> 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.
> 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.
Valve have headcount of under 400 people. Obviously they have contractors working creating assets for CS / Data / etc, but company itself is swift and agile.
Epic was around 1000 people at Fortnite release then grown to over 4000.
Yeah, UEFN when you dig past the surface is rough. I think it's a mix of both your reasons. UEFN seems to be a spinoff of their Fortnite Creator workshop while making use of their new Verse scripting. If this was originally only meant to mod Fortnite, I can see why it's so half baked as a Roblox competitor. You really are pulling teeth if you want to make anything other than "Fortnite but X".
> 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.