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You can find many thoughts around Epic Games recently laying off 1,000 people strewn across the internet, and someone who hasn't minced their words is Chet Faliszek, a former writer at Valve. In an impassioned video, he tears through CEO Tim Sweeney and Epic itself, calling out the scale of the cutbacks and pondering about morale at the corporation.
"Can someone explain this to me, why anybody who works at Epic should work hard?" Faliszek says (spotted by PC Gamer). "'Cause Epic just laid off 1,000 people. And it's gonna shut down Fortnite Rocket Racing, Ballistic, and Festival Battle stage, whatever that is. Who knows?"
It's a fair response. Epic's one of the biggest video game companies in the world. Fortnite is a cultural juggernaut. If, despite all of that, people's jobs are still at risk, what motivation is there to keep pushing?
Faliszek, who was involved in such games as Portal and its sequel, Team Fortress 2, the Half-Life 2 episodes, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, continues. "It's not like they're a publicly traded company," he states. "It's not like there's some need to hit the stock market thing. This is Tim Sweeney. This is Tim. A thousand people is more than [the amount] who work at Valve."
That's a pretty damning comparison, especially as Valve operates Steam, which Faliszek then brings up, albeit indirectly. "Tim has gone from making games to making one game," he says. "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."
He brings up that generally while at work, he's "gonna work my ass off," but then wonders if he'd have that kind of motivation at Epic, or any other major publisher right now. "Would I do that at Epic if they're gonna treat me like that and just have layoffs like that and just act the same way [as EA]?" he ponders. "Like, hey, 'great job, made Battlefield 6, we dethroned Call of Duty: here's a pink slip.'"
Staying on Valve, he points out a considerable amount of devs have been there for years, making great money, and he himself benefited from excellent financial benefits, implying that Epic is doing the opposite when it comes to retaining talent. "I could retire, I worked my ass off at Valve, and I could retire today," he explains. "I made more money than I'll ever make. And the money I made is dwarfed by the people who were there longer than me or before me."
The difference here is, "Valve understood that," Faliszek points out. "That's how you get this thing where people cared, people worked hard, people stayed because they felt they were improving," he continues. "What they were building on was something that they had agency over and owned."
The whole recording is seven-and-a-half minutes long, and it goes around and around like this. Knowing Sweeney, we might get a reply, since he's particularly susceptible to being trolled by Valve. We'll keep our eyes peeled.
