Recent industry news doing the rounds is from Epic Games, who yesterday publicly shared an email that was sent by Tim Sweeney about laying off 16% of the company. 830 people lost their job due to "spending way more money than we earn" as they continue "investing in the next evolution of Epic and growing Fortnite as a metaverse-inspired ecosystem for creators".
That is a lot of people, and clearly shows that Epic Games have been relying a lot on Fortnite money. While Fortnite is "starting to grow again" Sweeney said it's being driven now by player-made content which has "significant revenue sharing, and this is a lower margin business than we had when Fortnite Battle Royale took off and began funding our expansion".
In the post Sweeney mentioned how Epic has been making efforts to reduce costs like "moving to net zero hiring and cutting operating spend on things like marketing and events" but all of this "ended up far short of financial sustainability" so getting rid of staff was "the only way" they could stabilize.
Epic is also selling off Bandcamp to B2B music company Songtradr, which they only acquired in 2022, as clearly they didn't actually have a business plan for it to sell it off so quickly. They're also spinning off most of SuperAwesome that they acquired in 2020, who say they are acquiring most of it back themselves directly.
Psyonix, maker of Rocket League, was also(1) affected(2) since Epic acquired them back in 2019 and then made it exclusive to the Epic Store.
The developer Mediatonic who made Fall Guys was also impacted by this, since Epic acquired them in 2021 and then made Fall Guys exclusive to the Epic Store. It's not clear how badly they've been affected but Ed Fear (Game Lead) who was laid off showed off a picture on X that showed "Decimated", with many others also posting about being let go so Mediatonic appears to have been hit quite hard by this.
No doubt the exclusives and constant free games on the Epic Store cost a lot of monies.
What do you think to this news? Leave a comment.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
slaapliedje Oct 5, 2023
Quoting: Purple Library GuyYeah, that's why I put 'open' in quotes, like you can view it. :PQuoting: slaapliedjeMy understanding is it's "source available". You can't fork it or redistribute it.Quoting: NouserSo, the Tencent money is finally drying up... I just hope they'll release UE as open source before going bankrupt.Technically the source for Unreal Engine is 'open'. https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.3/en-US/downloading-unreal-engine-source-code/
I'm not sure what the license is, but you can download it and mess with it now.
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