Looks like they just were spending too much and needed to clean up. On the positive side, they're offering all affected employees 6 months of severance + healthcare. That is really generous of them.
Since they bought bandcamp payments have been fucked. Ever since every time someone buys an album it takes 2 or 3 days to reach me. Which is terrible on band camp friday, where all funds go to the artist. Because of the delay instead of getting the entire sale, I get the regular amount. Logins have been breaking, the app has been unstable, and a bunch of smaller issues. They fucked it up.
They keep giving away free games each week (they have to pay to the publishers of the games to give away games) yet nobody spend money in the store (I think the average was each user spend like $10 or $15 per year)
They also keep buying exclusives, a thing that cost money...
And we cannot forget all the studios and company they have bought, the purchase cost money and their maintenance too
The giant BR is likely Fortnite, the Battle Royale part that is the game most people know wasn't supposed to be the big deal, what is now Save The World was supposed to be the game and BR was just going to be tacked on.
Their reboot of Unreal Tournament failed. And so did their moba named Paragon. Arguably, their Fortnite Save the World also failed. Gears of War Judgement had poor sales for a Gears game though that may have been mostly developed by People Can Fly.
Generally if we ignore Fortnite and Infinite Blade(a mobile game), their last successful game was Gears 3, from 12 years ago. They basically only have Fortnite, Unreal Engine and the Epic store.
They cancelled a bunch of games like Paragon and Unreal tournament to feed the Fortnite machine, abandoned the main Fortnite mode they had already sold and then started funneling money at the epic store.
The epic store at this point has been such a huge loss, exclusivity deals alone are worth millions and not even those managed to get them a user base.
A company with Fortnite’s and Unreal’s income should not be struggling to make a profit.
I'd venture a wild guess that the revenue split business model behind Unreal Engine, and the strategy around spending tons of money to bring people over to the Epic Games Store, are not sustainable. They probably have been generally subsidized by the huge amount of cash that Fortnite has brought in.
Maybe the Fortnite well has dried up? 2023 has been a strong year for news game releases, and it's possible that Fortnite has lost some of players' attention?
Hard to say, but it's looking like Unity are not the only ones struggling to keep their business afloat.
I only have played Fortnite because my nephew was big into it for a long time, now that he and his friends are in high school they have quit playing, I don't know if that's a big trend, but he tells me it is just not cool to play anymore.
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