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Epic Games Lays Off Over 800 Employees as Apple Legal Battle Drags On
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I haven’t seen one comment being malicious toward the fired people.
It's never nice to get laid off, however I'm sure these people will find jobs with better companies, perhaps Apple 🤣
Epic Games, the company behind popular video game Fortnite, is laying off 830 employees or approximately 16 percent of its workforce. The layoffs come amid Epic's ongoing legal battle with Apple, which started way back in 2020.
Just this week, Epic Games asked the Supreme Court to hear the case, a request that follows two major losses and likely hundreds of thousands or more in legal fees. Epic Games has been trying to paint Apple as a monopolist, and it wants to be able to sell digital skins and other goods to Apple customers without having to pay a cut to Apple.
As a result of the legal dispute, Fortnite has been unavailable from Apple's App Stores for several years now, and those who want to play the game on the iPhone or iPad must seek alternate means to do so, such as web-based platforms.
Epic CEO Tim Sweeney in a memo sent out to employees and shared on the company's website said that it has been "spending way more money" than it earns to grow Fortnite, and other efforts to cut costs have "ended up far short of financial sustainability."
Sweeney says that layoffs are the only way to stabilize the company's finances. Employees will be provided with severance that includes six months of base pay and six months of paid healthcare.
As for the fight against Apple, Sweeney claims that Epic Games is taking steps to cut down on legal expenses, but will continue on with its legal battles so the "metaverse can thrive and bring opportunity to Epic and all other developers."
Article Link: Epic Games Lays Off Over 800 Employees as Apple Legal Battle Drags On
Personally I hope Epic goes bankrupt, unscrupulous companies like them should be stopped from trading !
People lose their jobs every day and find new ones just as quickly, there is a shortage of skilled programmers, so they won't be out of work for long!
I wonder how many of those jobs would have been saved if Epic was getting App store revenue.
Epic Games, stated that “Bandcamp will play an important role in Epic’s vision to build out a creator marketplace ecosystem for content, technology, games, art, music and more.”
Unless… like, we need some money.
Just sold it to Songtradr.
Unless… like, we need some money.
Just sold it to Songtradr.
I remember them when I had Palm Pilot.
They, IIRC, didn’t handle tax payments, provide developer tools and had no where near the custor base Apple had. I’m not sure if they were worldwide and handled currency conversions.
Here's a link that talks about the early days of ESD, in it the author says after fees and commissions, A developer could get as little as 20% of the sales price.
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I am not talking at Macro level, sure industry wide growth is gone. But individual company decisions are important. It shows recklessness with likely losing $1 B from a platform like iOS, which is more or less a revenue channel for Epic. If you look at the data, Epic wasn’t really wasn’t spending much money for the revenue they were getting from iOS. Sweeney’s own rhetoric was more of an activist than a CEO, most lawyers said Epic didn’t have much of a case. And add to the fact, iOS platform has shown consumers are willing to spend money. No matter how you slice and dive, it shows very poor judgement by Epic.
Not true. There is Android, which has bigger user base. It’s like Apple is specialized exclusive designer store and there is a huge Walmart next to it.
Right now there is basically 2 options, Apple or android (aka crapolla). It will appear to be monopolistic if Apple takes a cut from everything.
It is monopolistic behaviour. If the developer doesn't like Apple's terms how else does it reach iPhone users?
That depends on what country you are talking about. In the U.S., for example, iOS has around 57% share of the mobile OS market compared to Android's 43% (according to Statcounter).
In some countries, iOS share is even higher than that. It's close to 70% in Japan (again, according to Statcounter).
"Monopolistic" and "monopoly" are not necessarily the same thing. Besides, the definition or categorization of a "monopoly" can vary by country/region, case, etc.
FWIW, as a software engineer, both of the 2 times I’ve been part of layoffs in my career I’ve landed at higher paying jobs well before the window of my severance ended, meaning I got to pocket both most of the 3 month (in both cases) severance *and* got a raise.
That said being laid off sucks.
First of all it feels like crap, like you’ve been rejected, even when you know it’s part of a resource action involving, for me in one case, literally tens of thousands of others, in the other still hundreds (much smaller company). Easy to internalize that and let it fester in your head.
Second searching for a new job is awful and anxiety inducing.
Third changing your daily routine is pretty tough, at least for me, and I feel like I’m flailing for a while, and you miss your coworkers you were friends with.
And fourth starting a new job means another 3 months, maybe as much as 6 months, of ramp up, learning the new stack and all its pain points and quirks, meeting your new coworkers and hoping you like them, etc.
But financially most software folks who get caught up in layoffs generally do well (that said I’ll carve that out for older folks, there’s a huge amount of age discrimination in the field, for getting laid off in your 20s-50 what I posted applies, but I know for a lot of folks above 50 finding a new job starts to get much tougher).
Neither of those arguments makes apple a monopoly or monopolistic. If Apple is monopolistic, pretty much every embedded platform, specialized store, and industry becomes a monopoly.
