Look, I understand that the point of a business, including Epic, is to make money. And when a business isn’t making money – or in fact losing it – sometimes tough choices need to be made. Usually those tough choices are made by people who won’t be affected by them at all, so I’m sure they’re a little less tough, but still.
So when a company like Epic lays off one thousand people, it’s easy to buy into the narrative that this is just a sad, necessary way to right the ship. But one lingering question remains in the Epic’s mass layoff: how is Tim Sweeney so bad at this? How do you lay off an entire thousand people and then insult them by saying, essentially, “Someone should hire these guys!”?
Sweeney’s Tweet Is Tone Deaf At Best And Unhelpful At Worse
If you didn’t see that part, I’m not kidding. Tim Sweeney, ostensibly a human being, tweeted, “In the coming days, employers will see a stream of resumes of once-in-a-lifetime quality folks. An important thing to understand is that Epic never lowered our hiring standards as we grew, and the layoff wasn’t a performance-based ‘rightsizing’ as companies call it nowadays. It’s a sound bet that anyone with Epic Games on their resume is in the top few percent of their discipline.”
And, hey, that’s not a bad sentiment. These are good workers! They are talented! They deserve jobs! Epic never lowered their hiring standards! Those fired developers are the best of the best, sir, with honors. And that would all mean something if you weren’t taking away their healthcare and ability to pay their mortgage. What a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get skilled employees after many-times-in-a-lifetime layoffs!
Half-Life And Portal Writer Calls Out Tim Sweeney Over Epic Games Layoffs, Says Gabe Is “Better” At Making Money
Former Valve writer Chet Faliszek has taken aim at Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney over the recent layoffs.
Hell, you can probably get ‘em at a discount! Nothing personal here; Epic just needed some (super talented!) bodies to create a bridge from “losing money” to “maybe Gen Z will get nostalgic soon and buy V-Bucks for old times’ sake?” And if there’s anything that saves your live-service game, it’s cutting out the people who’ve spent years making the live service game. Especially when it’s people who’ve designed some of the most famous, money-making aspects of the game. Seriously, they fired the artist who designed the iconic face of the game.
That’s why it’s so insulting. Tim Sweeney basically treats his fired staff like someone putting a couch on the curb with a paper sign that says, “free, no bed bugs.” You think it makes you sound magnanimous, but it really is just a way for you to avoid feeling guilty when you see that couch is still on the sidewalk. Sweeney is the CEO of the company, not the lead of a dev team whose layoffs were out of his control.
So him being like, “Oh goodness me, these people I just pinkslipped are so wonderful, just the best, someone should give them a job” is a massive slap in the face. Hell, it would’ve been less crappy if he’d literally slapped them in the face. At least there would be some honesty in the relationship between employee and CEO.
Sweeney’s Message Probably Doesn’t Help Anyone
Receiving a generalized shoutout from a gaming executive doesn’t get someone a new job. And constructing the statement to sound like a great opportunity for other businesses is so wildly out of touch that it’s almost funny. “These are good people I don’t want to pay anymore, so if you need anybody, you’re in luck!” This was a mass layoff, not a job fair. There is no opportunity here for employees other than the opportunity to sit in a car and build up the courage to tell their family what happened. Having to interview with multiple companies multiple times after getting fired is not an opportunity. These are human beings we’re talking about.
Also, not for nothing, when you say your layoffs aren’t due to performance, it’s probably not great for morale for those remaining who are also worried about their jobs. Like I said, I do understand that he probably meant well. I also understand that he meant well from way high above the people who are now not doing well.
But telling fired employees they weren’t let go due to performance is a double-edged comfort. “Oh, we did great? And you still threw us in the bin? Thank you so much for your kindness!” Congratulations: you’ve told your entire company that no matter how well they do and no matter how successful a product is, the chances are bad for long-term employment at Epic.
And let me take a second to say that I’d love to love Tim Sweeney. Or I’d love to not think about him at all while respecting his company. We’re both bitter nerds, so we have something in common. Furthermore, he’s created games I like and he helped develop a game engine that has driven some of my favorite titles. Apparently he’s also bought up a lot of land in North Carolina to preserve as wilderness. I can acknowledge that’s a good thing.
And while live-service games aren’t my cup of tea, I do admire the quality and cohesiveness and creativity in Fortnite. Sweeney spearheaded a business and from that business came a lot of the video game culture we have today. Fortnite is now like Nintendo: even people who know nothing about video games are familiar with it.
