Luke

In memory of my grandmother. twitlonger.com/show/n_1sr72vq youtu.be/LXd6H-jshlg

A lot of people are focusing on the negatives of the EPIC Games layoffs. Am I sad that people I used to work with have lost their jobs? Yes. It’s gut wrenching. Is Fortnite cooked? NO When I first started working on the game in 2017 EPIC had a quarter of what they currently have if not less of a workforce. This is coming from someone who lost their opportunity working with Epic TWICE. TS sucks nuts. But life is more than a job. You can still do EPIC stuff, with less people.

@evankinney One thing I wanted to do was document the development of Fortnite. It’s hard to think back to all of the things you did when it’s been years. If you ever want to talk about Fortnite history let me know, while it’s still top of mind.

finally got the motivation to try and summarize all my work in some bullet points so i could get my name on the AWESOME PEOPLE LIST (of all of us who were laid off) i’m number 150! docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d…

@MatRopert @JuanRocamonde you can be replaced by a company at any time for any number of reasons. Just because you’re “full time” doesn’t mean you have job security.

@JuanRocamonde That's not what I said. I said that performance wasn't a factor in whether or not you could be laid off. People usually don't stay very motivated when they're told their continued employment is up to chance.

Team lead and union rep here. Telling your employees your layoffs aren't based on performance is an _amazing_ way to motivate your remaining workers to take things extremely chill because it literally does not matter how they perform.

@synaesthesiajp haha imagine at the end of your workday you’re signed out of everything while you’re still working and then you have to put the pieces together. 5 minutes later you’re contacted by your contracting company letting you know you no longer have a job. That was my experience

You know what's really awesome about getting laid off? I can't change the email to my epic games store account since I can't access it anymore. Kinda an ironic problem to have, huh? Hopefully account recovery process is smooth.

@nashtyboy @LHibAlt I did, but maybe I’m just dumb and I love Fortnite haha.

@LHibAlt Who would want to go back after getting kicked to the curb like that?

Is it possible for Epic to turn back and re-hire the staff or not ?

of course haha! That’s what happened with me on Fortnite. A lot of people that work in the gaming industry are autistic/ on the spectrum, and ADHD. So sometimes personality mismatches on teams. As well I’ve connected with Tim before, he cares deeply about the people that work for him.

Unfortunately one thing I observed while working on Fortnite with Epic Games was the paredo principle in action. 80% of the outcomes come from 20% of the inputs. Meaning there are a small portion of people that actually make 80% of the results happen in companies. Not referencing any specific people from this cull that just happened at EPIC but there are people who are “blackboxes” in a workplace. A blackbox is someone who can do a job that no one else can do because they know the system so well, that when they leave it’s like the system they run is held together by chewing gum and duct tape running a quantum computer and only they and a few others know how to use it. (Meaning if someone else was hired to do their job it’d be nearly impossible to do it the same) When you get rid of those people, their inputs are now gone. Meaning all the information they know, the processes/efficency that only they can do, their expertise is gone. Even if they document what they know there’s still a ramp up time to train new people, and some cannot be replaced. The only explanation to get rid of a blackbox in a workplace is they are not a culture fit anymore/ they don’t play nice with others/ or they use their status and knowledge as leverage against the company to do whatever they want “I can post whatever I want on social media because I’m indespinsible”. The only other reason to get rid of a blackbox is that the owner or their management got to know them so well that professionally they think it’d be better for their growth to go elsewhere. Thus changing how their business runs so other non top 20% performers will then step up, to fill in the gaps.

Maybe people now see the struggle as a developer who works on Fortnite. You wake up every day, go to work.. are asked to pour your heart and soul into a product every day for a measly paycheck. Then you open social media and streamers and UGC creators are making hundreds of thousands while you can barely afford a home.

@tommy @Justin_Neagle Maybe now people understand the struggle of people who make the game itself, but see content creators and streamers making thousands to millions?

laying off 1000 employees while paying hundreds of millions to roblox clones and slop PVP games is stupid.

@FNBRunderground to put a short excerpt of @evankinney in this post actually does him a disservice, to the work and contribution he actually made to the game.

