Epic Games’ recent to lay offs of over 1,000 employees has been decried by gamers and industry professionals alike, most prominently by Chet Faliszek, former Valve writer best known for his work on the Portal, Half-Life, and Left 4 Dead series. Faliszek’s comments, originally made on TikTok, have spread across the web like wildfire. Not only are they a fiery critique of Epic Games and its CEO, Tim Sweeney, they’re also a strong condemnation of the wider churn in the gaming industry, which seems to mass fire its employees whether games prove successful or not.
“I don’t get why you remove that agency from people.” Chet Faliszek continued emphatically, “Like, why would you care? Why would you think your hard work is going to be rewarded? I worked my ass off at Valve, and I cared about the things I made, and I cared about the people I worked with so much. […] Would I do that at Epic if they’re gonna treat me like that? […] EA, same way. Like, ‘hey, great job, made Battlefield 6, we dethroned Call of Duty, here’s a pink slip. […] Maybe there’s still some people there besides Tim, but the people that I liked and trusted? They’re gone. How do you build on that? I mean, Tim, you’re the one who decided to buy Bandcamp. I get what you’re trying to do, but come on, man. You raise V-buck prices to make ends meet, and now you’re gonna lay off a thousand people and wonder why the industry’s in the place it is?”
It’s hard not to see where Faliszek is coming from. Epic Games has spent billions of dollars pursuing legal battles and making acquisitions instead of accepting the terms of the platforms it wants to distribute Fortnite on, and had already laid off nearly 900 employees in September 2023. Tim Sweeney acts as if his hands are tied by the whims of the market while making questionable decisions with the billions of dollars Fortnite has made him and his company.
It’s not just Epic Games or Tim Sweeney, either. Microsoft’s mass consolidation of gaming development studios through the Xbox merger with Activision-Blizzard also resulted in multiple layoffs and studio closures, including the controversial closure of Tango Gameworks, which had produced the critically acclaimed Hi-Fi Rush. Which begs the questions: Why buy game studios and then stop makign games? Why mass-fire employees after successful game releases, like Sony PlayStation and Electronic Arts often do?
By Sweeney’s own admission, Fortnite hadn’t cratered, but had seen “a downturn in engagement”. The game is still massively successful by any reasonable metric, and the people who worked hardest on it seem to be getting fired because profits are being directed elsewhere.
Chet really said it best in his initial TikTok post: “Tim has gone from making games to making one game, spending all his time doing that and trying to make as much money as possible. And I guess, well, hey, Tim: Gabe’s better at that than you. I don’t know what to tell you, man, because you stopped caring about making things.”