No company “only realizes” anything when it comes to their financials. They had forecasts for the entire year, and accountants keeping track of that shit on daily basis. Every CEO gets together with their CFO on the regular. They know exactly where the company is headed financially, and they prepare what they are going to say to their shareholders quarterly.
Layoffs like this are always planned. The fact that they aren’t capitalizing on the Unity fuck-up to make up the difference shows their ineptitude.
What happened 10 weeks ago? Did they run some projections and realized their Fortnite revenue aren’t going to cover the operating expense for the whole company anymore?
While I also dislike Epic, I feel that their going under would be a bad thing for the industry as a whole. There are only a few game distribution platforms of this size; Steam, Epic, Prime, GOG, and EA/Origin (not including Consoles). So there will be less competition and less innovation. They give out a ton of free games, and people may lose access to those licenses. They also employ(ed) a large number of people who are going to be jobless. I’d prefer they get their act together and be held accountable.
Epic has never been about innovation in the retail space. Sweeney talks a good game but it’s always been consistently out of his ass. He launched the Epic game store framing it as some sort of crusade on behalf of consumers, “Apple bad”, “Steam bad” but the reality is he just didn’t want to split money with others in the stack. I don’t blame him for that but his marketing was disingenuous and it’s quite obvious, now, that his business plan was inherently flawed.
His performative crusade against Apple has now led to 20% of the company looking for new jobs. We all stood by cheering, selling our souls for a bucket load of cheap games that, for the most part, we wouldn’t actually have paid for and will never get around to playing.
I don’t really care about EGS, I’m more concerned about Unreal Engine. If they keep dumping money into EGS exclusives and whatnot, it could impact UE investment, which would be bad for the industry.
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