I hate to have to justify layoffs but it’s at least true that lots of studios are unexpectedly (from a couple years ago) hemorrhaging cash right now. anytime inflation is so high for so long, discretionary spending on entertainment is near the first to get cut from consumers budgets. people aren’t sitting at home like we were in 2021 only buying digital entertainment anymore.
Evidently, all of Epic Games’ business had been “heavily funded by Fortnite” in the last six years, and different parts of the company became “disconnected” from their revenue streams.
Wait, so youre really telling me me Epic giving away a ton of free games on EGS every single month and free unreal engine marketplace assets to devs as well as regular epic megagrants was never a financially sustainable move?
Psssh. In other news, salt is salty. 🤭
I honestly believe Tim is not going to f–k this one up though, as a former one he clearly cares about the game dev community and as majority shareholder he isn’t needing to be driven by profits as much as publicly traded Unity head John Riccatello is.
Plus, fortnite is still a goddamn cash printer, just not printing as fast as they expected.
I could hear that gabeN is running an underground fight klub in his basement and my opinion of him wouldn’t change. the man is a national treasure and the savior of my childhood. godspeed, Gabe! 🏎️
seriously, you’d think with the holiday season coming up studios would be crunching to get their games ready in time, but since unity shit the bed and epic took their lead it’s been nothing but bad news in the AA and AAA space
respectfully, what is this? it’s just a subject. what discussion are you having about NPCs? are they good, bad, unnecessary bloat? improving with the pace of AI? the best 10 NPCs of all time? NPCs based on real characters? I don’t really want to risk a click until I know what I’m fully getting myself into.
epic is a lawful good with epic mega grants, but their partial owner tencent is lawful evil. if Sweeney ever loses a controlling amount of shares to them, I’m likely done with them for good.
God damnit if I didn’t open this post to write this, verbatim
Honestly after unity shit the bed and payday 3 looks like a turd they probably realized they don’t need to try as hard anymore on unreal and fortnite, respectively
I can however, point to evidence that it’s a popular business model, if you don’t mind accepting hacker news and y-combinator articles, as well as YouTube media of startup CEOs in earnings calls, but I refuse to defend it otherwise. These are often people with lots of money and advanced stem + business degrees however, so Im not going to sit here and act like I easily know better than them. I can say it did work for Google, but this is after they already were dominating with ad revenue and had the means to slowly introduce ads into every platform they owned ( youtube, maps, android). Popular platforms like DoorDash also have yet to become profitable, despite commanding a 70% market share on food delivery.
it’s a known strategy in tech startups and most non inventory based businesses in general (think moviepass) to undercut your competition to try and get as much market share as possible, even operating at a loss, and then slowly turn up the prices on your users once they are locked into your system and make back the lost revenue over time. I don’t agree with it either, but the y-combinator business tech crowd seem to love this model, so I can’t really say if it’s a bad decision or not.