Epic Games Is Laying Off Almost 900 Employees

Epic Games logo pattern

Epic Games, the developer behind the extremely popular battle royale game Fortnite and Unreal Engine, is said to be laying off almost 900 employees, or about 16% of its workforce. The cuts are said to be a heavy blow in particular to Fall Guys development studio Mediatonic, though the studio will reportedly not be shut down.

The news was broken by Bloomberg yesterday, which reports that Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney announced the layoffs via an internal memo to employees, and many employees have since confirmed the cuts on Twitter and other social media platforms. The layoffs were also confirmed on Epic's website.

“For a while now, we’ve been spending way more money than we earn,” Sweeney reportedly said in the memo, “I had long been optimistic that we could power through this transition without layoffs, but in retrospect I see this was unrealistic.”

Epic will also be divesting two of its businesses — music website Bandcamp is reportedly to be sold off, while marketing firm SuperAwesome will be spun off into its own independent company. These additional divestitures will reportedly see a further 250 employees leave the company.

According to Bloomberg, affected employees will receive six months of severance and health insurance. Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier wrote on Twitter that Mediatonic was hit “very hard” by the layoffs, and in a subsequent post said that Epic is still hiring for new positions. It’s also not a great look that Epic announced Fortnite V-Bucks are getting more expensive next month just yesterday, before firing hundreds of staff to cut costs.

The news came just hours after it was revealed that Sega’s Hyenas game would be shut down before it even launched, with developer Creative Assembly subsequently confirming that the decision will result in job losses at the studio. It has also been reported that some marketing and communications roles were cut at Ubisoft, and earlier in the week some Blizzard employees reported being made redundant.

The games industry at large has been brutal for employees in recent months, with layoffs from companies like Pokemon Go developer Niantic and within Embracer Group’s studios dominating headlines throughout much of the year. Thousands of workers have effectively been removed from the industry, and while some may find other jobs within the games industry, many will likely leave altogether.