Tim Sweeney on Layoffs at Epic
epicgames.com
epicgames.com
I could understand maybe turning off the master servers to cut costs, but lets be honest, they could have hosted the entire franchise master servers on a raspberry pi. There was no need to pull the games from stores. They all but guaranteed there will never be any new players and the existing players all resort to piracy now when needing a new install.
At least give an explanation.
What would you and others have payed for a Unreal Tournament monthly subscription? Not much I assume.
If you are a land lord you want the home-owner slice to shrink and the renter slice to grow. Gross, right?
I was interested in their Verse programming language, but it's future looks grimmer now.
https://github.com/OldUnreal/UnrealTournamentPatches/
These patches include updates to the master server addresses which enable the game to continue working online.
Third-party master servers have also been available for at least a decade.
There are patches going around for UT2004, but it all has to be done under the table with fear of retaliation from Epic.
The communication around the layoffs, the "why" and "what now" make sense. If you have to pivot, learn from this communique.
But honestly yeah, at 6 months of pay and benefits. It still sucks and gettin laid off can affect you emotionally with the "why me" question. But 6 months is enough to fend off the panic that could set in.
Layoffs suck and unfortunately are just a reality, sometimes they really can't be avoided. They deserve some credit for how they are handling it.
Of course it would have been far more expensive for big tech to do it.
> Benefit-eligible U.S. employees are to receive severance, six months of health care and stock vesting, and 60 days of notice, Nadella wrote.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/20/google-amazon-microsoft-meta...
Just curious, but how useful are stock options in a company that's 30+ years old and still private?
...
> We’ve built the best engine in the world, and will be hosting Unreal Fest next week to bring the community together and spotlight the things they are building with Unreal Engine and UEFN. Creators are making a living building for the Fortnite ecosystem, with time in third-party games now exceeding first-party.
...
> We've been taking steps to reduce our legal expenses, but are continuing the fight against Apple and Google distribution monopolies and taxes, so the metaverse can thrive and bring opportunity to Epic and all other developers.
They are absolutely positioning Fortnite as a higher fidelity Roblox, with a view to becoming a whole gaming platform. It is a curious strategy to attack the legal foundations of one App Store while you attempt to build your own.
One of the bits of noise bouncing around the games industry is the extent to which UEFN is being seen as a sort of proving ground for teams and ideas. How viable it actually is as a business has yet to be seen.
Epic’s platforms are 60% cheaper than Valve and Apple, allows for in app purchases that don’t leverage epic and thus give them no money, and from the sound of it is much more creator friendly than something like the ridiculous economics of Roblox (not familiar with it though)
Assuming they eventually win against Apple, they will make a fortune when they take on the console market with the precedent.
Platforms leveraging their market position to keep shares of revenue at 30% is insane.
There is value in building and maintaining an ecosystem. I get they nobody likes paying a middleman, but there is value there.
It’s great that they provide this service to you. But if they had competition it would be way cheaper and better
But that’s not good long term. If there’s no reward for success, there’s no incentive to risk failure.
Bandcamp has for so long been a boon to independent music and musicians, and allowed them to sell their work (and whatever else) on their own terms, more or less, in a way that I thought was radical and fair compared to most other marketplaces today. Not to mention the Myspace-esque customizations you can make to your album pages!
Hopefully Bandcamp continues on for a long time relatively untouched.
EPic have better severance than google....
Funny that he is revealing codnames like this which are more or less not-secret thanks to dataminers but still.
Del Mar = Racing mode in Fortnite
Juno = LEGO collab in Fortnite (probably even a whole season)
LEGO invested $1b into Epic last year [1] so people were already joking about some kind of collab then. In January the UEFN (Unreal Editor for Fornite) actually had an update with the whole LEGO brickset databse imported into it [2] and there was an internal memo leak this May that they are actually working on a LEGO collab
0, https://twitter.com/iFireMonkey/status/1686125878890115072
1, https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/news/sony-and-kirkbi-in...
2, https://twitter.com/GMatrixGames/status/1614276121012445184
I guess giving away free games and not charging deveveloper (or charging very little depending on exclusivity deals) wasn't the best financial decision. Who would've thought?
Shame about the people impacted by this, I actually know some of them, hope they find something quick.
I buy everything off of EGS if I can because of it, even though the EGS is trash
https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/4/22418782/epic-games-store-...
Their options to become a major player are limited. Aggressively spending money on customer acquisition was probably the best move they had. Pulling their new games from competing stores risks impacting their game sales. Relying on organic growth would probably see Epic Game Store stuck as another tertiary, niche marketplace, like Gog.
It may not have worked out like they hoped, but it wasn't a bad play.
You mention EA, and they did try to break into the market and left steam for a while... they had the money, the franchises, the personnel and they couldn't do it. Now they're back on steam. Anyone else would look at what happened and would learn from their mistakes.
To me, growing your employee numbers like that seems to be orders of magnitude more costly and risky than licensing some games to give away for marketing.
Having to lay off some people after growing quickly by ~200% does not seem like that big of a failure to me...
PC Magazines in the 2000s also managed to do regular game giveaways just fine (while being much smaller than even 2020-Epic), and I would wager they had razorsharp margins and much less revenue, too.
From very early on, gamers were VERY vocal of what they wanted from Epic store, and Epic didn't deliver, instead they shoveled money into the fire basically.
Example of stuff that money could have better been spent on:
1. Discussion/Comments 2. Review system 3. Functioning shopping cart 4. Linux support (instead Epic did the opposite, for example buying Rocket League and removing Linux support) 5. ability to work with other stores (like Gog Galaxy does)
and so on.
Instead they choose to have a shitty, basically unusable store (that by the way, killed an older laptop GPU of mine by sending it to 100% in a screen that was only text, until the thing burned itself down), and "bribe" both creators and gamers, hoping this would replace an actual good product.
This stuff wasn't the problem at all. By all accounts the free game giveaways have achieved their intended purpose and they are going to continue doing them. Their engine licensing business is looking better and better as Unreal's only big competitor has made a habit of sabotaging themselves.
Has anyone else gotten laid off? How is the market out there?
I have 12 years of experience and am not a slouch. Haven't really started looking in earnest yet.
If the CEO of a factory had to sell half their maintenance-hungry machines to balance the budget, do they owe it to the sold or retained machines to take a pay cut so they "share in the harm of the layoffs"?
The factory machine example is silly because they are machines and offensive because many people would agree that employees are very much not machines.
... then they're clearly in dire straits and the company should be looking at any cut they could make including the CEO's compensation. Payment in stock devalues the stock; payment in cash decreases the runway.
I wish the Unreal Tournament still existed and not the kid's game Fortnite.
Seriously I grew up playing his games as a kid and when I saw his name in the credits there was a certain warm and tingly feeling of respect and adulation. And now this. I get it shareholders are always #1. Still...
I think Tim is still cool.
Also there's those that don't care or see anything negative about it
The package he's giving employees is outstanding. The communication is solid.
The alternative is to bleed out financially and put the larger company - the other 84% of employees - at heightened risk. A lot of things could easily go south for Epic, their business isn't guaranteed in the least, and they have 5,000-6,000 other employees to consider.
While i fully understand it, i also understand that it is human to be angry if you are part of the few.
Still kudos, as others showed it can be much worsely handled
Interesting he mentions investing in Fall Guys specifically when Mediatonic was hit really heavily by these layoffs.
(Still not quite sure why he/Epic bought a music streaming company like Bandcamp; seems a bit of a stretch even considering content licensing for Epic-based games.)