price of leadership making it rain with their overflowing coffers they couldn't help but burn.
Well, you goto be good nowadays, you compete against the whole worlds dreamy eyed teeangers wanting to make "their"game. A wellfunded, pig-trough-slop-mill ala hollywood can not compete against that when it comes to fun, art and experiences. They fled into gambling, but gamers actively ostracize lootboxers nowadays.
It absolutely is a profitable industry, maybe not as profitable as todays greedy shareholders would like it to be. Just look at the CD Projekt that releases 1 game per 10 years and still makes a fortune through Netflix colabs and selling merch.
Right now even Valve realizes that Steam will literally run out of steam. This is why they have been trying to become more like Nintendo and selling their own hardware (with varying success) .
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
>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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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?
> "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.
They aren't losing money on Fortnite, they're losing money on vanity projects like the Epic Game Store where they spend tens of millions of dollars for exclusivity deals with developers, and give away free games to try to poach Steam users with an otherwise inferior product. Unfortunately it is their employees that are paying the price of leadership making it rain with their overflowing coffers they couldn't help but burn.
The epic store with its giveaways and exclusivity deals is probably burning money.
They explicitly stated this as a reason during their last layoff cycle.
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.
Because games is simply not a particularly profitable industry. There's a reason why Valve moved on from making games to being a digital landlord.
Well, you goto be good nowadays, you compete against the whole worlds dreamy eyed teeangers wanting to make "their"game. A wellfunded, pig-trough-slop-mill ala hollywood can not compete against that when it comes to fun, art and experiences. They fled into gambling, but gamers actively ostracize lootboxers nowadays.
It absolutely is a profitable industry, maybe not as profitable as todays greedy shareholders would like it to be. Just look at the CD Projekt that releases 1 game per 10 years and still makes a fortune through Netflix colabs and selling merch.
Right now even Valve realizes that Steam will literally run out of steam. This is why they have been trying to become more like Nintendo and selling their own hardware (with varying success) .
Fortnite alone is estimated to produce more than five billion USD in annual revenue every year since 2018
Steam works on the top 2 most played games on Steam right now.
Is it games overall or specific genres? I always regard games that have stores and strong at UA as something else.
Games are an obscenely, absurdly profitable industry. Particularly the successful ones.
Citation needed.
Look at NVidia's stock price during the period when they announced a pivot away from gaming.
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
>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
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.
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)
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.
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-increas...
[2] https://www.fortnite.com/news/fortnite-developers-will-soon-...
Discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47503239
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?
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.
Speaking personally, the move the