Bloomberg: Epic Games Cuts About 1,000 Jobs Across Company

[Shadow1980]

Ah. The joys of working for a publicly-traded corporation. Do a shitty job? You're fired. Do a good job? You can still be fired if the bean counters decide layoffs are the best way to pad profits. Job security doesn't exist for most workers anymore. I lost my last job after nine years as an employee because the company I worked for was bought by private equity, saddled with the debt from said purchase, and eventually all the brick-and-mortar locations were liquidated to pay off the remaining debt. Fun. And people wonder why socialism is attractive to so many.

Sogreblute said:

What this shows is you always need to create new games since putting all your eggs in one basket isn't enough and won't last forever. Instead of laying off those employees have them make new games and pump out a game every few months to keep the revenue flowing. Also, the free games for the Epic Store ain't helping. We now know whenever a free game is offered that same game gets a sales boost on Steam, so maybe Epic should consider releasing all their games on Steam and try to improve their own store.

I've been saying for a while now that the industry is too ambitious for its own good. Big publishers are leaning more and more towards and all-or-nothing approach to video games. They'll sink inordinate sums of money into some gigantic AAA game or live-service title and hedge all of their bets on that one title doing well. They're like if film studios only funded big-budget action movies instead of also investing in lower-budget films, all while leaving those lower-budget titles the sole provenance of small indie studios. While having the occasional big-budget title is fine and all, some of the money invested in AAA games could be invested in smaller-scale titles. Instead of a single $200M game, they could spread that money across multiple titles, so if one of them fails it's less of a hit to the company's finances. Not every game needs to be a giant 60+ hour open-world sprawl with hours of mo-cap cutscenes, or some all-encompassing live service title. There ought to be more room for more modest titles.

Sadly, the games industry continues to be too ambitious for its own good. As a form of entertainment that is not only more dependent on tech than any other, but is literally tech itself, there's always this push to keep growing in terms of scale, scope, graphical fidelity, and other things that necessitate larger and larger teams working more and more years to make a game. This isn't helped by the fact that "short" and "linear" have become dirty words to a great many people in the world of gaming, among both the makers and the players. As for me, if I pay $60-70 for a game that only lasts me eight hours but I keep coming back to on the regular, it's still just as much worth it if not more so as spending the same amount on some 60-hour game that I might only play once.