Epic Games is laying off 16% of its staff
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
I don't care a ton about Epic, but I love Bandcamp. It's my primary mechanism these days for discovering and acquiring music.
I was puzzled when Epic bought Bandcamp, apparently they were too. They're being kicked over to Songtradr -- I hope that's a neutral to good move, but I don't really know. Anybody know anything that could shed light on that?
The new company Songtradr focuses on licensing, it's a b2b, while Bandcamp is a b2c. So it can be easy to see how they'd want to make Bandcamp more like themselves. Of course I'm being negative and cynical, apologies. I share the same fondness for Bandcamp.
Edit: to clarify meant Songtradr.
Let alone Bandcamp is a good source for smaller DJs to acquire tracks, which isn't a long shot for Songtradr.
One of the suppositions people had about Epic buying Bandcamp was that maybe it would allow Epic to more easily license music for their games. From the press release[1] it seems like they did that. I have no idea how well that worked but here we are with Songtradr, "a music licensing platform and marketplace company," acquiring them.
On its own Bandcamp is (was?) a profitable enterprise.[2] I wish they'd go back to being on their own. That said, if Songtradr does nothing more but give artists more diverse ways to make money off their music I'm all for it.
That said multiple changes of ownership can play hell with continuity and morale. I'm worried about that.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/songtradr-acquires-bandcamp-e... [2] https://components.one/posts/bandcamp-the-chaos-bazaar
They added playlists, I think, this year but I have > 1200 albums on the service (I buy a lot of full discographies and subscriptions when labels have them) and it's so painful to try to go back past the first 100 or so.
Music discovery is OK through the site - their Bandcamp Daily and other content is great - but it could be so much better. And it's screaming for better social features. Sigh.
The other reason of course is that they went a bit crazy with the hiring sprees and accumulated some unproductive devs who are probably a net drag. That’s ultimately a healthy force in the economy as those people can do more in smaller firms with less in-house expertise (albeit at lower wages).
I wonder also how much of a driver new programmer productivity tools like copilot and ChatGPT are factoring into this. If your top 10% productivity workers just got a 30%+ productivity boost, that means you can easily shed the bottom 20% productive workers and still be ahead of the game.
Regarding the second para, the interesting part for me is: how do these companies determine which are the unproductive devs? My impression so far is that senior management has no way of measuring this, given how little data is provided to back up decisions to RTO.
Not so sure about the third para. Why would one company be more ahead of the game than any other, if indeed LLMs are providing this supposed boost?
I can bet that if you bring Google Reader up, you'll get a lot more complaining - than any "horrible Google services" topic.
If you decide to stop paying your water bill you don't lose service that same day. Typically these layoffs either cause or are a sign of stagnation and then some scrappy startup starts eating away at your market share.
How do you even know that?
Usually the only way that you will see that, as a customer, is when the people who left are unable to keep up with all the firefighting and things ultimately explode. Either with outages or a security breach.
You can accumulate a _lot_ of tech debt before customers notice. For smaller companies, that's often a fatal amount of debt.
Can they? In my experience, they don't tend to do this when it comes to deciding who to lay off. I assumed this was because they can't tell who the bottom 10-15% are.
Team members can tell, but can upper management?
How else would you measure how much work someone does, other than by how much tracked work that's attributed to them there is?
The people using these indicators probably don't care about someone who might have fewer closed issues but instead is helping out 5 people work more efficiently, but rather about people who are constantly shipping measurably less than others, stack ranking and all - in their minds, development should be viewed as some widget factory.
Just look at what happened to agile and how SAFE ended up: https://www.atlassian.com/agile/agile-at-scale
That's also how you get attempts to turn some abstract complexity evaluation (story points) into hours that could be billed to a client ahead of time, even though it probably shouldn't and doesn't work like that.
Never have I ever been the person with highest "overall activity, number of issues closed, merge requests completed, etc.", yet I have not been laid off in a very long time.
Last time I thought I was getting laid off, I misread the manager's comments as PIP.
The senior management delegates. At every moment your direct manager knows whom they are willing to part ways with if asked. Even if everyone on the team is great there is always some criteria (costs, impact on important project, institutional knowledge) that sets some people apart.
There's a lot of "you have to cut X off your salary budget", pick whoever you want. Then it's up to the managers to pick, very subjectively, who they want to work with the most.
FFS - I managed to dodge 4 layoffs at a startup, including my whole department being cut wholesale. My managers always kept me, even though I wouldn't call myself the "best" or "the cheapest". All of it just boils down to one thing - I'm the one that whoever manages me can rely on. Just that... being reliable.
