The End of Fortnite?

Hey guys, so this is going to be a little bit of a different video than I usually do. We unfortunately got some really sad news from Epic Games and it's got people asking is this the beginning of the end for Fortnite? So if you didn't hear about it, Epic Games on March 25th laid off over a thousand employees, which is an absolutely surreal number to even say. That's a crazy amount of people that were affected and some of those employees included

people that were there since the beginning of Fortnite. These are people that were in key roles that contributed to the spirit of what Fortnite is. I can't go through the entire list, but there's a Google Doc that I'm going to link in the description below. It was created by Lee Graham, who was one of the people affected by the layoffs. Now, Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Epic Games, he said that this was not a performance-based

layoff. and I know that Epic Games has a real high standard for people they hire. So all of these people are highly skilled. So on that note, if anyone's looking to hire, I definitely recommend checking out that list. Now I'm gonna read the whole letter that they sent out and talk about the game modes that they're removing from the game.

I wanted to bring up three people that really took me by surprise because they've been with Fortnite for so long and they had some key pivotal roles. So first up, I want to bring up John Dravek. He's a great guy. I've worked with him before. He's always at the Fortnite events and was such a pleasure to talk to always. He really cared about his job and he was the creator marketing director at Epic Games. So he put out this tweet where he says,

after almost eight years, my time at Epic Games has come to an unexpected end. It's so hard to put into words what an incredible journey it has been, but I'll try it in this. And to top things off with how sad this is, he knows Bald knowledge because he's a Fortnite veteran and uses the image from the end event. He said, Epic is a place unlike any other where you get to work with amazing colleagues, you know who you are, on Marvel one week, move on to a launch of Lego game the next, and then focus on The Simpsons and then wrap up with a movie premiere, all while collaborating

with an insanely passionate, kind, and inspiring creator community. He goes on to say that he helped launch Paragon, Save the World, and VR. And I mean, if you're launching Save the World, you've been there since the beginning. He launched the Supported Creator Program, a program that has helped thousands of creators and has been replicated numerous times across the industry. Created a cosmetic grants program, giving creators early access to dozens of IP collabs each year. So essentially, that's like whenever I tell you guys like, oh, I just got a Lola bunny and Daffy Duck early Like, you know, he's the one that set that up

He says I could go on but ultimately what made all the blood sweat and tears and a broken finger I don't know how that happened. You're gonna have to tell me John worth It was the genuine incitement and passion I saw each time I had the't have achieved half of the things I accomplished." And then he finishes off by saying, I don't fully know what the future has in store for me but I'm excited for my next

chapter either way. Love you all and don't forget to thank the bus driver. I'm still shocked because I knew John I've the case for a ton of the people that were let go But I knew John personally so I could tell you that from my experience next up We have Evan Kinney and he's a principal engineer at Epic Games Which means he's like one of the top dogs there for engineering and he quote retweeted the epics official statement of the layoffs And he said guess who got laid off today? I am generally so confused and bewildered like I spent the past week debugging the rivalry system while recovering from pneumonia. So he was working on these core systems that we're playing with right now.

And just in the past few days, I've had multiple directors tell me how much they appreciate everything I do. I've 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.

Like that is super impactful. And a lot of people in the community knew this. I mean, this tweet from him has over 10 million views. I'm just shocked. Like how do you even find somebody to take over the role that all these a thousand people were occupying?

There's gotta be holes, there's gotta be gaps, and there's gotta be some of the magic that just went away that day. And the last one I'm gonna show you before I get into the actual article and what Epic Games said about the layoffs,

here we have a tweet from Charlie Intel. It says, the character artist at Epic Games that created the iconic Jonesy in Fortnite was laid off today. So yeah, the Jonesy character that was done by Vitaly Nemushin. He said well, this is weird after 11 years I find that I no longer work at Epic It's been a wild ride lots of ups and downs

Seeing Fortnite from pre-launch to today like wow and being a part of making that happen was an experience of a lifetime Seeing lots of similar posts out there and I hope that everyone impacted by the layoffs lands on their feet Best of luck to all folks remaining at Epic. I am now open to work. That's just insane, especially that Jonesy is like the face of the entire game. So iconic. And you let that guy go. It's it's mind blowing.

