Epic CEO Admits There Will Be ‘Quality Degradation’; Unreal Engine for Non-Game Developers to Change Pricing

wccftech.com:

Epic Games founder, CEO, and primary stakeholder Tim Sweeney took the stage at this year's Unreal Fest, hosted this week in New Orleans, to provide more context and details on the recent mass layoffs that affected the company. In a video grabbed by Fortnite creator and shared on Twitter (X), Sweeney admitted that even if the engineering teams were barely affected, there might be a degradation of quality in some of the future work. He also revealed when exactly Epic became aware that it had significant financial problems.

I think we were the right size and I loved our original plans, but this is a survival moment that was necessary. One of the principles we decided on early on ten weeks ago, when we realized we were running into a financial problem that we had to solve quickly, is that we wouldn't spread the pain around equally. Rather, we went through and identified all the parts of our business and exactly what we absolutely needed in order to accomplish our mission. So, it affected different parts of the company in different ways. The Unreal Engine engineering team was only impacted by 3% of the layoffs. Many of the business sales and marketing teams suffered more than 30% of layoffs.

This is going to have implications for everything we do, and it's going to result in a degradation of quality in some of our work. I'm sorry for that. Right now, everybody in Epic is working to figure out how we're going to rebalance our priorities and retest the teams in new ways in order to serve all of your needs. We'll get through that.

Why did Epic even get into financial issues, given its substantial revenue from Fortnite? Sweeney candidly says that different parts of the company's business became 'disconnected' from their own