Epic Games laying off staff

BUDFORCE

BUDFORCE

BUDFORCE

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I expect it is a sign of things to come, should life stay expensive vs wages. Anything goes to keep profits high it seems. But the gaming industry appears strong despite many of us not liking today's games. Hopefully your bro finds something he likes in the industry again.
 
Chris C said:
Depending where you read it, they make $5billion+ per year, so how much are they spending?!
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I suspect its not about the totals, all that matters is if it's more profit than last year. So even if all 5 billion was profit, if they made 5.5 last year the people at the top would treat it as a failure
 
There have been other layoffs too. Sega flat out cancelled Zero-G looter shooter Hyenas despite it being potentially only a couple of months from Launch resulting in layoffs from developer Creative Assembly. Ubisoft have laid staff off earlier this year as well. Dev costs are so high it seems unless a game sells well it's doom for the developer.
 
arknor said:
most companies are cutting away the fat.
I bet the majority of them can be replaced with "AI" aka a script
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And then when there are bugs in the program no one can fix them because the AI wrote it. I don't think AI is quite to the point where it can create complex programming required for game interactions and complex game mechanics just yet.
 
arknor said:
most companies are cutting away the fat.
I bet the majority of them can be replaced with "AI" aka a script
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They think they can. But "AI" isn't a good replacement for people, it produces some very sketchy stuff.

These big developers are now putting lots of money in to products which end up terrible. The main problem is there has been a talent drain from the games industry over the past decade. The days when we had very talented people like John Carmack working on games are long gone.
 
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Nasher said:
They think they can. But "AI" isn't a good replacement for people, it produces some very sketchy stuff.

These big developers are now putting lots of money in to products which end up terrible. The main problem is there has been a talent drain from the games industry over the past decade. The days when we had very talented people like John Carmack working on games are long gone.
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Or that one talented person isn't enough these days. Games are so complex and so big an AAA title ends up being worked on by hundreds of people, often with other studios helping out if the Publisher is big enough.
 
MissChief said:
Dev costs are so high it seems unless a game sells well it's doom for the developer.
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That's quite an interesting point really - obviously dev skills working in the gaming industry are very transferrable to any software engineer. So if other industries are paying software engineering roles highly it also forces the gaming industry to do so in order to attract and retain the best talent.
 
MissChief said:
Or that one talented person isn't enough these days. Games are so complex and so big an AAA title ends up being worked on by hundreds of people, often with other studios helping out if the Publisher is big enough.
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No more complicated than they were 15 years ago. Probably less actually, a lot of things have been dumbed down. Graphics got a bit better, but that is usually licenced from someone else.

AI in games is nowhere near as good as it used to be either. Which seems odd, but there are hardly any AI developers working in the games industry now. The money is elsewhere.
 
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StarShock said:
I suspect its not about the totals, all that matters is if it's more profit than last year. So even if all 5 billion was profit, if they made 5.5 last year the people at the top would treat it as a failure
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Also Epic is a private company so no shareholder dividends to focus on like Activision. "Epic Games is a privately owned company. CEO Tim Sweeney owned more than half of its shares, while the Chinese technology and entertainment holding company Tencent held a 40% stake in the game maker. In addition, Sony and Kirkbi (the holding company that owns the Lego Group) held minority interests in Epic Games."

But you're probably right, costs up, so profits down, even if there are still a lot of profits there, if they cut out a load of 'optional' jobs then profits go back up again.
 
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