Former Valve writer Chet Faliszek, who left the company in 2017 and whose credits include the Half-Life 2 episodes, Portal, Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, has taken aim at Epic over the latest round of swingeing layoffs imposed by the company. Over 1000 people are out of a job, while Epic CEO Tim Sweeney arguably rubbed salt in the wound by saying other companies would now be able to hire all these high quality staff.
“Can someone explain this to me,” begins Faliszek on TikTok. “Why anybody who works at Epic should work hard? 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?
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It’s worth bearing in mind that Faliszek may feel a little protective towards his former boss, because Sweeney’s never been shy of picking a fight (in 2017, Valve’s COO internally replied to Newell about a Sweeney rant simply saying: “you mad bro?”). Since the launch of the Epic Games Store, Sweeney has heavily criticized the cut of Steam sales Valve takes—20%-30% today—arguing that it’s a “bad deal for developers” that hurts PC gaming.
“I don’t get why you remove that agency from people,” says Faliszek. “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, I wanna go home and I wanna be with my family. But if I’m at work, then I’m gonna work my ass off, so the time away is worth it. And I’ve just always worked that way. Not to say that’s always better, and I think sometimes it’s problematic, and I wish I could just kind of chill out like some people do, but I 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 act the same way [as EA]? Like, hey, ‘great job, made Battlefield 6, we dethroned Call of Duty: here’s a pink slip.'”
Faliszek says it infuriates him to see “lazy dev” complaints when companies like Epic “just cut them off at the knees, man.” He suggests looking at the documentary about Half-Life and Valve: “And how many people still work there after all those years?”
And it turns out the salary was good. Very good. “They care so much about what they’re making that they’re still there and they’re all rewarded handsomely,” says Faliszek. “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. And the money I made is dwarfed by the people who were there longer than me or before me.
“But Valve understood that. That’s how you get this thing where people cared, people worked hard, people stayed because they felt they were improving. What they were building on was something 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?”
Faliszek circles back round on the idea of ownership and opines that, after layoffs like this, most of Epic’s remaining staff are “just gonna clock in.” Not that this is likely to be an issue after this particular TikTok, but he adds “I sure as hell wouldn’t go work at a place that I didn’t think respected me and wouldn’t reward that.”
He then draws a line between this latest round of layoffs and the wider industry picture. “What we’re doing to the industry now and the seniority, we’re losing the care, we’re losing the passion,” says Faliszek. “That just freaks me out, man. I guess if you are of my mindset, that’s why you do your own thing, but I would much rather take care of people, reward them, show them that their hard work counts: and they’ll invest and work hard.”
I asked Epic Games and Tim Sweeney for comment on Faliszek’s remarks. The company did not respond to them specifically, but pointed me towards the Newsroom post it released on 24 March addressing the layoffs.
Certainly the mood music coming out of Epic right now is dire. Yesterday Fortnite’s producer asked for patience as the remaining developers “pick up the pieces” after massive layoffs, adding: “We cannot even fully understand what kind of impacts this will have on the game for the rest of the year and likely beyond.”
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