Epic Games is reportedly laying off around 900 employees | Said to be roughly 16% of its workforce.::UPDATE 4.54pm: Epic has confirmed reports of widespread layoffs at the company, saying the move will affect "around 830…

    • CaptDust@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      ~20 game studios, unreal engine (probably has 15 divisions itself across games, films, ads, etc), epic games store, artstation, sketchfab, metahuman, quixel, metaverse projects… how many employees should they have?

        • schmidtster@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          The article covers all of what we answered quite well, so if you read the article why else would you be asking, and if you didn’t read the article, why are you participating in the comments?

            • schmidtster@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Rockstar has over 2000 employees and puts out a fraction of the amount of games.

              The number of employees is a completely irrelevant metric, there is no explanation other than they thought they needed that many. No different than any other company is existence even………

    • schmidtster@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      They have a game engine, they make games, they have a store front.

      Why would the amount matter?

    • Varyk@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Goddamn, so many unhelpful answers.

      There are lots of threads online about this, and no clear firsthand answers, but as far as I could parse the Internet consensus:

      1. Hired too many people, that’s why they’re laying people off right now

      2. Unity engine team is the same size as unreal, but unity is constantly trying to sell ads and services to the point that their engine department is just another department of many departments that are all trying to hoover up revenue, rather than the engine being their main focus.

      Here’s an example thread with a bunch of snooty assholes and a couple reasonable answers: https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/16owfy1/7700_employees_at_unity_can_someone_who_works/

        • filcuk@lemmy.zip
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          1 year ago

          Me neither, but iirc Valve has 300 employees total. It seems massively out of proportion.

          • SMT42@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Yeah like Twitter had 7500+ employees before Elon went and fired 90% of them. Sure the site is worse off for it, but it still runs. Clearly most of that 90% were nonessential to the function of the company.

            A lot of these tech companies are bloated like that

        • scarabic@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          An engine is not just a kernel of 3 dimensionality logic and lighting principles. Engines are there to speed the development of games, and so are composed of lots of tooling and infrastructure for game developers to use. I’ll bet the core technology engineers and testers number 2000 and the rest are researchers, customer relations people, advertising, marketing, sales, lawyers, international market specialists, website managers, HR, corpdev (large deals / mergers) and of course the management layer. Really a lot of large corporations need a lot of the same apparatus. It would be great if you could find out, company by company, how many people it takes to actually build the product but the total number has to do with how many it takes to run the business.

      • coconautti@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Not just a game engine, Unity is a software company with numerous services. Mainly game related though. There’s the Unity ads platform which probably employs hundreds in Finland alone. Unity is used from entertainment to manufacturing industry.

    • BURN@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Fortnite alone had >2k people working on it at once when it was at its peak. Add in a bunch of extra departments and that makes a little more sense

    • qooqie@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      If they see value in it I don’t see why employing more people is exactly a bad thing