Newly hired people were more junior and cheaper than previous employees so it makes no sense to fire them.
Which industry? I’m seeing a lot of middle layers being reduced, but not the rainmakers.
This org in particular missed, in my eyes, where to cut. There is a number of engineers who cannot do much more than copy/paste code and the org has no wish to train them. Unfortunately, the org thinks that going wide (lots of teams, lots of people) is a good way to scale.
Though functions like CEO and a lot of the executive suite - are under threat of just being replaced.
By what? A Board-hired AI?
Quite a few CEOs should just sit on the board and stick to reviewing an AI generated strategy implementation plan. Because it's still the board that decides on the strategy, while CEO typically is focused on the implementation of said strategy.
CEO as a fulltime position is definitely under threat here.
Agree.
> Quite a few CEOs should just sit on the board and stick to reviewing an AI generated strategy implementation plan
Generating strategy is an important part of a CEO’s job. But it’s far from the main one. Their job is, centrally, about people. Managing relationships external and internal. That is AGI-territory work.
Well, this sounds logical and all but isn't always.
For example, Google's revenue/employee exploded during covid but it didn't crater post-covid [1]. So even with a hiring spree, the company is on the same track as it was pre-covid. You might need to layoff employees to get that same covid high but that covid high is the unsustainable part not your current employee count.
So some companies may have overhired compared to what their reveneue growth without covid would've been but not all did. You still need to evaluate companies on a company by company basis.
[1]: https://www.macroaxis.com/financial-statements/GOOGL/Revenue...
I can confidently say that this factors in 0%. Layoffs were happening in the industry even before the LLM craze.
And a 30% overall productivity boost for a "top" developer is a massive overestimate. Your best developers aren't spending their days writing boilerplate unit tests.
"A recession is a significant, widespread, and prolonged downturn in economic activity. A common rule of thumb is that two consecutive quarters of negative gross domestic product (GDP) growth mean recession, although more complex formulas are also used."
- [investopedia]("https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/recession.asp#:~:text=W....")
We've known this for a while BTW, I first learned about the timeline in 2014 watching the budget committee hearing on CSPAN. They showed the slide with the timeline yet no one talked about it. Austerity back then was scheduled to start by 2020 but we got stimulus, like they were steering into driving off the cliff.
This guy wrote and updated his book on the topic. https://www.amazon.com/COMING-COLLAPSE-AMERICA-BALANCE-FEDER...
Businesses are attempting to discover how to operate in a macro that makes labor and money more expensive than they've been accustomed to over the last 15-20 years. u/DoughnutHole touches on another important point: businesses and capital are clinging to returns that might no longer be obtainable in this new macro (as we've been papering over reality with cheap credit and financialization for some time). What is going to break first? Who knows, first time we're someplace like this. Everyone is going to fight like hell to defend their piece of the pie (note the broad layoffs and back to hiring shortly after, as well as activist investors demanding trimming labor costs aggressively).
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS (Pick 10Y time scale)
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WM2NS
https://www.goldmansachs.com/intelligence/pages/why-the-us-m...
https://fedinprint.org/item/fedkeb/96953 | https://www.kansascityfed.org/Economic%20Bulletin/documents/... ("The labor market has so far shown remarkable resilience to the Federal Reserve’s recent monetary policy tightening. Severe labor shortages in the post-pandemic era have led many employers to hold on to workers and hire less-skilled workers—even though they expect demand for their goods or services to weaken in the future. As a result, unemployment remains low, and labor productivity has declined.")
If you've been eating the same for the last 20 years and you've been gradually gaining weight over the last 20 years, then it's your diet.
If you've been eating the same for the last 20 years and you suddenly gain weight, it's likely not your diet, it's something else -- exercise, illness, et cetera.
You're overfocusing on one single component of a fairly complex system. Government spending, COVID impacts (pent up demand, supply chain disruptions), a massive war in Europe impacting multiple crucial raw materials - they all have a part in the stagnation / borderline recession we're seeing. Anyone claiming it's "simple" or due to one single factor either has an agenda or doesn't understand how complex economics are.
I mean, both can be true. ZIRP wasn't made over the recessions either. Tech has been in that rush for at least 12 years now. If not longer. You mention 15-20 years after all.
We had at least one recession during your time period. It doesn't preclude another one.
>labor shortages in the post-pandemic era have led many employers to hold on to workers and hire less-skilled workers—even though they expect demand for their goods or services to weaken in the future. As a result, unemployment remains low, and labor productivity has declined."