OK, we're going to go through this note that Tim Sweeney sent to Epic employees on March 24th. He said, Today, we're laying off over a thousand Epic employees. I'm sorry we're here again." Now this is a reference to back in September of 2023 when Epic Games laid off over 800 employees. He goes on to say, the downturn in Fortnite engagement that started in 2025

means we're spending significantly more than we're making. We have to make major cuts to keep the company funded. Now I thought that's what they did last week when they raised the V-Buck prices, but I mean, this must have been already in the works. So they did that and this, which is very drastic. He continues to say some of the challenges we're facing are industry wide challenges, slower growth,

weaker spending and tougher cost economics, current consoles selling less than last generations, and games competing for time against other increasingly engaging forms of content. So with that, he's referring to, you know, PS5 and Xbox One not selling as well as their predecessors like the PS4. And then games competing for time against other increasingly engaging forms of entertainment. That's going to be like TikTok. We're only in the early stages of returning to mobile,

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 developers. Now, we can all get into whether they should have, you know, gone off the App Store and whether they should have gone against Google, but the objective truth here is that in those legal battles,

they're very, very, very expensive. To the tune of like guaranteed 100 million plus dollars was spent on just legal fees, which is insane. And then also with them not being on iPhone and Android, like that's probably billions of dollars for them. Again, I'm not gonna get into whether

they should have done that or not. I think there's pros and cons. What we now need to do is clear, build awesome 4-N experiences with fresh seasonal content, gameplay, story, and live events. Accelerate developer tools with greater stability

and capability as we evolve from Unreal Engine 5 and UEFN to Unreal Engine 6, and we'll be kicking off the next generation of Epic with huge launch plans towards the end of the year. I feel like this was always pretty clear, like they should have always been building awesome Fortnite experiences with fresh seasonal content, gameplay, story, and live events. I think they went off that path a little bit when they tried to do too many things. And then I thought this was always their goal as well. Accelerate developer tools with greater stability and capability

as we evolve from Unreal Engine five and UEFN to Unreal Engine six, which I'll get into in just a little bit. At Epic, we pride ourselves in only hiring the industry's best. So it's very painful to part with so many talented people. The folks impacted by the layoffs will receive a severance package insurance package that includes at least 4 months of base pay with more based on tenure. We're also extending EPIC paid healthcare coverage. He says we'll have a company meeting Thursday to talk about the roadmap in more detail.

Again, I didn't see this coming because they just raised the price of VBucks. You think that would like at least delay a decision like this for a while, see how it goes. But again, with something this huge, it must have been something they were working on for at least a little while. It's just crazy to think about 1,000 Epic employees.

That is incredibly sad. You also gotta believe, who makes the decision to let go of these 1,000 people? These specific ones that are keeping thousands of people still, I can't even imagine that. So with the layoffs, they're also gonna be cutting

a bunch of game modes from Fortnite. And I mean like fully shutting them down. So Fortnite status tweeted out Rocket Racing, Ballistic, and Festival Battle Stage going offline. We've built a lot of Fortnite modes and in some cases we failed to build something awesome enough to attract and retain a large player base. We are going to shut these modes down on the schedules outlined below. We're grateful for everyone who played. So they're shutting down rocket racing. After two years of high-speed competition,

rocket racing will leave Fortnite along with all UEFN islands built with rocket racing templates in October, 2026. Nothing changes with your vehicle locker and you can still use your customized cars in Fortnite. For developers building car content,

in April, we're adding car physics, hazards, and track building tools, including the track, spline tool, and speed boost devices to the base UEFN toolset. Develop like a Mario Kart or like a kind of more arcadey, or this one was arcadey, a more, I don't know, casual racing game. This one to me is an absolute shocker. I'm gonna read it last, but we got Festival Battle Stage over here.

