Fortnite creator Epic Games announced layoffs of over 1000 employees Tuesday, citing the usual litany of game development headwinds, global economics, and rising costs–as well as lessened Fortnite engagement and the results of its five-plus year battle to bring the game back to mobile.
“I’m sorry we’re here again,” a message sent to Epic employees from CEO Tim Sweeney reads. “The downturn in Fortnite engagement that started in 2025 means we're spending significantly more than we're making, and we have to make major cuts to keep the company funded.” In addition to layoffs, the company will undertake “over $500 million of identified cost savings in contracting, marketing,” and will be “closing some open roles.”
Sweeney notes challenges like lowered games and console spending, as well as “games competing for time against other increasingly-engaging forms of entertainment.” The latter comes on the heels of a presentation by Matthew Ball suggesting that games are competing for attention against sports betting, iGaming, prediction markets, and social media.
At the same time, a Newzoo presentation during this year’s GDC claimed that of the 67% of PC gamers playing games older than six years (rather than new releases), 5.4% of them were playing Fortnite– meaning that while Epic cites a “downturn in Fortnite engagement” that is definitely true from its heyday, it still makes up a not-insignificant portion of players’ time overall. To that end, Sweeney notes the need to “build awesome Fortnite experiences with fresh seasonal content, gameplay, story, and live events” moving forward, despite the company now having less people to do so.
Sweeney writes that
Despite Fortnite remaining one of the most successful games in the world, we’ve had challenges delivering consistent Fortnite magic with every season; we're only in the early stages of returning to mobile and optimizing Fortnite for the world's billions of smartphones; and in being the industry's vanguard we have taken a lot of bullets in a battle which is only in the early days of paying off for ourselves and all developers.
This is a reference to the protracted legal battle and populist crusade Epic waged against Apple and Google, both of which began when Epic introduced its own payment system for the game on mobile in 2020. Fortnite returned to the Google Play store just last week, which required, among other things, Sweeney not to dunk on Google online anymore. According to investing site The Motley Fool, 116 million players were playing Fortnite on iOS before it was removed from the Apple store in 2020, with over 20% of total Fortnite players playing exclusively on iOS. Epic surely spent a significant amount of money on the ensuing court battles, and surely lost a significant amount of players and their money during the game’s absence from mobile, which will certainly be costly to rebuild–again, with less people to now do so.
“Since it's a thing now, I should note that the layoffs aren't related to AI,” Sweeney, an avowed AI booster, writes.
Epic has leapt energetically into AI in game development, and Sweeney has said that “AI will be involved in nearly all future production” of games broadly. While these aren’t strictly reasons not to take him at his word here, it’s hard not to read “since it’s a thing now” as a foot-dragging bit of crassness in light of how many game developers are struggling to protect their jobs against the false promises of AI and company leadership’s hunger to cram it into every possible crevice of game development, technology, and hardware before the bubble bursts. Fortnite faced scrutiny for suspected AI use during its 7th season in December, and in May 2025 for using AI to voice an in-game Darth Vader that predictably started spewing hate speech.
Sweeney writes that Epic has faced challenges before, citing the shift to 3D games in the 90s, building console games in the early 2000s, and moving to online games in 2012. “Each time, we rebuilt our foundations and earned a renewed leadership position,” he writes. He doesn’t list among those challenges Epic’s previous mass layoffs of over 800 people in 2023, either not to draw attention to it or because upending hundreds of people’s lives doesn’t make the cut of the company’s grand narrative of overcoming the odds.
Laid-off workers will receive “at least four months of base pay” and extended health care coverage, as well as accelerated stock vesting. Epic will have a company meeting on Thursday to discuss what’s next; Sweeney writes in his message that these future plans include “kicking off the next generation of Epic with huge launch plans towards the end of the year.”
Several Fortnite modes will also be going offline during the coming year. These modes include Rocket Racing, Ballistic, and the Festival Battle Stage.
Today’s layoffs come barely two weeks after Epic raised the price of Fortnite V-bucks to “help pay the bills.” It also comes two years after Disney invested $1.5 billion in Epic to bring Disney characters and properties into Epic’s games, and a few months after Epic enabled in-game transactions on Fortnite creator islands, for which creators are earning 100% of the V-bucks value until January 2027, after which they’ll earn 50%. It also comes after the company announced that Save The World, its initial paid game, will go free-to-play on April 16.
During the 2023 layoffs, Sweeney closed with the goal to “get to the other side of profitability and become a leading metaverse company.” That goal seemingly not met, today he cited “the journey to build an increasingly open and vibrant future of entertainment together.” While it’s obvious the Fortnite money-printing machine is no longer printing the kind of money it used to, it’s less clear than ever what precisely the company aims to replace it with, using murkier goals and 1000 less people to get there.
