Epic Games Boss Says Firm Now 'Financially Sound', Following the Firing of Over 800 Staff

If sacking 800 odd staff took your billion dollar company from financially unsound to financially stable, that shows that you’re a sh*t CEO.

Capitalism at its finest, huh? Sheesh, how on earth was Epic supposedly not “financially sound” with what Fortnite pulls in.

I'm waaay to stupid to understand how they can't be financially sound without firing all those people. Where does all the money go?

Or are we talking about "financially sound" for shareholders and investors, aka arrow must always point up, up, up?

> Fortnite making billions of revenue
> Sweeney "Ahhh. It's time to trim the fat so i can buy another yacht and mansion 🤑"

@Waluigi451 you don't realize how much money epic invests in the epicgamesstore especially for free games. Fortnite racking billions doesn't matter if they have thousands of staff that are paid more than 100k a year and sony/microsoft/nintendo take 30% of that fortnite revenue anyway.

The usual agendas of the super rich..
All goes up,,and the ones under low can ....

Well this shows how terrible Tim Sweeney is at his job if having the most profitable game in the world with the most players isn't good enough and he was just getting by, basically pinching pennies till he fired all those people.

@nessisonett Disney alone gave them $1.5Billion earlier this year and they still had to fire 800+ people? 🤑

https://www.midiaresearch.com/blog/the-context-behind-disneys-investment-into-epic-games#:~:text=Disney%20announced%20it%20is%20investing,entertainment%20universe%20connected%20to%20Fortnite%E2%80%9D.

I know the class war is over and we lost but some of these guys need a swift kick to the gonads. 🤬

There really needs to be some form of legal checks and balances that make these kinds of statements impossible for publicly traded companies. Private business? No problem. Public companies? Mass layoffs need investigations and legal accountability as to the finances of the company and it's use.. want to be public? That's the risk.

Meanwhile Microsoft cannot say the same 👀

@khayladam I thought Fortnite was released in 2017…? Is this some other version?

Par for the course for an American tech company in 2024, unfortunately.

I don't know the lore of Fortnite.

...there's a race of banana people with a monarch?

Tim Sweeney and Epic are on my blacklist of companies/people I don’t buy from ever since they sacrificed Unreal/Unreal Tournament for Fortnite. I realise that this won’t change anything and people playing Fortnite will still play it 😛

Happy to announce that "Fortnite and the Epic Games Store have hit new records in concurrency and success" and made billions in revenue, but still needed to lay of 800+ people to be financially sound.

Does anyone actually believe a single word coming out of all these exec's mouths? I'm sure all those who lost their job are delighted to hear about all the milestones and peaks their ex-employer reached while they were still working there.

@NEStalgia what if the company buys/bribes that investigation team? 🤔

Hope those people find jobs quickly.

Didn't Epic Games spend tones of money fighting Apple?

@2here2there Standard politics, it's true. At least alternating administratiions can switch witch hunt them for partisan brownie points and apply uneven justice. Sam Eagle approved. Bad as it is, it's better than economic policy exclusively by, for, and of a tiny cabal of tech bros and their hedge fund financiers.

@gollumb82 Try being a Jazz Jackrabbit fan....

@NEStalgia

Too bad the US Supreme Court classified corporations as a "person", being granted all the benefits and none of the disadvantages of an individual, in an act that required the most insane mental gymnastics of any legal opinion I've ever read.

You can thank political lobbying for that one. Money, money, money.

The same old problem of overhiring that keeps biting companies back one way or another.

Well as one of those affected by these layoffs a year ago I don’t know how to feel about it 😕

If they’re doing so well, why fire people? What. To make their profits seem even larger?

@UnlimitedSevens Meanwhile the court is supposed to be apolitical with lifetime positions............................

@LavenderShroud yep. A few more million this quarter and the share value goes up. Screw next quarter. Battle passes will sell anyway.

I suppose having Fortnite on your CV should help them get another role in the industry quite a lot hopefully

@Waluigi451 Well. Because like every company, Epic overstretched during pandemic. It doesn't matter if you earn 1 billion from Fortnite, if your expenses are 1,2 billion (for example).

