The creator of Fortnite has laid off more than 1,000 staff – despite billions in revenue

Video game developers need to unionize, like as a whole. This has pretty much become the norm for these big studios and it’s fucked up.

Hopefully this will get people to stop pretending Epic is the good guys against Google and Apple.

Android and macOS never stopped Fortnite from running on their platform. Only iOS ever did that, because Epic wanted its virtual currency to be sold directly from them and not give Apple their cut. In and of itself, that is not an unreasonable argument, except Apple is entitled to something considering Fortnite has multiple 10GB+ updates, per user, per week. Multiple. They can’t afford that infrastructure, so they have Apple bear the load, but they don’t want to pay for it. That’s what the App Store fees are for.

On macOS you also have the App Store, but you can also go around it entirely. The Epic Games Launcher works on macOS. However, Epic does not distribute Fortnite through it on macOS because they don’t want to pay the server costs of the constant, huge, mandatory updates. They just say it’s unavailable. On Android, the Play Store has never been the exclusive app store. You could always just download an app and install it. Recently they warn you it could be harmful, but they still let you do it. Nothing has ever stopped Epic from releasing Fortnite directly on Android, or via the Epic Games Store. Similar to Apple, they just want Google to bear the load.

Yes, they recently settled with Google. Now Google will carry Fortnite in the Play Store and support the updates, which are getting neither smaller nor less frequent, and Google will take less money from selling the Fortnite “V-Bucks” (even though you could always buy them directly from Epic, either on their website or via gift cards sold in stores).

It was never about the V-bucks. Yes, Fortnite makes money from licensing pop culture stuff and selling it to players, but the game’s true purpose is to advertise the quality and capability of the Unreal Engine it runs on. If you’ve never played Fortnite, do yourself a favour and try it out, preferably on a modern console, or a capable PC. The gameplay is at least as good as old Unreal Tournament (which is what it’s basically the modern incarnation of), and the graphics are outstanding. Yeah, the culture around the game is juvenile, but if you’re good at shooters, you will do okay. I can’t love it, I remember when it was a beta, it was a very different animal to what it is now, and I remember YouTubers I still follow raving about how cool Fortnite was. It still has some of those elements, but it’s not what was originally promised. In many ways it’s more, but I’m not sure all those ways themselves are good.

Anyway, while you can say that Apple and Google are “rent seeking,” Epic has always been after free high-demand high uptime web serving. Maybe Apple and Google should have charged less, but Epic was always trying to get something for nothing, and that should be frowned upon as well.

How is this unexpected?

I would guess, Fortnite has peaked a while ago and entered the decline phase. So…

One could argue, that it would have been nice to split the revenue more evenly. But shrinking an unprofitable business isn’t bad per se. Or ist it?

Something pointed out via a friend is that, while we like to shit on corpos for these layoffs, sometimes in the art/story field they (the employees) really are not needed or not desired anymore. Some places eant to hire a new storyboard person/team, or art directors to make changes to the existing items . The first guy made his impact, now the company wants changes that, as an artist, they just don’t see from their artstyle (of any medium like story, characters, environment etc) perspective. Think the botched Ecce Homo fresco as it was originally painted, and then the restoration - the original artist could not concieve of what it became and therefore is legitimately no longer needed. Paying him his dues and letting him go is the nature of it, if done honestly.

That doesn’t excuse hoarding wealth and trying to get out of paying severance, retirements, royalties for their work, and insurances, but while we often praise that one time Nintendos kept people on at the expense of the CEO, the question is “for what though” if it was a legitimate direction pivot.

But in general fuck epic because thats not what this is. This is almost always"line must go up" behavior. Just wanted to mention it so I can say “ah, there it is” when fortnite skin quality/story direction/landscape changes invariably catches up with and shows the result of these missing staff in a season or 2, as a direct result of these people’s layoffs.