Is it because of all the free games I claimed?
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.
I’m sure the Fall Guys owner who sold it is happy. Made bank and all it cost them was the livelihoods of all the people who made the game.
Sucks for the low level employees losing their jobs, but I can’t possibly feel bad about Epic losing money. Garbage company that needs to lose their grip on the industry after the shit they pulled with Epic Game Store and buying up games/studios just to delist their games from Steam, axe the Linux support, and make them exclusives on the worst platform in gaming.
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.
All these companies that are suddenly having layoffs and/or enshittifying everything at once all shared the same basic business model (pardon the Bronze Age meme format from Slashdot…):
- Give goods or services away for free
- Attract customers on the basis of getting goods or services for free
- ???
- Profit!
Years of basically free debt service and stupid VC money let them kick the can down the road for a long time in terms of figuring out what Step 3 was gonna be, up to the point that many such services didn’t even bother, replacing both Steps 3 and 4 with “Sell to whichever FAANG is sucker enough to think they can leverage our userbase for their own product.” High interest rates have suddenly put a stop to the money party, though, and now they’re all scrambling to find ways of aggressively monetizing their services.
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.
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.
Epic bought a lot of companies over the last few years and they also rapidly grew. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Games#Subsidiaries_and_divisions They rapidly grew and bought up all these companies in the last 5 years and are now slimming down these ventures and focusing on what they want to do with them.
I don’t know what it costs Epic to grab all these “exclusives”, and I know lots of people (myself included) who just wait and get whatever it is on Steam anyway. It can’t cost nothing, and it doesn’t seem to be terribly good business.
Likewise, devs must make something when Epic offers a game for free (I think?).
It does seem to me like a deep-pockets game, and I’m not sure how deep Epic’s are anymore.