Like. Unreal Engine and Fortnite are basically funding entire operation of Epic Games, which isn't small.

I'm pretty certain that Epic is loosing money in a big way on Epic Games Store for example.

@NEStalgia

Yeah the Supreme Court is definitely apolitical and known for its sound legal decisions, as evidenced by the Jim Crow rulings.

I always found it kinda funny how we Americans ascribe an almost divine infallibility to the decisions of the Supreme Court, like it's the Pope making papal decrees. Until recently that is, with US approval ratings of the Supreme Court nosediving to finally join nearly every other public institution in the doldrums of public opinion.

Corps will do whatever they can get away with doing legally. They internally weigh violating laws and regulations through the lense of 'will this action net more profit than the potential fines / lawsuits?' It's an actual managerial accounting task. They literally do risk-benefit assessments to determine whether or not they follow the law, as the only penalty is monetary, something they tend to have quite a bit of. And they get to do this while having all the rights and protections of a person. No accountability anywhere you look in this system.

Meanwhile, the FTC and SEC (the supposed check on corporate abuses) are about as toothless as my 90 year-old grandmother and have been for decades. The corporations know it. In this environment, decisions like these mass layoffs are not only expected outcomes, they are inevitable.

Banning corporate political donations (lobbying) would cure about 60% of this country's ills in one swoop. It gets talked about now and then, but not with any earnestness and usually only as a bad-faith political platform for some up-and-comer to campaign on. But I guess I'm not telling anyone anything they don't already know.

@NEStalgia Private business? No problem. Public companies? Mass layoffs need investigations and legal accountability as to the finances of the company and it's use.. want to be public? That's the risk.

Epic Games is a private company. Other entities (e.g. Tencent, Sony, an employee share scheme, etc) own a proportion of its stock, but that stock is not publicly traded. Sweeny retains a controlling stake, I believe.

Good luck to them. Have never even tried fortnite but have enjoyed some of their weekly free games 👍

It reminds me of a previous company I worked for. Spending millions in random acquisition just to seem in the red and justify rounds after rounds of redundancy to get rid of people the overpaid useless CEO didn't like.

Which part was inappropriate?

Read: “epic can now afford my massive Christmas bonus thanks to the 830 layed off”

Meanwhile he’s now having a pop at Samsung and Google after his failure against Apple.

This guy doesn’t sell himself or his business practices well to me.

Its the sickening face of rampant captalism, which doesn't value your work force at all. We see it time and time again, record profits, huge bonuses for execs, yet devs thrown to the wolves.
I despise this behaviour...

@UnlimitedSevens Funny you'd compare it to the Pope, as I think that used to be part of it. Judges were revered as above the law and in traditional American, indeed informed by religious values (allegedly), and able to put the final word on the corruptible elected officials without fear of retribution. Maybe it's the robes? Or just idealism. People seemed to believe they were above corruption because to be fair the role was attempted to be designed as above corruption at inception, without somehow noticing that if they're appointed by politicians....there's a reason?

Yeah, the biggest problem in the system is that it was designed around the free market that existed in the 18th century. BUSINESS meant Samuel the butcher, Edward the blacksmith, and the bankers (always the bankers.) Business meant one or a few people trading goods and services for coin. And the laws were based on that. With everything decentralized and infinitely redundant. It was not based on central conglomerates of which there's 2 for the entire planet and they have more money than the government itself. None of the rules are equipped to handle that. Though, the be fair, Jefferson warned about the central bankers even in freaking EIGHTEENTH CENTURY! And here we are.

Though it also goes back to the loss of ethics in modern society, even businesses, for the most part, used to be guided by people that had a sense of ethics and sense of right. As society, and the people lost the sense of ethics, and really "will Satan torture my immortal soul for all eternity if I do this" vs "will I net more cash if I do this and will I be subject to prison time?" took hold, this was inevitable. Rule of law was designed around fear of divine punishment (right down to swearing on bibles in court, which used to make people afraid to lie, and now does not), and without fear of divine punishment it nets a society of children looking to see what they can get away with. If you're not cheating, you're losing.