Opinion - Fortnite's heart died today ✏️ "I’ll miss [working on] Fortnite Battle Royale," one Epic employee said after being laid off. It’s estimated that over 1,000 workers - roughly a quarter of Epic Games’ workforce - were laid off today. In the coming days, there will be many questions about Fortnite’s future. A future that will almost certainly look different without so many of the people who helped build it. Just to name a few: - Christopher Pope, a Battle Royale Design Director, said they’ll “miss Fortnite Battle Royale, but I’ll miss you all most of all.” In the replies, another employee said Pope had been making plans for the future of BR “mere moments” before being laid off. - Evan Kinney, the principal engineer behind Fortnite’s earliest live events, Replay Mode, and systems like the Rivalry feature. - Paige Dugre, art producer for Chapter 6 Season 3, the Simpsons mini-season, Chapter 7 Season 2, and collaborations like KPop Demon Hunters. Earlier this month, Jonah Kettman, a QA engineer on Fortnite Festival, defended Epic’s decision to raise V-Bucks prices, noting that “the quickest way to lower expenses is layoffs.” Kettman was laid off today—less than a week after paying a $4,000 vet bill for their cat. - Devin Connors, a community manager at Psyonix, widely respected within the Rocket League community. - Nik Blahunka, a lead writer behind many of Fortnite’s defining stories since 2017. - Vitaliy Naymushin, character art director who helped shape icons like Jonesy, Ramirez, Penny, and Kyle. Fortnite is the people behind it. And today, many of those people are gone.

@evankinney there is a silver lining in every dark cloud @evankinney

i have done so much for this company and our games so many late nights so many weekends so many live events, and competitive events, and new features, and new seasons solid performance reviews every time with multiple people mentioning how critical i am and what an impact i make across multiple teams just to be thrown out i don’t get it.

guess who got laid off today! 🫠 i am genuinely so confused and bewildered like, i spent the past week debugging the rivalry system while recovering from pneumonia and just in the past few days i’ve had multiple directors tell me how much they appreciate everything i do

@evankinney I’m sorry to hear that Evan. You’re a brilliant person. I know how you feel pouring yourself into something every day. While I was there it was nice working with you.

My thoughts on Layoffs at EPIC Regardless of your thoughts in the comment section please keep it respectful to Tim. He has to make stressful decisions that keep the products and services you love still operable. There’s hope for those that are gone, your work is not your identity. From someone who experienced this twice working with EPIC.

@TimSweeneyEpic My thoughts on Layoffs at EPIC Regardless of your thoughts in the comment section please keep it respectful to Tim. He has to make stressful decisions that keep the products and services you love still operable. There’s hope for those that are gone, your work is not your identity. From someone who experienced this twice working with EPIC.

@elonmusk hey Elon, feature requests for Grok after using it as my main and only AI platform now. 1. When asking Grok to repeat something through audio, could you please not have the audio bar collapse so you can go back through and scrub through the audio? Makes for learning language easier for certain portions of the fed back response Grok gives. 2. Can Grok please stop removing my text that I have typed when swiping up to reference another source from my phone. Please

@ran_the_numbers @aakashgupta Developing more land doesn’t solve housing insecurity. Having empty homes that currently aren’t rented out is an issue. Instead of taking away land from wildlife we need to develop solutions that allow us to work with what’s already available. Not squander resources.

@aakashgupta The government owns a massive amount of land in Wyoming, which artificially drives the price of housing to the moon. We need *more* land to build on, not less. Unless you hate poor people, of course

I worked at Epic Games for two years. This is real, and the strategy behind it is smarter than most people realize. Tim Sweeney has spent nearly two decades buying North Carolina forest land. 50,000+ acres across 15 counties. He’s now one of the largest private landowners in the state. The purchases started in 2008, right after the real estate collapse wiped out developers who had been planning golf resorts and luxury communities on biodiverse wilderness. Sweeney paid $15 million for Box Creek Wilderness, a 7,000-acre stretch in the Blue Ridge foothills containing 130+ rare and threatened species. Developers had owned 5,000 of those acres before the crash. He bought them for conservation prices when nobody else was bidding. He runs the acquisitions through an LLC called “130 of Chatham.” He buys the land, holds it for years, then either donates it to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, sells it at a discount to state parks, or hands it to land trusts. In 2021, he donated 7,500 acres in the Roan Highlands to the Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy. Largest private land donation in North Carolina history. The part people miss: he told the News & Observer that since 2021, land got too expensive to keep buying. So he shifted focus to converting his existing 50,000 acres into permanent conservation status. He’s locking the land into legal structures that make development impossible regardless of who owns it in the future. A billionaire worth roughly $6 billion is spending tens of millions acquiring wilderness specifically during economic downturns, then giving it away or placing it under permanent legal protection. The land will outlast him, Epic Games, and Fortnite. That’s the part that separates Sweeney from billionaires who write checks to get their name on a building. The building depreciates. The forest compounds.

@twxt110590 @aakashgupta Plot twist, aakash actually worked at Epic and he’s a cool guy. He branched off after he left and does his own thing now. Glad to see he’s still succeeding in what he does.

@aakashgupta We have ex Epic workers posting ai slop for twitter revenue. It might actually be over