Following Epic Games’ mass layoffs, a Fortnite producer has said that the devs left behind “cannot even fully understand” the sort of impact the job cuts will have on the game during this year and into the future.
“None of them deserve this and it’s not at all reflective of their work or their impact,” Fortnite gameplay producer Robby Williams wrote in a Twitter thread about the layoffs, which saw long-serving Epic staff like Fortnite principal engineer Evan Kinney suddenly let go. “What comes next is very hard and painful. Our teams will have to pick up the pieces and try to keep moving forward, but we cannot even fully understand what kind of impacts this will have on the game for the rest of the year and likely beyond.
“I’ll continue to do my best to keep making the best game for you, and I’m confident that my peers feel the same, but please be patient with us as we navigate this tough time and do our best in spite of these truly gut-wrenching losses,” he added.
Not long after announcing their plans to fire more than 1000 staff into the sun – in a move CEO Tim Sweeney blamed on a downturn in Fortnite’s popularity, some “industry-wide challenges”, and having “taken a lot of bullets in a battle which is only in the early days of paying off for ourselves and all developers” – Epic put shutdown dates on three Fortnite modes. Rocket Racing, Ballistic and the Festival Battle Stage are all set for the chop this year, but even those moves are set to create work for developers, who’ll have to handle the shutterings and make sure various bits of Fortnite linked to the departing modes can live on.
Sweeney and Epic’s execs also won’t be sparing the whip in terms of pushing the remaining teams to create new additions and improve existing elements of the game. “What we now need to do is clear,” declared the CEO in his company-wide layoff letter. “Build awesome Fortnite experiences with fresh seasonal content, gameplay, story, and live events; accelerate developer tools with greater stability and capability as we evolve from Unreal Engine 5 and UEFN to Unreal Engine 6. And we’ll be kicking off the next generation of Epic with huge launch plans towards the end of the year.”
I assume he finished writing that, lazed back on his banana-skinned chaise longue, and signalled for a chug jug of grapes to be tipped into his mouth by a servant who’s required to do the default dance 24 hours a day.
