BELLEVUE, Wash. — Epic Games, the game studio behind Fortnite Battle Royale, will lay off employees in Bellevue as part of its nationwide plan to cut its workforce.
In a Sept. 28 letter to employees, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney said the company will be laying off around 16% of its workforce, around 830 employees.
According to a filing with the Washington state Employment Security Department, Epic Games will lay off 39 employees in the state. The Bellevue location reportedly employed 80 people as of 2020.
Sweeney said the company has “been spending way more money than we earn” and cited a change to core revenue sources from multiplayer juggernaut Fortnite as a cause for the layoffs.
“While Fortnite is starting to grow again, the growth is driven primarily by creator content with significant revenue sharing, said Sweeney. “Success with the creator ecosystem is a great achievement, but it means a major structural change to our economics.”
He said the company had been working on cost-cutting efforts including net zero hiring and reducing spending on marketing and events but “still ended up far short of financial sustainability.”
Two-thirds of the roles being cut were in teams outside of core game development, according to the statement, and are not expected to impact game development. According to the Epic Games website, the company is still hiring for five roles in Bellevue.
“We concluded that layoffs are the only way, and that doing them now and on this scale will stabilize our finances,” said Sweeney. “Saying goodbye to people who have helped build Epic is a terrible experience for all.”
Epic Games first opened a studio in western Washington in 2012 to help develop Unreal Engine 4, a licensed toolset that game developers use to make games. In 2021, it acquired Kirkland-based software developer RAD Game Tools.
According to an Entertainment Software Association study, the video game industry had a $11.6 billion economic impact in Washington state in 2019, the second largest in the nation.
