Fornite Laid Off Dev Who Had Been Working On It Since 2017

Epic Games, the company that makes the billions-earning Fortnite, publishes games, and has its own PC game storefront which has apparently been losing money for years, is laying off over 1,000 employees today. The cuts come as part of what Epic CEO Tim Sweeney calls a “downturn in Fortnite engagement,” resulting in the battle royale crossover game spending more money than it’s making. A year ago, Sweeney seemed pretty confident that Epic could keep spending money on its legal case against Apple and Google over mobile microtransactions, and here we are with the company behind one of the most successful, lucrative games in the current video game industry landscape, kicking workers to the curb. It sounds like this has come as quite a shock to those affected.

Evan Kinney, a former principal engineer at the company who worked at the company since 2017 and was even called the “backbone and spirit” of Fortnite by fans, posted on X that he had recently been working on Fortnite’s new Rivalry system while recovering from pneumonia, and was told over the past few days that his work was appreciated by “multiple directors.”

Devon Adesso, a test lead on Fortnite, says she had filled up a notebook with work notes just yesterday, and is now looking for whatever’s next. She’s not the only one, as more and more former Epic employees report that they’re on the job hunt.

Some who weren’t affected have posted that they’re still at Epic, but those posts kind of read like someone marking themselves “safe” after a natural disaster.

Other members of the online Fortnite community aren’t giving Sweeney any grace on this, as a game that has been raking in billions of dollars only loses money if there’s mismanagement at the top.

Epic recently wrapped up a longstanding legal case against Google and Apple regarding in-game purchases, which Sweeney says “is only in the early days of paying off for ourselves and all developers,” even going so far as to say that Epic is the “industry’s vanguard” that has “taken a lot of bullets” in the battle. Which, crucially, they did not have to do, but Epic is a tech company of the modern era, which apparently means screwing over the people who make the thing that brings in all your cash in the hopes that you’ll get even more of it later.