So Fortnite Festival is gonna be, I lost my keyboard. So Fortnite Festival is gonna stay, Festival Battle Stage, that's gonna go. The Battle Stage competitive mode of Festival will go offline on April 16th with the 4020 release and quests will be available until then. Music remains a major part of Fortnite and will continue to improve Festival Main Stage and Jam Stage and the music features

that are available everywhere in Fortnite. This one, not very surprising at all. I think Fortnite Festival is pretty good. I mean, if you wanna play rock band or guitar hero, like this is it, you know, Harmonix made this. So it's a lot of fun to jump into. I don't really play much on stream and stuff just because it contains a lot of copyright music,

but I would otherwise. Plus the guitar is pretty cool. Now this one, this one is a punch in the gut, Ballistic. So Ballistic will be removed from Fortnite on April 16th, just like about two weeks from now. You can still play and rank up in Ballistic during its final weeks. For developers, first-person shooter tools and UEFN remain available, and FPS creator islands will continue to be supported. In order for developers to build modes like Ballistic,

more UEFN features will be required, such as custom weapon support, rank support, and additional matchmaking features. This one is a punch in the gut. I, just even a couple weeks ago when they released the wrap that you can get for ranking up in Ballistic, I played it a ton, and anytime you'll see me play it, I have so much fun in Ballistic. I have so much fun. And it has, I think out of all of these,

it definitely does have the most strong player base to it, like just a dedicated community of people who love Ballistic and that's because it is fun. If you jump in there, it is fun. It does have its problems. All right. But I really, truly don't believe it was given the chance that it was supposed to have. I know the teams behind Ballistic had a lot of love for it.

I've spoken to some of them. I think that they were held up by a lot of higher ups or maybe technical difficulties. I don't know what it was. I can't speak. Ballistic was not given its proper love and support. Now, following that, I thought I'd reach out to the CEO himself and see if I could maybe keep Ballistic going.

I said, hey, Tim Sweeney, I love Ballistic and I know there's a dedicated community behind it. Let us at Jogo, which is my gaming company, buy it from you and we'll maintain, update, and grow it. I'd be sad to see this mode just disappear. didn't get the chance it deserved. Now this got a lot of attention, over 1.4 million views, ton of likes, and Tim actually replied.

He said, we need to ship a number of missing UEFN features so that anyone can build comparable games in these genres and do it better than we did. These projects currently rely on complex UE5 C++ code and a number of areas that needs to be continually maintained. The engine and tools team at Epic is reorganizing

around delivering as many useful features and verse capabilities as possible for building varied and feature-rich games. We have a UE5-UEFN split among the teams previously and now everyone is together." Now this is a tough response from him because you know he's saying things that eventually will be really good but this is a problem that's happening right now. We tried to build a ballistic like game mode ourselves, it was 5v5 Legends, and we just simply, like, the tools don't exist to make it like ballistic right now.

It's just, it's physically not possible. And he's saying that it will be possible eventually, but from someone who's worked in the UEFN space since it's come out, I suspect that it'll be another year, probably two years, until someone can create something that's close to what Ballistic is now,

and still it won't have the official Epic support, it won't be featured the same. Who knows if they'll even have like rank mode the same, like that's a tough one, matchmaking. I think with that being said, my offer is still on the table.

We have an incredible team of engineers who are super smart would totally be able to work on this complex UE5 C++ code. We'd work with the epic team. Like, we would be the ones that would have to do this continual maintenance and we would be okay with that. And I've had so many people reach out and be like, hey, if you do get it, I'll work

on it for free, which is a really kind and sweet offer. We would 100% pay anybody who works on it, obviously, but it just goes to show the passion behind this. Clearly, there's like a very, very small chance that they'll actually let us take it over and like make Ballistic better, but it's worth a shot. And if they don't, which is the most likely scenario, then we'll just have to try to make

our own first-person experience that maybe taps into some of the magic that made Ballistic special. Now there's one thing I wanna talk about is that there's this general sentiment that UEFN is a large reason why this happened. And when I reference UEFN, that's gonna be any game that's in Fortnite,

but not made by Fortnite. So I'm talking Steal a Brain Rod, or even my Super Red vs. Blue. Now obviously, I'm super invested into UEFN with my game company, Jogo, to money purchases is placed into an engagement pool, which is distributed among developers and Epic's islands based on engagement payout formula. So I think it's really interesting

because that 40% number is tossed around a lot. Epic participates in that 40% as well. And I'm not gonna go into the nuances of that formula. They don't even detail it like exactly for us to know. But if we're basing it purely off of player count, that would mean that Epic Games gets 50% of that 40% pool,

which means essentially at the end of the day, they're giving away 20% of whatever the Fortnite item shop makes to these map creators. Yes, that is a significant amount of money. And look, I don't personally play Steal a Brain Rod, but there's a ton of people that do.

