Zero employees relating to the Unreal Engine or any form of game development tool have been sacked.
Epic Games may employ only a few thousand people but that doesn’t mean that majority of those jobs are worthless pushovers effectively sandbagging the company as a whole, which is why Epic has announced that they have terminated 870 employees and are selling off some of its acquired assets.
The post titled “Layoffs at Epic” goes into further detail, overall Epic Games are cutting 16% of their workforce and are divesting Bandcamp alongside SuperAwesome.
Epic Games has been making horrific financial decisions, effectively pissing out cold hard cash to maintain the relevancy of its Epic Game Storefront platform through exclusivity contracts and paying developers/publishers to give away numerous games for absolutely free.
Including Grand Theft Auto V at one point which helped propel Rockstar’s earnings on that particular instance.
As Epic Games continues to throw away hundreds of millions of dollars every single year to effectively buy video games on behest of the consumer it doesn’t make much sense to keep around dead weight that’s dragging the company’s balance sheets continually downward.
Personally, I am glad to see Epic Games rid itself of Bandcamp of which Epic Games had only purchased back in March 2022, the online music platform targeting independent musical artists, except for the fact that Bandcamp was notorious for removing band accounts of individuals they deemed problematic or didn’t agree with both socially or politically.
Anyways, Epic Games are forking over Bandcamp to the music marketing company known as Songtradr not even two years after acquiring them, which is hardly much a loss, the same thing can be said about SuperAwesome which is a self described “kidtech platform” but apparently they are just a sleazy ad company targeting children. Epic Games bought them back in 2020 for an undisclosed amount.
Tim Sweeney, Epic Games’ CEO and China’s greatest western ally declared in his “Layoffs at Epic” email that Epic Games as a whole has been spending too much money, which is fair enough considering exactly how much the company has lost trying to push its fledgling Epic Game Store upon the PC consumer space through exclusivity contracts and game freebies.
A reported $181 million loss in 2019, a further $273 million loss in 2020, it was speculated that Epic Games managed to lose $593 million on the Epic Game Store in 2021 and when you compare Epic’s 2022 yearly review it gets all the more bleak. Despite the fact that consumers spent an equal amount overall on the EGS, to the tune of $820 Million dollars overall, that figure is down 2% compared to 2021 and it’s unknown exactly how much of a loss Epic Games has taken throughout the entirety of 2022, rather just the consumer spending figure count is available.
Epic Games were also fined $245 million dollars by the FTC (Feder Trade Commission) back in March for apparently deploying crafty tactics dubbed “dark patterns” into manipulating children to racking up in-game microtransaction sales.
Oh, and a further $275 million for violations of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.
But that’s okay, while Epic Games continually burns money like it’s going out of style, their Chinese overlords, otherwise known as Tencent are the ones eating up the bills.
The Epic Game Store still fails to be profitable or even sustainable as Epic themselves continually chew up the cost buying anti consumer exclusivity contracts for games on PC and giving away millions of free games, which are paid for by Epic themselves, Fortnite’s profitability is running thinner and thinner, Epic seemingly has to do something to get people to use their crummy store.
It’s a unique marketing strategy that seemingly isn’t paying off, less free games were given away on the EGS throughout 2022 compared to 2021 and 2020, Epic Games are slowly winding down its budget allocations to freebie games, less big names and more indie titles, sometimes games are given away for free by Epic on repeat.
While Epic Games have rid themselves of dead weight as they attempt to reign in the costs, focusing entirely on the Unreal Engine’s continual development and progression but also continue to waste money on their abysmal Epic Game Store that seemingly won’t be profitable in the near future.
Learn to weld.
