A report from Bloomberg today has detailed that gaming mega giant Epic Games is cutting roughly 16% of their staff.
The cuts come as part of a larger strategy to restructure, citing figures for ongoing Fortnite costs as being untenable when compared to the slowing growth of the title. An announcement that the cost of the Fortnite V-bucks currency will be increased is poorly timed, but adds further evidence to suggest that the game is seeking further revenue to support it’s size.
As to where these staff are being sourced from, nothing has been immediately made public – however members of the Mediatonic team (the developers of Fall Guys) have reportedly been impacted.
Epic Games Inc. is laying off about 900 employees or 16% of its workforce, according to a person familiar with the matter. https://t.co/w0pstJAGVW
— Bloomberg (@business) September 28, 2023
An internal memo from Epic CEO Tim Sweeney was viewed by Bloomberg, giving reason for the dramatic changes:
“For a while now, we’ve been spending way more money than we earn, I had long been optimistic that we could power through this transition without layoffs, but in retrospect I see this was unrealistic.”
In addition the to loss of staff, further sources and an internal communication mentions that that Epic will actually be selling the Bandcamp platform, which was only just acquired recently. They will also work to partially separate the SuperAwesome business acquisition by carving out some of its facets and only retaining the portion that is more dedicated to producing child-safe gaming tools.
It’s a significant number of staff by any metric – and some have already posted their goodbyes on social media. It’s a trend that is occurring across the entire game industry, with developer Creative Assembly also mentioning their plans to offer redundancies.
Are you aware of any particular studio or person impacted by this outcome? Let us know in the comments or on social media.
Shoutouts to Bloomberg.
Known throughout the interwebs simply as M0D3Rn, Ash is bad at video games. An old guard gamer who suffers from being generally opinionated, it comes as no surprise that he is both brutally loyal and yet, fiercely whimsical about all things electronic. On occasion will make a youtube video that actually gets views. Follow him on YouTube @Bad at Video Games
