Prolific former Valve writer, Chet Faliszek, has hit out at Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney, asking why anyone at Epic “should work hard” when staff have no agency and “the recent 1,000 job cuts didn’t come because of shareholder pressure”.
ICYMI, earlier this week Fortnite maker Epic Games announced it was cutting over 1,000 jobs as its flagship battle royale game experienced a “downturn” in engagement. One developer called it “a brutal day” that left them “absolutely devastated”.
Now, in response to the cuts, Faliszek said: “It’s not like they’re a publicly traded company. It’s not like there’s some need to hit the stock market thing. This is Tim Sweeney. This is Tim,” (thanks, PC Gamer).
“Can someone explain this to me? Why anybody who works at Epic should work hard? ‘Cos 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?” he said.
“But it’s not like they’re a publicly traded company. 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 [inaudible] who work at Valve.
“And so Tim has gone from making games to making one game, 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. You make just one game.”
Faliszek said that, unlike other companies like Epic and EA, which he also singled out, when he worked at Valve, he had agency and ownership over his work.
“I don’t get why you remove that agency from people,” he added. “Like, why would you care? Why would you think that your hard work is going to be rewarded? I worked my ass off at Valve, and I cared about the things I made, and I cared about the people I worked with so much.
“If I’m at work, then I’m gonna work my ass off […] Would I do that at Epic if they’re gonna treat me like that and just have layoffs like that and just… EA, same way. Like, ‘hey, great job, made Battlefield 6, we dethroned Call of Duty – here’s a pink slip’. And then they’re gonna say western developers are the problem, ‘cos they’re lazy or something, when you just… just cut them off at the knees, man.”
Faliszek says that the reason Valve still employs so many of the same developers that worked on Half-Life is not just because “they were all rewarded handsomely” – although it seems that they were: “To be clear, I could retire, I worked my ass off at Valve, and I could retire today. I made more money than I’ll ever make,” Faliszek added – but because Valve knew that people needed to have agency.
“Valve understood that. That’s how you get this thing where people care, people worked hard, people stayed because they felt they were improving what they were building on, that they had agency over and owned. Like, even now, I’m excited when I see the Valve announcement about the VR stuff and everything, that makes me happy.
“Would you be that way about Epic now? Everybody I know at Epic that was like ‘The Epic Guy’ that had been there forever is gone. I mean, maybe there’s still some people there besides Tim, but the people that I liked and trusted? They’re gone. How do you build on that? I mean, Tim, you’re the one who decided to buy Bandcamp. I get what you’re trying to do, but come on, man. You raise V-buck prices to make ends meet, and now you’re gonna lay off a thousand people and wonder why the industry’s in the place it is?
“I sure as hell wouldn’t go work at a place that I didn’t think respected me and wouldn’t reward that.”