I see this as a natural consequence to their actions, though. You require "Junior" engineers to have 3+ years of experience, discourage apprenticeships in lieu of short internship stints and headhunting acedemia, and overall try and compartmentalize engineering roles. So no surprise that labor in the Gen Z won't be as skilled as the Gen X that rose entire industries from the ground up. It's due (but not limited to):
- tech being more complex. How many people worked on Google search in 1999? How many work on search alone in 2023, let alone the other 30+ division Google has now.
- top talent more and more seeking out their own business ventures. Same questions as above. More startups and more Ycombinators to fund them. People really want to be or to fund "the next big thing" in a rate not seen since the Dot Com era.
- simply being ubiquitous. You can work in tech without being in a tech company. If you don't like the hustle of FAANG or high frequency trading, there are plenty of places who just need to maintain their website outside of tech. This won't drive growth as much, but it pays the bills.
There's many factors behind this, but I will emphasize that people requiring top talent need to invest in them. Schools don't have the same goals as employers, and schools as is are becoming more cost prohibitive as is.
The Max timescale is even more interesting. Almost every time one of those gray-shaded recessionary periods begins, it's preceded by a graph segment that looks a lot like the last couple of years.
This (and other layoffs) are a response to increased interest rates imposed to combat inflation. Companies don't have access to as cheap credit, so they're trying to appease shareholders by cutting costs to improve profitability.
This puts the brakes on the economy and may cause a recession if it goes too far. But the US economy is not currently in recession by any definition.
It's not just profitability and shareholders, although those are good indicators of whether or not you're overspending. If the cost of capital goes up, something has to give to pay for that.
The fact that they borrowed bigtime to buy this adtech company (hence the push for “if you use our ads, no fee increase!”) and are now deeply deeply underwater is forcing the issue, they have gone from losing $100-300m per year to losing $800m-1b per year. But, again, unity has literally never turned a profit in the history of its existence.
The same thing is happening across the industry where the end of free money is putting some boondoggles out of business, burning out the waste that has resulted from 2+ decades of unconstrained tech growth in a ZIRP environment. A correction was inevitable and healthy, excessively cheap money has all kinds of noxious effects on an economy.
The most prominent is xbox - I don't think anyone realized just how bad things have gotten for xbox but the FTC leaks are devastating, they reveal the xbox division has been on the ropes for quite a while. They have been in severe risk of being closed if they can't make gamepass numbers perform, and they've massively undershot the scenarios in which (two or three years ago) Phil Spencer said he'd close the division. It's entirely possible that Starfield is the last straw, and if they don't see a big bump in gamepass subscribers from it (which doesn't seem to have happened) they may spin off the game-studio side and kill xbox, or pivot it into a "nettop" that competes more with appletv and switch pro type hardware.
It’s also resulted in some businesses making some crazy pricing model changes and other things, out of a real or perceived need to get to profitability. The unity change will kill the business, and things like google business spinning off domain registry (you need to use a third party service to get a complete offering on google cloud?) are pound-foolish decisions that will/could have long-term negative consequences.
But the tide is going out and we’re seeing who’s swimming naked, as they say. There were a lot of businesses and projects that were only sustainable with 0% interest money, and companies are rightfully asking if this is worth it if they have to pay 7% or 8% interest. And that's exactly the type of unproductive work that needs to be burned out of the economy.
PS5 has won the console war, Series X's hardware advantage has been subsumed by upscaling into a meaningless "runs 840p instead of 720p input res" thing that doesn't sell consoles and Sony has actually organically built studios that pump out exclusive content that does draw in customers. Microsoft has largely failed at building that, and instead tried to buy more studios to make their content exclusive (bethesda, tried to buy nintendo and activision, etc).
Microsoft has pretty explicitly pushed all their exclusives to PC as well, meaning Series S and the Gamepass are the only interesting thing they have going. And gamepass simply hasn't been doing the necessary numbers - there was a bump in 2020/2021 from COVID, when silicon shortages meant Series S was the cheapest and most available route to a diversion during the COVID disruptions, and gamepass gave you this ready library. But 2022 and 2023 have been the great Going-Outside and the numbers have gone down not up.
In the meantime Series S is also this albatross around their neck - they have a much lower hardware baseline for game compatibility, and can't really push forward to next-gen without losing those subscribers (who are probably not going to "convert" again if it requires a $700 purchase or whatever). like it or not they are trapped by series S and gamepass now, and there is no true next-gen console on the radar (unlike sony), only a refresh.
