• xkforce@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    How the fuck do you manage to lose money with all those microtransactions from whales AND selling games with no physical media for 60+ dollars a pop!? I guess the cocaine and hookers wont pay for themselves.

    • dustyData@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      They aren’t. Epic continues to make ever more and more record amounts of money quarter after quarter. Layoffs have nothing to do with revenue in the gaming industry.

      • xkforce@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I know that. The point was to show how absurd what they said was. And they could have said they were streamlining their business or whatever euphamism they want to use instead of lying about how profitable they are. And their investors probably would have taken that better than the company claiming that theyre “spending more than they earn.”

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        It actually does. If profit goes down (i.e. they’re still making lots of money), they do layoffs to keep profit margins at the target level. It doesn’t matter if they’re still making tons of money, they cut costs if they’re not making as much money as they forecasted.

      • PoisonedPrisonPanda@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 year ago

        Layoffs have nothing to do with revenue in the gaming any industry.

        FTFY

        Its all about shareholders. Layoffs generate less costs. Less costs mean more income. More income means more dividends, more dividends means more share value.

        For short term for sure.

    • lorty
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      1 year ago

      Isn’t that strike for voice actors? These layoffs are of IT people.

    • ampersandrew@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Honestly, I’ll bet it truly doesn’t. Lots of places are laying off lots of workers right now, and Epic spent money like there’s no tomorrow (and now it’s tomorrow).

      • halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        True, but the timing is extremely suspect. They could have laid them off at any time in the past weeks or months.

        It may be a coincidence, but when it comes to corporations and their bottom line, there are rarely coincidences.

        • ampersandrew@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          The non-coincidence is that we’re at the end of September, the end of a fiscal quarter and historically the worst month of the year for stocks.

    • sirsquidOP
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      1 year ago

      I wonder if the author was just copying verbatim from an Epic press release?

      No, I just chose that wording.

      Who but corpo snakes, habitual shedders of skin in service of new exploitative endeavors, would use such a word?

      Well, me, obviously.

      Seems really fucking weird to focus so much on the word like this.

  • RealFknNito@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    There’s no way they’re losing money with Fortnite and Unreal 5 in their hands. Literal money printing machines. They’re bullshitting hard.

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        It’s kind of like my company. We just did layoffs because we missed revenue targets. We were still quite profitable, just not as profitable as we estimated at the beginning of the year, so we need to make cost cuts to keep the profit margins we’re looking for.

        • Selmafudd@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I’ve been out of management for a while thank god but I did 11+ years as ops manager and every month we’d have a meeting to go over p&l reports which was full of budgets the owners set without any input, there was one item let just call wrap that we would use 300-700 rolls per month depending on how busy we were, they also wanted me to order minimum 1000 rolls at a time to hit discount break point. So this cost would only be on the report every 2 months right… easy to understand yet every fucking 2 months they’d be like went over budget by almost 100%… I’m like yeah, how much did we spend last month… oh fuck me it was zero, funny that. So after that they wanted one branch to do a single order each month for all 3 state branches, I’m like you’re gonna spend more on freight for no actual saving and they’re like don’t worry it’s in the budget… wtf.

          And that was just one line on the p&l out of hundreds, it was the same shit over and over again. Fucking labour costs in a 5 week pay cycle month was great too, like they just split the total labour budget by 12, allocated that to each month and called it a day… and just kept doing it every fucking year and then 2 months every year they’d be scratching their head trying to workout why it’s 15-20% over budget

      • RealFknNito@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Well yeah it was an internet gigatrend and it peaked. It’s a steady loss on players but they’re gonna sit there and lie to my face like they aren’t making money hand over fist on skins from the addicted still on it.

  • Platform27
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    1 year ago

    For all those who’ve lost their jobs, I’m sorry, and hope you land on your feet. For Epic…

  • Jaxseven@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    Company responsible for one of the most played games on the planet unable to pay its workers. Feels like someone at Epic is horribly irresponsible with finances, or just maybe infinite growth is impossible and harms everyone below the execs.

  • FartsWithAnAccent@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Maybe you assholes should stop buying exclusives and make your launcher not a piece of shit? IDK, just spitballing here…

    • Contend6248@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      If they wouldn’t keep their user stats artificially with these exclusives, even more heads would roll.

  • underisk
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    1 year ago

    What if they just stopped doing that instead of firing people?

    • Hot Saucerman
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      1 year ago

      Yeah they could stop giving away free games in a weak attempt to get people to use their shitty sub-par service. That probably costs them a good bit.

      The only games on Epic I “own” are the free games I’ve cared enough to grab… and I still have opened Epic exactly zero times to play any of them. Pointless.

      • Molecular0079@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        That was exactly my first thought. Getting exclusives and giving out free games is not cheap. Epic brought this on themselves and like any corporation they’re punishing their employees during downturns.

  • Gamey@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    Maybe spend some of it on a good app rather than marketing and exclusive deals, well or fire your workers and hope that accident of a game store will fix itself I guess!

  • taanegl@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    Management fucked up, workers pay for it, witnesses saw that the sky is blue. News at '11.

  • HiImThomasPynchon [des/pair, it/its]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    So Epic games can just cut 830 people because they’re “spending way more than they earn” and nobody bats an eye. But when I cut 830 people because I spend way more than I earn, I’m “committing assault” and am “a menace to society.”

  • jlow (he/him)@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    This and selling Bandcamp on to some shady ad(?) firm would not make me want to choose Unreal Engine if I was looking for a new one after the recent entshittification of Unity (I’d have gone for Godot anyway but …)

    • DarkenLM@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Unfortunately, for some projects, there just aren’t as many options available right now, at least none that I know of.

        • DarkenLM@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          I’ve seen it, and it looks quite nice. Might give it a try if I ever get into game making. But some project that want to harness the full power of systems like Lumen, Niagara, Megascans, etc, don’t have much of an alternative.