Seems like it’s even worse than that
this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2023
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They seem to claim it was all an innocent mistake:
@EpicPublishing We are looking into this and the team will be reaching out to you directly.
Not replying to the dev's messages and not paying them for 2 years is not an innocent mistake.
Not replying to the dev’s messages and not paying them for 2 years is not an innocent mistake.
Yeah, they only announced to reach out in the future after bad press.
Or you can look at it as for what it is rather than some ulterior motive behind it, the emails may have just not been getting to the right person regardless of fault. They're only replying now because it's only just now they heard that something was wrong.
Now on the other hand, I generally find it hard to believe that for a business as large as Epic, nobody would follow up on money that's just been sitting around for over 2 years.
Agreed, all it takes is for one or two employees to leave the company after the handoff and information can be forgotten.
Why not? Dev's email might have ended up in the spam list and no one ever saw their emails. Shit happens. All the time.
I agree- I work as a data scientist, and internal data is messy as shit. When you're talking about data from an acquired company, that's doubly so
That's because Epic doesn't have any money
What're you even talking about??? Epic takes a revenue share of every game made with unreal engine, plus Fortnite runs exclusively on mommy's credit card and is still insanely huge. Even if the epic games store doesn't take as big a cut of every sale, they're held by daddy Tencent who'll probably kick em some lunch money if they're actually desperate.
Just because you make a lot of money doesn't mean you can't spend it even faster.
This. They've been burning money trying to give games away for free to entice people to their platform. It's quite possible they have a cash flow problem. That they just layed off 900 people definitely supports this idea.
I doubt it. Fortnite alone probably covers all of those free games and then some, it's an insane cash cow. Add to that Unreal Engine revenue and they're not hurting at all for money.
Layoffs just means they probably finished the bulk of UE5 dev and are seeing softening revenues with the COVID spike being over, so they don't have as much demand to get that and related projects done sooner. Amazon and other big tech firms have done similar layoffs, and it's not because they're losing money, but because they're seeing an end to the crazy growth in the gaming industry due to COVID-19 demand changes.
So no, I really don't think Epic is hurting for money, they're just cutting costs to improve margins now that revenue is likely falling.
Epic Games is a privately owned company, thus we don't know their financial state. We don't know which debts they have and what ventures they have undertaken over the last few years. They might have huge debts and Fortnite might not be enough.
Sure, it's possible, but I think unlikely. This sounds like the normal BS reasons companies give when their investors want better margins. I'm guessing Tencent isn't happy with profit margins and wants a better short term return for their stake.
But you're right, it's all speculation at this point.
Guessing you didn't see the recent news about Epic doing a big layoff and shedding properties recently?
Got to love the fact that Hatoful Boyfriend and Fall Guys are made by the same developer. I'm assuming those do not have similar market share. /s