Those Devs Made Fortnite What It Is Today
But on the other hand, that success and that money is in a very, very large part produced by workers. So when you’re a man with billions of dollars firing people from the company, you aren’t being nice when you say “please give the people I just fired jobs,” you’re just rubbing salt into the wound. I might be wrong, but I don’t think many of these workers are going to be picked up instantly because Tim Sweeney wrote a tweet. I’m not sure anything positive has ever resulted from a Tim Sweeney tweet. Or any tweet at all for that matter.
Some of the laid off workers will find jobs quickly, yes. They are talented people. But at this current moment of Hell, there is far more qualified talent available than there are slots to put that talent in. People don’t need to be told by their boss that they’re gonna be swell as their boss also commands security to revoke their email and Slack access immediately. It’s really giving “this hurts me more than it hurts you” energy. Hey, has anyone picked up that couch yet?
Also, I’m willing to believe Epic when they say this isn’t a mass firing in order to pivot to AI. But we also live in a world in which Tim Sweeney has defended AI in games multiple times and has criticized other developers for not liking the technology or having guardrails around it. Imagine if he went to the mat for his employees the same way he went to the mat for Grok.
Epic Games CEO Says Generative AI Creating GTA-Level Games Is The Next “Logical Step”
Sweeney agrees with Musk that AI-generated games are the next step for the tech.
He’s more than allowed to do that. It is his right as an executive and as a human being to run the company the way he wants and to be excited for a tech that other people aren’t. He can defend or support whomever or whatever he wants. But it doesn’t make it less awful to then let go of an entire public high school’s worth of employees and subsequently post, basically, “I just burned down an orphanage; does anyone want to adopt these kids?”
I get it. Epic has made a fortune on Fortnite, but like Tyra said in that America’s Next Top Model doc that made her look super bad, you can only stay on top for so long. Just as other video game companies had to pivot to fit the new, hot model that Fortnite was built on, Fortnite is now scrambling to stay relevant too. Waves come in, waves go out. Every popular piece of art will one day seem a little quaint and a lot cringey next to more recent art for a more recent audience.
Trust me, I know: I was a big Hamilton fan and now feel vaguely embarrassed about that fact. I’m sure Tim Sweeney feels the same way about Fortnite when he’s not on Twitter acting like he’s still getting bullied in middle school and not a literal billionaire with more institutional power than 99.9999 percent of humanity. The world has been cruelest to him of all, he thinks as he looks out the window of his private jet.
Game Devs Aren’t The Reason Epic Lost Money
Maybe it was a mistake for Epic to spend years suing other companies for not letting them keep all the real bucks from the V-Bucks. Maybe it was a mistake for Epic to overexpand their cash cow to include every single cultural phenomenon to try to reach all of the Earth’s audience at once. Maybe it was a mistake for Epic to create a storefront that is so deeply unpleasant that even giving away free games didn’t make people want to use it.
I’m more than happy to shop at multiple digital storefronts, but the Epic Games Store feels like it was designed by a team of parents trying to add so much friction to fun that you just give up and go outside. I’m not asking for much. If itch.io can do it on a shoestring budget, so can Epic on a larger one. If GOG can do it with mostly old games, Epic can do it with mostly newer ones. And that’s no shade to itch.io or GOG, who both have a whole lot of my money. Like, a troubling amount of my money.
But what probably wasn’t the primary, secondary, or even tertiary problem was the game developers. They did have a cost on the balance sheet, but it’s my completely unqualified opinion they weren’t the big reason Epic was losing money. Nope, just a quick way to put on a tourniquet. And that’s even if those people did cost about half of a lawsuit against Apple. Those are the people who were and should still be making you money. They’re the ones who created a cultural hit so big that Quentin Tarantino shot a short film in it.
Yes, some fans are aging out of the game while younger players are shifting to other platforms such as Roblox. Yes, Epic made some bad business decisions. But the people getting screwed aren’t by and large the ones who made bad decisions. Tale as old as time. I don’t even know why it’s worth repeating. But it’s almost cruel, or at least deeply, profoundly thoughtless, to be the person that makes those decisions coming down from on high to benevolently, but generically bless those that now have to fight everyone else on LinkedIn for scraps.
You really want to help those people you fired? Pick up the phone and start calling a few CEO friends and pulling a lot of favors. But you better get started because there’s about a thousand people who can’t make rent soon. Worst case scenario, at least they have a comforting tweet they can print out and eat.
- Released
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September 26, 2017
- ESRB
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T for Teen – Diverse Content: Discretion Advised, In-Game Purchases, Users Interact