Another problem is that all those gamepass subscribers are using the "$1/mo for 5 years" crazy promo deals too. Which is another perfect example of crazy VC growth-hacking stuff that is being rightfully burned out.
the FTC leaks are absolutely devastating and reveal a company that is so on the ropes they're looking at closing the xbox division, or pivoting it to nettop style consoles and going after appletv and switch pro (docked) market, perhaps with an upscaling-based ARM console. They are drastically underperforming the scenario in which Phil Spencer said he'd pull the plug. But it sure as fuck isn't going to be running like it currently is, in another 5-10 years, unless they get a whole lot of market traction awfully fast.
I do think it's entirely possible that Starfield was their last shot - big flagship title from a big flagship studio, and if they didn't do the gamepass numbers (and they didn't) this is the final straw. MS has very explicitly avoided weighing in on a true next-gen console and maybe they pivot or kill the division off instead. And this leak is so embarrassing and reveals how much things are so on-fire internally, that the leak itself may push them over the edge too, on top of starfield underperforming this month. This is C-suite level deliberation laid bare.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tJBC9zXYQ8&t=2511s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUPxytMLWzI
But it's stunning to see this (ostensibly) gaming pillar/institution fall apart like this... apparently they were swimming naked too. But I guess that's not surprising, their only real traction was during the XB360/PS3 era and every single other time it's been a money pit they dump cash into in hopes of being profitable next generation... everyone kinda knew it intellectually but without the scales of losses being broken out separately, it's just an abstract point. Now we know: Xbox is losing so much cash they will probably go under shortly.
(which is a great reason to prevent them from acquiring more studios, especially when the goal is obviously to take their content exclusive to combat Sony's organic exclusives. That's anticompetitive to the core.)
Phil's entire job is to communicate the idea that they have to acquire third-party studios to keep the business running at all. "If you don't let us buy Activision, then we'll just be forced to fold our tents, and then there will be even LESS competition. You don't want THAT, do you?"
When in reality, Microsoft's attitude toward the Xbox division has always been more like Citizen Kane. "Why, yes, we lost $100 million last year, and we're on track to lose $150 million this year. At this rate, if things don't improve, we might have to shut this place down in... let's see... 12,000 years."
Adjustment of COVID, low interest rates and Russian war.
I think you're doing standups wrong.
Do they need a cover sheet as well? Did you get the memo?
That kind of stuff can't be solved by technology.
LLMs are phenomenal busywork generators. And as a natural consequence, if you want to stay productive, you should be suspicious of anybody that uses one.
Unless you're suggesting that using an llm is just as efficient as not, but is somehow more fun?
If you're more of a generalist though? I can see productivity gains of 25% maybe.
ChatGPT and GitHub CoPilot have regularly barfed out garbage for me while I use them. I spend more time double checking whether it's right than I do writing code with it.
It's terrible for my use case where I am doing somewhat complex fixes/refactors everywhere. It just regularly makes up stuff, or gets the wrong API version, or just outright poops out non-existent syntax crap.
I really doubt this. Copilot/ChatGPT are not useful at all for the hard problems and they're not trustworthy enough for the small problems. Even for the simplest things I have to comb over the generated code very carefully because I've seen them be subtly wrong dozens of times in my relatively short use. If I have to go over everything they generate with a fine tooth comb it's just easier and less error prone to write it entirely myself.
if you have to glue together multiple unfamiliar APIs and packages, maybe even seeing a couple new ones per day, you often throw away your code, and your work output is something else with writing code only a means to that end, it hugely speeds things up even accounting for debugging the frequent cases where it's subtly wrong.
this latter situation is more common than many software engineers realize.
Maybe take the time to be familiar with them? I think that is a description of an unhealthy job. It's like asking an average mechanic to handle optimizing for an f1 car in day 1, then asking him to improve the endurance of a rally car the next day! Then telling them the main point is to market the sponsors, so no need to be perfect.
maybe a better analogy would be if you travel to new cities a lot, and have to navigate, you don't want to memorize a map of all the city streets and learn in detail the transit schedules on each rail and bus line, you just care about a few routes a few times. and Google Maps can make your life a lot easier. on the other hand if you lived in that city, it would quickly become pointless to take out your phone all the time to plan a commute to work.
I'm convinced I've spent more time scrutinizing, undoing, and debugging the CoPilot code than it saved me on typing.
I personally don't believe its a massive function of Generative AI (although it could be), I think the major contributing factor is that the projections that companies made in 2020/2021 and the hiring they did to resource more projects to take advantage of those rosy projections ended up falling short of real expectations. i.e instead of needing to take advantage of a potential 20% yoy future growth in their target markets, they only really need to staff for a 10% yoy growth.
