Epic Games is eliminating 16% of its workforce and selling Bandcamp

2023-09-28 21:02:45

Epic Games on Thursday said it’s laying off 16% of its workforce, selling its music platform Bandcamp and spinning off most of its SuperAwesome services.

In a memo Epic shared on its website, CEO Tim Sweeney said about two-thirds of the roughly 830 job cuts will be “outside of core development,” so the company is reducing costs without interrupting major plans. He said Epic, which develops and publishes video games such as Fortnite, had been working to cut spending on things including marketing and events, but “concluded that layoffs are the only way” to reach financial stability.

The rest of the story...
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/28/epic-games-is-eliminating-16percent-of-its-workforce-and-selling-bandcamp.html

Re: Epic Games is eliminating 16% of its workforce and selling Bandcamp

Reply #1 – 2023-09-28 22:02:22

They bought Bandcamp only a year and a half ago. Might be that they have done what they wanted to it already, might be that since it was (allegedly intended to be) operated pretty much stand-alone it is easier to spin off when they find out they are short on cash ...
... might be that right now they found a buyer? According to the CNBC story:

Sweeney also announced Epic will sell its music platform Bandcamp, which it acquired last year, to Songtradr, a music licensing platform.
Songtradr said in a separate post that it “will continue to operate Bandcamp as a marketplace and music community with an artist-first revenue share.”

The new owner: https://themusicnetwork.com/aussie-owned-songtradr-acquires-london-based-big-sync-music/

Re: Epic Games is eliminating 16% of its workforce and selling Bandcamp

Reply #2 – 2023-09-29 15:07:54

Epic tried to leverage the billions they made off fortnite to penetrate the videogame store market to compete with Valve's Steam. The Fortnite cash cow is diminishing however they still have unreal engine which is one of the big engines the other main one being unity, unity seems to be winning that fight. However now unity is pushing heavier monetisation which will have people migrate to unreal/godot/sdl over time, to what degree depends on unity but the result of that will be years off.

All this to say I'm not surprised that there's layoffs, the Epic game store is still crap years later and I don't think there's been much of any penetration that they didn't directly pay for, given a choice the vast majority will choose steam every time. Epic won't go under but their ambition has to be dialled back to reality, things like bandcamp are the first things to jettison.