in a note<\/a> to employees on Tuesday.<\/p>\n“We’re spending significantly more than we’re \u200bmaking, and we have to make major cuts to \u200bkeep the company funded,” he said.<\/p>\n
Blockbuster titles such as Fortnite, a first-person shooter game, had proven resilient after the COVID-19 pandemic, \u200bholding up as a slowdown eroded demand beyond the biggest franchises.<\/p>\n
But \u2060engagement is now \u2060declining even for those, particularly live-service games \u200cthat rely on a constant flow of costly new content to retain players.<\/p>\n
“We’ve had challenges delivering consistent Fortnite magic,” Sweeney said, adding “market conditions today are the most extreme” since the early days of the company’s founding in 1991.<\/p>\n
“The layoffs aren’t related to AI,” Sweeney noted, amid industry fears that the technology could replace developers.<\/p>\n
Epic had earlier this month raised prices of \u200cFortnite’s in-game currency, citing higher costs to run the game. CBC News has reached out to the company for a statement.<\/p>\n
2nd major round of layoffs in 3 years<\/p>\n
The move marks Epic’s second major round of layoffs in three years. In September 2023, the company cut about 830 jobs, roughly 16 per cent of its workforce, \u200bto boost profitability.<\/p>\n
It was not immediately clear what percentage of staff would be impacted by Tuesday’s \u2060announcement.<\/p>\n
Last month, Fortnite topped U.S. monthly active players across PlayStation and Xbox, yet \u2060the average playtime fell sharply, according to Mat Piscatella, senior director at Circana.<\/p>\n
Other gaming \u2060companies \u2060have also cut jobs.<\/p>\n
In September, \u200bElectronic Arts laid off hundreds of workers and canceled a Titanfall game that was \u200bin development, according to \u2060media reports. Amazon’s broader job cuts late last year also affected its gaming division.<\/p>\n
Rising memory chip prices have added to the industry’s difficulties, as surging demand from AI data centres absorbs supply, pushing up semiconductor costs and forcing console makers to raise \u2060prices. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Listen to this article Estimated 3 minutes The audio version of this article is generated by AI-based technology.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":558425,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[49,48,61],"class_list":{"0":"post-558424","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558424","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=558424"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558424\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/558425"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=558424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=558424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=558424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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