And there's a ton of people who don't play battle royale. They just jump in to play steal a brain rot or to play this other experience. And the more persons on the game, the more they'll probably spend money, which means the more money that Fortnite makes. Let me tell you, they are not losing money on this. If anything from the math, they're gaining money. Now people can debate this a ton. I can debate it a lot. But what Epic really wants to do by incentivizing people to create maps and to draw in players is to de-risk themselves, right? They have Battle Royale and that was really successful for them and continues to be, but overall Battle Royale as in the game mode just across any game, not just Fortnite,

you could say like Call of Duty Warzone or other games like that, like the whole category is going down. So what they want to do is become a. This way, they don't have to develop all the games. They don't have to put up that money up front. And if a game hits and does super well, well, they can go ahead and share in that success for providing the platform, providing the networking,

providing all these other things, the audience that could potentially see it. So I think that's's really tough. We don't have the data, right? Like we can't see how much this collabs drive Fortnite. It's probably a huge amount if they're doing so many of them. Because a lot of people are attached to these IPs that they're collabing with.

And maybe they wouldn't have hopped in Fortnite if it wasn't for picking up this skin. to play Fortnite because they can rock their favorite character. But I appreciate the sentiment that before collabs, Fortnite was super special. So maybe because of these collabs, it's not as special. I think the collabs did take them a little further away from the path of the storyline and live events and stuff like that.

People really enjoyed that. I really enjoyed that. I think we've seen just a decline of the performance of live events because they're not as special anymore. And the story, honestly, hasn't made sense in a long time. There was some pretty darn good story live events.

Favorite gaming memories were these live events. They were fantastic. Travis Scott event, I forget, the chapter three event where you're the mech and you destroyed the giant base. Like my favorite live event ever. And then again, like I mentioned before, the lawsuits that they're engaged in, again, there's a lot of pros, so there's a lot of cons,

but it's very expensive. Again, just in people that could have been playing Fortnite that haven't been able to, billions of dollars. And also the lawsuits themselves and lawyers are really expensive. That's gonna be a hundred million dollars plus.

And I will say, Fortnite is pretty lagged behind on those devices now because of this. Like if you go to play Fortnite on your phone at the current moment, it takes a very long time to download. Now say if you were to download Roblox, it's really fast. That is a big issue and one that they know that they have to solve quickly. So I started this video with saying what does this mean for Fortnite? Is this the beginning of the end? Now obviously if you lay off a thousand people there's gonna be some big problems. We already saw the last season of Fortnite be pretty buggy. This is just speculation but I would assume that things aren't gonna be fixed as fast

moving forward. There's also just probably gonna be less things happening. I'd assume less collabs, less tournaments, less in-person activations. Again this is just speculation. I don't work at Epic Games. I don't have any insider information. But I just don't see how letting it go of that many people won't affect things. So I think as the people who work there now adapt,

there probably will be a decent amount of bugs. I just don't see how there can't be issues when you let a thousand people go. And I do think a good percentage of the magic of what made Fortnite so special was Let Go. Let's not forget about the people that are still there. You know, there's thousands of people that work at Epic Games and everyone's best interest there for the game

to continue to grow, for it to succeed, for it to do overwhelmingly better so that they could hire more people, so they can get back where they were. I have faith that when the tools for UEFN and game development continue to grow, that we will get a lot better games

that aren't just clones from other games, but the tools just aren't there yet. So they got to really accelerate that. I'll give you an example. We just released our game, Cache Heist City. I think it's absolutely incredible,

but I wish I could have made, you know, the island five times bigger or five times more features. But we're getting close to the limitations that we have to work within, right? We don't have the memory to do the absolute craziest things we want to do. And I think that will be resolved in the next coming years.

So it's going to be an iterative, you know, moving process. But that's the hard pill to swallow when that's not today. I'm still positive and bullish on Fortnite. I believe in the game.

I think chapter seven season two was one of the better seasons we've had in a long time. We at Jogo will continue to make games and push things forward and try to really make unique games for this platform that is Fortnite. And we'll just see where things go. make unique games for this platform that is Fortnite. And we'll just see where things go. If anyone at Fortnite needs any ideas, like I'm here to help. Again, I play this game