Also probably a bit of "monkey see monkey do" where a company that actually needs to layoff (meta) lays off a bunch of people, and other large companies that may not "need" to layoff (like Google) follow suit since now its "socially acceptable."
Epic went from 2200 employees in 2020 to almost 9000 in 2023. They are now basically shedding 1 out of 6 hires they've done since 2020. That's not really about sustainability, it's just a way to drop the ones that didn't really work out.
These layoffs are just a way for CEOs to improve "efficiency" AKA increase margins so they get a nice fat bonus - COVID overhiring has been a convenient excuse and every company has jumped on it.
They're living in a momentary dream that AI LLM tools will solve all our coding problems. They don't and reality hasn't hit them yet.
I don't know any real seasoned dev who is getting a 30% boost because they installed Co-Pilot. The tools poop out too many errors/fake-garbage to be useful to devs working on battle hardened codebases.
The productivity boost for non-seasoned devs, or devs of average skill level or above doing relatively routine but needed work? For a large chunk of the nearly-invisible-to-silicon-valley workforce doing those tasks, I would be surprised if it wasn't more than 30%.
So if anyone gains from this, is the companies paying under-market, and therefore typically getting somewhat substandard devs to do boring things. There's major savings in productivity there, precisely because the training for those tasks is so good. If you had your highest performance developers spending a significant amount of time on that kind of busywork, you weren't getting that great of a performance in the first place.
But the devs here are all very experienced senior-level engineers. Perhaps that's why we aren't seeing any gains?
I think many software developers have this romantic, idealized notion that their entire job should be furiously typing code into a computer, and that anything else they have to grudgingly do is unproductive overhead.
My experience was that it was about as useful as searching Google and Stack Overflow without knowing what a good answer looks like. You copy and paste a lot of code, a lot of it works, but inevitably, something breaks and you have no idea why. So you still have to go back to "the hard way" of reading the documentation and building an understanding.
I'm sure things will improve over time, especially for products built specifically for code generation, but my first and second impression is that so far, LLMs don't actually lower the bar for junior programmers.
Otherwise you're suggesting that these senior devs are using a tool which provides no value whatsoever which seems unlikely.
I'd say it depends on the task more than on dev level. If it's maintaining, improving, or refactoring of a large project LLM can't help much. When it comes to small utilities GPT-4 is a time saver. You can even write a small playable game with it in a matter of hours. Using any popular language. Simple web pages, JS are much easier. With ChatGPT-4 I've learned how to do certain things using ffmpeg. Without it would take hours of googling.
PS: talking about ChatGPT degradation with the time. I didn't see it on programming tasks. But it became noticeably faster.
I have been evangelizing GitHub Copilot (+ Copilot Chat) and ChatGPT Pro to my coworkers that include full-stack .Net/React devs, Python data science people, and embedded C devs.
Only the .Net/React devs have been sticking to both Copilot and ChatGPT Pro. The Python data science are using ChatGPT Pro but have dropped Copilot. The embedded C devs are using neither.
When working with embedded systems - I barely ever have "lightly" customized code. Meanwhile the closer you're to the frontend - the closer you get to having majority of your code being boilerplate.
If they really did over-hire during the pandemic and fail to plan for the future that was either 1) intentional and they lied to recruits about the duration of employment or 2) incompetence on the part of leadership and recruiting. Have heads rolled in the responsible departments?
Likely not a reason for layoffs. If someone was fired due to llms it was probably due to the incompetence to think the chat bot is more than a data leaking search engine.
There is still some insane growth
Fortnite's game as a service fatigue, for some reason they didn't jump on the Extraction Shooter hype and it cost them today IMO, Fortnite became successful because they jumped on a trend at the right time (from Survival Base Building to Battle Royal), they seem to have forgotten that
EPIC launcher is still bad today.. which doesn't make me want to have it open, and let alone to browse it.. which might hurt their numbers
Steam's launcher follows the same path it seems, slow and bloated CEF bullshit.. makes me want to use it less
fun sieve(n: Long) = (2L until n).fold((2L until n).toMutableList()){p,i->p.apply{for(j in i * 2 until n step i)this[(j-2).toInt()]=0}}.filter{it!= 0L}
and it works OK in some situations:
>>> sieve(100L)
res5: kotlin.collections.List<kotlin.Long> = [2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37, 41, 43, 47, 53, 59, 61, 67, 71, 73, 79, 83, 89, 97]
Let's try another test input -
>>> sieve(10000000L)
java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space
Oops.
Also if the 12th-20th most popular language (Kotlin) being too obscure is the reason, how will they fare currently except with the most popular languages?
