Epic Games lays off 800 employees and announces financial restructuring

summary:Epic Games, known for its hit game Fortnite and the Unreal Engine, shocked the market by laying off more than 800 employees in a drastic financial restructuring. Tim Sweeney, the company’s CEO, broke his silence and explained the reasons behind this sudden decision. According to Sweeney, the financial difficulties that led to this action were only seen about ten weeks ago. He revealed that the issue came to his desk in July, and the company realized it needed to act quickly to avoid financial collapse. “We realized that we are facing a financial problem that needs to be solved immediately. This is really a process of reconciling our business model with the reality that will eventually come to all companies. We got away from that for a while with Fortnite and got it back – but we got to a scale of almost 4,000 people working as we got less and less money. And we’re desperate now that we have to act differently to make sure we don’t go back to these types of conditions,” Sweeney said. The CEO also admitted that Epic Games was at fault for overspending. “We’ve spent more money than we’ve made, investing in the next step of the company and the growing ecosystem inspired by Metaverse for Fortnite creators. I’m very optimistic that I think we can make this whole transition without layoffs, but in retrospect I wasn’t realistic enough,” Sweeney admitted.