> pulling a Valve

> Video games are the exact opposite of Infinite Growth Forever. People get bored and move on.

To me, Epic Games were clearly trying to "pull a Valve" and capture the platform magic that allows Valve and other platforms like Roblox to be sustainably profitable. Obviously they have their own game store, but they also have a Fortnite Creative / UEFN (Unreal Editor for Fortnite) platform where people can create minigames inside Fortnite that work similarly to Roblox.

They even had the right idea for a while - refusing in-app transactions in their Fortnite Creative platform to encourage actually fun games rather than greedy games that prey on players. Unfortunately they had to walk back that system recently, which I now assume to be for the same financial reason as this new layoff.

I think their idea didn't work for two reasons. First, they locked down the UEFN platform too hard, leaving not a lot of options for developers to modify core gameplay features like movement and player controller. Devs like me who wanted more control over the player character and game mechanics were really severely restricted - if it was intentional, it was a bad call, and if it was unintentional then it shows that UEFN was too half-baked technically when they launched it. Second, Fortnite already had the reputation of being "just that Battle Royale game", so people didn't innovate too far beyond the game's base gameplay, rather than Roblox which was more like a true game engine / platform where every genre was possible. This kind of doomed their plan to compete head-to-head with Roblox from the start.

> They would have been better off building a war chest and pulling a Valve (though I'm sure they'd hate hearing it that way)

Isn't that exactly what they were trying to do with the Epic Game Store?

Steam is the thing that has made Valve successful. They were great as a game company, but as you said, the games don't last. Steam does, and I don't think Valve would be that successful in a business sense without it.

> Epic has many stable and valuable businesses

I don't think their approach is getting to stable, valuable businesses and keeping them that way. Their company name is Epic, not Mediocre BlueChipGameCo. I think their approach has been to make big investments into things, almost like Amazon's earlier approach where they would re-invest everything into the business and that might be where Epic now has to react to the market slowing for them and pull back.

I have to imagine AI is having an impact but not in the way people jump to about them using AI. How many people out there have ideas for games and can't execute them because they don't know the tech? How many people in the software industry were drawn to computing because of gaming?

If they built AI into Unreal Engine so that someone could approach it from a Game Producer/Designer role and not have to get deep into C++ programming or shaders and art assets, and produce games, games that go to the Epic Game Store and they take a cut? That would move the market in a way that would be more fitting for their company name.

I broadly agree, though it does seem like Minecraft has some plot armor here. I think people are still buying and playing Minecraft a lot. I like Minecraft, I play it occasionally, but I guess it's a game that has much more staying power than average.

I though my grievances with Epic are primarily because we never got Jazz Jackrabbit 3.

At least they're doing severance, health insurance, etc. Nowadays if I got laid off at a company I'd expect to just find that my key didn't work and a "check's in the mail" letter to the wrong address.

Pool the money then make the dream game. Announce Unreal Engine 6 with Jazz the Jackrabbit 3!

Aren't they trying to do a Valve with their store?

They did try to pull a Valve and use their successful game to fund a game store that prints money.

It’s a reasonable take, but I do think there is a wrinkle: Tim is an AI proponent, but also understands the current politics of it. Personally, I doubt that AI has nothing to do with this: Tim just knows not to admit it.

Re Tim the man: I have no opinion on him, but I follow gaming news closely and know that he is polarising. However, I saw this recently in PC Gamer and thought it was admirable: https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/epic-ceo-and-billion...

You see this trap in tech companies as well as game studios. I call it "acting like Google before you're Google". And in fact virtually nobody becomes Google.

Google has been a money printing machine for 20+ years almost unparalleled in human history. That's allowed Google to write bespoke software for everything, which has been useful because almost nobody has Google's problems. It's also allowed Google to contribute a bunch to open source and engage in vanity projects. They can afford it.

Then you see the likes of Twitter a decade or more ago who dedicated possibly hundreds of engineers to make Cassandra work. That's doing Google shit. But they aren't Google. And eventually those chickens come home to roost.

Games are like any content business where the owners and leadership are trying to create a formula that can be repeated infinitely. Content business actually hate the creative people who make their content because creativity doesn't scale. This is why movie studios churn out sequels and superhero movies. It's a formula.

Games eventually fall out of favor as genres get stale and new genres get created. Minecraft is an almost unique exception to this. There's a reason it sold for ~$2 billion. It's still popular. It's crazy. But that kind of example is so incredibly rare you should assume it's never going to happen.

The hubris at Epic was that they could challenge the Apple and Google app store monopolies. They were wrong. And they wasted an extraordinary amount of time, money and opportunity chasing that. That was a strategic mistake, even though I agree with their philosophical position.

I'm reminded of id software. John Carmack was legendary for years. Wolfenstein was groundbreaking. So was Doom then Quake. But eventually (IMHO) id games ceased to be games but because tech demos to sell engine licenses before ultimately being acquired and swallowed.

I feel like Epic is the same with the Unreal Engine. Fortnite is a success while it's popular and people buy cosmetics but when that popularity wanes, they have a huge revenue problem.