This is about as simple as a function as you can get. 95% of my programming work is standups, sprint planning and grooming, looking at Swagger or other API backend documentation for information, looking through Outlook, Teams and Confluence for information about my story, looking for UI on Figma, contacting various teams for more information - then someone wants me to review their pull request and stop to do that - but notice they have some business logic wrong because they don't fully understand the domain. Yet even something simple like a function generating a list of prime numbers, ChatGPT struggles with.
Not that it can't get better, but it's no threat to most programmers I know in the short term (and if it becomes one, I'll shift over to writing Python scripts that call Pytorch, numpy etc. - I already do so in my spare time).
It doesn't even work, even if it was productive, as barely any problems the average gamedev faces on a day-to-day have been surfaced to the training data of an LLM.
Sure, if you're still learning how to move position from x to x+1, ChatGPT can help you with those basics, but anything more than that and they start hitting me up on Discord looking for real answers.
Something as simple as how the serialization of fields in behaviour classes was too much for ChatGPT. They read what it hallucinated up, got confused, and were calling me up to explain minutes later. For those who don't know Unity, this is something you have to do daily when building new logic into game components and ChatGPT was clueless about it.
The limitations of ChatGPT as a programming aid are very very obvious and it has a long way to go before it's really useful to seasoned professionals.
Specifically with type-ahead suggestions I believe with typing you are more engaged in thinking about what is correct. With a CoPilot suggestion the tendency is to just skim it to see if it look good. And that's probably part of the problem; the LLM is trained on what looks good!
This may look good:
computeNodeDistance(sourceNodesA, destNodesA, x, -1)
computeNodeDistance(sourceNodesA, destNodesB, x, 1)
Epic's game programmers are already incompetent to the point that Fortnite is basically falling apart at the seams and every update adds dozens of new bizarre bugs, I don't even want to imagine how much worse it would get if they started using AI to write code.
Probably 0%. What I heard, mostly people not performing (which is the real pandemic after COVID-19). If I'm not wrong as other companies, devs there are not "allowed" to use copilot and chatgpt fearing code plagiarism and ending up with some license violations..
Is that really how it works? It seems like the biggest gains are actually in the less skilled segment.
The biggest reason for layoffs has always been, and likely will always be, the "C-Suite class" controlling expectations on labor costs (salaries/wages) in an industry. That's why they often happen in waves, many companies at once, it's a pressure release valve to keep the labor market in "control" propagated by the largest shareholders, especially those born and bred into the C-Suites. Those shareholders don't actually care how productive a company is, productivity is increasingly orthogonal to profit. They care how profitable a company is, and companies stay the most profitable when (among other things) the labor market is most effectively depressed (and layoffs are a useful depression tactic) and laborers aren't comfortable enough to fight for better wages.
Like, for example: an end to pauses on payments for debts, expiring eviction bans/moratoriums, companies looking to dump housing and commercial buildings causing a collapse in prices that other financial instruments depend on, government shutdown (and financial consequences of just the threat) leading an enormous group of already marginal people to fall over the edge.
And that's just a few minutes of coming up with plausible things. Something has to give and, historically speaking, something will.
[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/a-100-billion-drag-on-u-s-...
Soon after they started hiking the rates there were some of the biggest bank failures in US history which amounted to nothing much because they basically hit snooze on it by effectively promising to back 100% of deposits well above the FDIC threshold. Supposedly this measure runs out in a year from when it was made.
I’m not going to try and predict what and when exactly is going to happen. If you like lines and extrapolation, you can go to the St Louis fed website and plot yield curve inversion and effective fed rate.
Housing prices will continue to be an indefinite bubble due to boomer economics.
Healthcare is a disaster in this country and will never be fixed because of Citizens United.
None of this is due to the economic downturn.
What is boomer economics?
Total nonsense. Businesses are closing.
If some divisions or individual employees in a company are not making meaningful impact on the bottom line and are not long-term strategic for future profits, then it makes sense to let them go.
Just because these are hugely profitable companies, doesn't mean you should be spending money on things that will not lead to you generating additional funds. That is like keeping real-estate rented but not filling it with people -- it is wasted resources, whether it is humans or real-estate.
These companies over-hired or were sloppy in terms of their spending and that has changed in the new environment.
Pretty cynical and unfair IMO. Meta layoffs were the first time the company did layoffs in its entire history. Layoffs are super unpopular with employees. It's not like they wanted to do it.
This argument is lazy. Like suddenly there's a huge wave of layoffs, and your explanation is "they could." That really offers no explanation for why it happened now vs. literally any other time.