IDK that just banning the corporate donations solves anything. Just like everything else you describe, the corporations would just route the money different, and of course soft funds that can't be banned. You had the infamous 2008 election where Eric Schmidt was INSIDE a campaign headquarters partying while sharing Google data with their campaign. Even without a dollar spent, Google's head was directly a part of a campaign and leveraging the entire datamined information bank of their corporation to benefit a single party's candidate. And that wouldn't ban that. Unfortunately I think "rule of law" isn't enough to fix it alone. Restoring societal ethics is necessary. But how is that accomplished. It took 10,000 years to build religion to successfully do that. And it still fell apart in a decade or two. Even a social revolution is usually just backed and sparked by the 2nd tier nobles that want to become first tier.

@StrickenBiged Fair enough then, to a point. The risk of heavy intervention should apply to public companies only. However, Epic is a different kind of case, and is kind of a backdoor around even the existing rules. It's more of a public-private setup. One person owns a little over half, but the rest is owned by other public corporations. And interestingly, all foreign interest.I think a line would have to be drawn around what constitutes public, and when very nearly half is owned by public corporations, it's hard to say it's not a public company.

Not that in Sweeney's case it would matter if he were the sole owner, the guy's always been a giant stick.

And now mult million dollar lawsuits again they are not fine 😑

@NEStalgia

Oh absolutely, it all goes back to our Puritan and English common law roots in our legal system, which still influences a lot of what we do and how we do it. At least on the surface. Swearing on the bible for court testimony comes off as almost laughable and quaint in the modern setting, a relic of a relic of a bygone time that somehow survived. I provide some court testimony now and then for work, it always comes off as a bit of a bad joke.

For the lobbying, the law(s) prohibiting it would have to be airtight and prevent alternate backdoor channels of "donations". Sort of how applying trade sanctions creates two dozen other problems / secondary abuses and it becomes this game of whack-a-mole. The law would be have to be written well and foresee these issues in advance. Now I don't know about you, but I don't have that kind of faith in our elected representatives to pull this off. But in theory, it could be done. In theory.

If the problem is cultural, we are all screwed. Once something becomes baked in to how we think and act as a society, nothing short of a megaton bomb can change it. Let's hope it isn't that and we are being overly pessimistic here. I have faith that there are a lot of people out there who still believe in equity in their business dealings and wouldn't cheat even when presented an opportunity to do so. I don't think a lot of these commenters, if placed in this CEO's position, would go through with these layoffs. Now maybe that's because they are naive to the business realities, but regardless I think that most here would take a 5% pay cut to their multimillion dollar salaries to make it happen. I truly believe most people are good. Its just by design the good people, who outnumber the bad, are not given these positions of authority. Of course we have all heard the studies that CEOs and executives test well above average for psychopathy, narcissism, and other personality disorders. It's a feature, not a bug.

To bring the scope in a bit, look at scalpers. They exist in significant numbers, sure, but on the whole the general audience feels the act is unethical, even if only because it negatively affects them. I believe some people over time develop this idea they can or even need to cheat to get ahead, that to believe anything else is to be a rube. And this is generally a result of them being treated unfairly or cheated in the past themselves. They feel being a cynic means they are more aware of the reality when ironically they completely lack self-awareness. Being cynical is very "in" right now, unfortunately, a product of an overall lack of faith in any formal institution - religious, social, or governmental. And granted, those institutions haven't given them much good reason to have any trust.

I guess my point is there will always be "cheaters", but most people aren't and can freely recognize bad conduct. We just need to stop giving the outlier bad faith actors positions of power. Or at least I need to believe this to maintain my sanity.

@CriticalHit "Quickly" is about how long their next job will last in this tech climate. Time to work for the government or something, I guess.

I'm glad I stopped supporting this game.
I honestly think its done massive damage to the industry as a whole.

This guy, he’s insufferable. I sacked 800 people but I’m really happy now that we’re profitable for this quarter shareholders meeting.

This guy is Bobby Kotick level evil. He probably got his bonus and was happy firing those 800 people.