I imagine this is a mix of things. UE5 has officially been out for a while, their biggest competitor just offed themselves, Fortnite’s UE editor support is out and thus Fortnite probably doesn’t need as many devs now with UGC to pick up the slack, etc.
That’s still a huge chunk of people though. Wonder if all these financial gambles they’ve taken are starting to add up.
Is it because of all the free games I claimed?
no, it’s because you didn’t buy enough fortnite skins
Or OP bought so much the suits thought of ways to keep the profit gravy train to go even faster.
Yes. And they would be even more upset if you didn’t play the free games you claimed.
Supposedly the whole Fall Guys team at Mediatonic, who Epic just acquired, were let go. Including the game director.
Well, prolly just gonna milk all that IP. What is the point of developing when we got armies of people spending great money as is.
Just a quick reminder that Epic is owned by Tencent.
Tencent has a minority stake in the company. Along with Sony and Kirkbi. Epic is controlled by Tim Sweeney, who has over 50% of the ownership.
Thanks for the clarification!
Company was ‘spending way more than we earn,’ CEO said in memo
It needs a genius to see that. All those contracts for timed exclusivity, all those games given for free. Most people just play free to play games on the platform and get the games for free. I thought the idea was to eat the cost and spend more money than to earn, so they can build a loyal customer base. If that wasn’t the entire goal, what was it then? Why punish the staff (holy cow its 870 employees!) by cutting them off the company now? The store and launcher of Epic games already struggle to get better.
Unfortunately I can’t read the article on Bloomberg, as it requires an account.
I’m guessing it was the goal but it didn’t work as well as they’d hoped. I’ve got a couple of the freebies but I’ve stuck mostly with Valve because most of my games are already on Steam and they haven’t seriously fucked up yet.
They made enticing incentives for developers and publishers, but what incentive would I have as a customer to buy a game from EGS rather than Steam or GOG or even Humble?
I’m guessing here because I don’t sit on Epic’s board of directors, but I would imagine their angle for consumers was mostly to grab new markets with the appeal of free games, which would also establish a library that would be a pain point if they ever wanted to move away, coupled with some of those one-year exclusives that would peel people away from Valve if they wanted to play them day-of.