Scaling quickly has risks and the current wave of layoffs is just a way to minimize risk. It is probably better this way than raising tons of cash until things are falling apart and you are forced into panic mode.
https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/metahuman
Pretty amazing. Although I don't know if I even need characters this real in my games. At some point it becomes too much like real life and kind of boring? I think I like the fantasy aspect of games too much and I like to escape.
https://medium.com/locodrome/unreal-filmmaking-building-a-st...
The game just needed a more likeable protagonist and a less crowded release window, but I'm sure the takeaway for EA execs is that it shouldn't have been a new IP...
Lumen is really nice as long as you never hope to have >60fps and don't want open worlds.
The architecture of it is just fundamentally not compatible with the majority of AAA games, especially open world or esports ones.
It's not that Epic are stupid it's that they're "optimising" in all directions and it sometimes causes issues. -- marketing advertises features that are not fit for the purpose they're being marketed for. Lumen is excellent for small games that aren't so CPU heavy or alternatively for non-realtime renders such as scene generation VFX.
Unreal itself is extremely bound to single-core CPU performance, so the idea of adding extra weight to the main render thread (which is basically the only thread) is unconscionable and was a deeply unwise decision.
I haven’t studied Unreal enough to say for sure, but I think those tools can be a boon if they enable a less technical developer to do things that normally took a lot more time.
That said, there are ways Songtradr could abuse their new position of trust. I hope they're smart enough not to do that, but I also hope that an archival project for free downloads on long-inactive Bandcamp accounts is underway...
Ko-fi is 25GB for free and 200GB for paid accounts, so most things will fit. I'll probably cross-post it to Patreon's new shop feature in the near future just to be safe.
edit: and confirmation
https://www.songtradr.com/blog/posts/songtradr-bandcamp-acqu...
Off the top of my head I can think of him saying the Valve Steamdeck is great: https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/141575567884990054...
And him saying that Valve not demanding crossplay is bad.
But Epic is one of the most dev-friendly companies in the world. And in my opinion they're constantly pushing in the right direction on things. Maybe not without prompting. But still.
* Online multiplayer must have crossplay
* Anti platform monopolists lawsuits
* Source available engine
* No lootboxes
* Over a hundred million dollars to Ukraine
* $250k to Godot for open source graphics
It's one of the few companies I'm actually rooting for.
The second one seems reasonable, factually accurate, and not a big deal.
I dislike the third argument regarding crypto because I think crypto is trash, but I do think Steam's (and many others) 30% cut of transactions is predatory vs. Epic's 12%. I also think it is predatory to require that games use the Steam Wallet for in app purchases meaning that steam gets a cut.
None of these are blaming Valve for being successful.
That's absolutely blame to me, but you're entitled to your own interpretation
That's not blaming Valve for being successful. That's calling them out for anti-consume practices.
What's controversial about that? What's he blaming them for?
Competition is good for consumers. If Steams leadership position is making it harder to have quality, viable alternative game stores that's bad for dev's and consumers long term.
No ragrats!
https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/4/22418782/epic-games-store-...
Steam is the big player with network effects, and anything more than "being better" by steam should be construed as anticompetitive.
Edit: to be clear, it's the largest fine the FTC has ever imposed, it is a historically large amount of $$$
Of course there are other likely causes of layoffs, like a downturn in industry forecast for particular types of games, their next product didn't test well (or can't charge what they wanted), etc.
This is not a reaction to an FTC case.
Although I mean if you're the executive overseeing the devision where users got overcharged perhaps your bonus did deserve to be ax'd.
For senior management? Usually not.
If you hit it out of the park, the Board rewards you at its discretion. It isn’t until a company is mature enough that even senior managers don’t meaningfully affect the whole that performance targets are worth drafting. (Executives on performance targets early are a red flag.)
> if you were the cause of the suit, then you definitely shouldn't be getting anything
Sunk cost. Question is going-forward risk and return potential.
Basically the only way people evaluate you is pn past performance. If you made a bad judgement call resulting in these sorts of penalties, you're likely out.
"For senior management?"
For executives.
If you’re likely to make them again and/or don’t bring enough counterbalancing value to the table. If it came out of thin air it’s performative to punish. There’s a good Lee Iacocca quote about this somewhere.
> For executives
Senior management and executives are the same thing in a general context. (Another is upper management.)
Nothing comes out of thin air, unless you're saying the fines are bull shit.
"Senior management and executives are the same thing in a general context."
Depends on how big the company is. At my company senior management is at least a level below the executive level.
