Epic Games has announced the loss of 830 employees in a round of layoffs, with “two-thirds” of these roles outside of game development ventures.
Through this, CEO Tim Sweeney aimed to “[cut] costs without sacrificing development or lines of businesses” and guarantee the continued efficacy of the company’s development functions.
“For a while now, we’ve been spending way more money than we earn, investing in the next evolution of Epic and growing Fortnite as a metaverse-inspired ecosystem for creators,” explained Sweeney in a post to the Epic Games official website.
“I had long been optimistic that we could power through this transition without layoffs, but in retrospect I see that this was unrealistic.”
Of these 830 employees, Epic Games will lose 250 employees resulting from divestitures from Bandcamp and SuperAwesome. Bandcamp will be owned by Songtradr and “most” of SuperAwesome will be taken over by SuperAwesome Leadership.
Those affected will benefit from a severance package that contains career transition services, visa support, six months base pay, the opportunity to “accelerate people’s stock option vesting schedule through the end of 2024” and six months of Epic-paid healthcare in the United States, Canada and Brazil.
There will be no further redundancies in the future, affirmed Sweeney. On the topic of recruitment, the company said that it will hire for “critical roles while maintaining net-zero at our new size”.
Similarly, this week has seen the cancellation of Creative Assembly’s Hyenas as Sega Sammy forecasted “record losses of approximately 14.3billion yen [£78.6million]” in this fiscal year.
“Organisational changes” in Activision Blizzard‘s Hearthstone team led to 10 developers being let go without notice, reported Kotaku, and “aggressive growth targets” at Roblox Corporation required the loss of around 30 employees in order to meet them.
In other gaming news, Cities: Skylines 2 has been delayed for PS5 and Xbox Series X|S so that the quality of the final experience is as polished as possible.