I’m saying not everything can be anticipated, and everything is in balance. A Board that fires everyone proximate to a fine will seal its own fate.
> At my company senior management is at least a level below the executive level
That’s middle management rebranded. It’s fine! I’ve done this! But the same way someone with a director title isn’t a director of the company, someone who reports to anyone other than the CEO is not senior management.
Fortnite has generated a revenue of over $26 billion since its release in 2017.
How in the world could they possibly have spent more than they make? I mean, how is that remotely possible?
16% of its staff is 870. They had 5,437 staff?
That's $797,008 per employee per year. And that's just from Fortnite alone, ignoring all of their other sources of revenue. Imagine spending "way more" than that.
What am I missing?
If your expenses are growing faster than you revenue, you done goofed.
If we look at earning statements (can't cuz they're private), this was probably due to overhiring.
[0] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/1234193/epic-games-annua...
I’ve also read in a few places that hiring is picking up.
Lucidchart just had a layoff this week.
And Qualtrics is rumored to have one soon.
While I do believe AI (imho shorthand for LLMs and Diffusion models) has a lot of potential, it's main function has been to reignite irrational exuberance in the tech industry.
I work in this is space and I'm very curious how long the mania can hold out, and even more curious what the consequences will be for the people seriously working on AI when it dies down.
Layoff didn't stop because a correction had finally concluded, but because investors snorted another line of hype and were happy to throw their money around again and pretend everything is fine.
The come down from this, I suspect, will be pretty rough (but hey, if I'm wrong it's great for me).
You could look back after any market downturn leveled off and lament that it’s surely doing to happen again. And of course it will.
Epic actually shows its business model is doubtful.
If the wallet is feeling empty, stuff like Fortnite skins are luxuries that are pretty easy to cut back on.
Epic was actually implementing the Metaverse. But with that dead...
Article might say but can't tell because of the paywall.
Same but anecdotally I can say I know a ton of people who stopped playing Fortnite these last few seasons because Epic kept making it more and more annoying to play. So your theory might be on the money!
Why does it take ages to open? Why did downloading some games launch another launcher that downloaded the game again? Why did it sometimes not switch to idle when in the background and keep wasting CPU? Why does the UI sometimes just randomly not work? Why is every interaction with it so slow? Why does it get exponentially slower the more Unreal Engine assets you have? Why is that even in the same launcher? Why can't I do basic things like open game pages in a new tab? Does anyone at Epic actually use this thing?
Most importantly, why did they do the stupidest PR moves imaginable, by "stealing" games that were already announced for another platform?
This is basic stuff, it doesn't take 5 years to figure it out! They had a once in forever chance to kill the unnecessary 30% tax booth that is Steam and they blew it by shipping this terrible software.
Things have to get amazingly bad before such empires are dismantled and the product fixed, generally something existential for the company as a whole.
The Epic Store almost certainly could not be fixed without simply rebooting with a whole new team with the incentive structure setup to make it work.
I am reminded of a Steve Jobs quote: ""It turns out the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies, like IBM or Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful. So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers."
Incentives.
Apps with a better UX than EPIC GAMES:
* GoG
* Blender
* Godot
TWO OSS projects including a GAME ENGINE, and a game service that made their name on budget and retro titles..
Somebody at Epic should be massively embarrassed with that steamer.
Based on 3rd-party statistics they still have hundreds of millions of players, though.
9000 in 2023 ???.
I think few people will disagree that letting Valve have a de facto monopoly is a bad thing. But Epic's whole strategy around EGS seems built entirely around appealing to publishers and developers at the expense of making the platform desirable for users.
Their marquee feature is that they take a smaller cut of sales on their platform (12% vs Valve's 20-30%), but this savings never gets passed down to the customer. So from a user's perspective, this isn't a feature, it's a footnote with no real bearing on their decision making.
Where Valve has invested a lot of time and money into building out platform features that add value for the customer (Steam Play, Steam Input, Workshop, Big Picture Mode, a fairly reasonable refund system), Epic uses all their money to buy exclusivity deals. The platform itself is barebones. The client takes twice as long to load as Steam despite having 1/10th the feature set.
https://www.americanbar.org/groups/business_law/resources/bu....
That's straight up a line from Gabe Newell, owner of Steam: https://www.gamesradar.com/gabe-newell-epic-games-store/
The article is very brief, basically just an expansion of the headline.
I'm curious where the layoffs are occurring. Admin? Epic Games Store? Maybe now that UE5 is mostly baked they're reducing the size of the team? I'd be surprised if they were expecting to make significantly less money this year.