Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic, said that there will be a decrease in quality and he spoke about this at this year’s Unreal Fest.

The Unreal Fest was held this week in New Orleans, where Sweeney also spoke to give more context and details about the layoffs that affected more than 600 employees. A short video of the speech was posted on Twitter. He admitted that the engineering teams were barely affected, but that there would be a slight drop in quality in future work. He also explained when Epic Games started to feel significant financial problems.

“I think we were the right size and I loved our original plans, but this is a survival moment that was necessary. One of the principles that we decided on early on, ten weeks ago, when we realized that we had a financial problem that we needed to solve quickly, is that we weren’t going to spread the pain around equally. Rather, we went through all the parts of our business and identified exactly what we needed to do to fulfill our mission. So it affected different parts of the company in different ways. The Unreal Engine engineering team was only affected by 3% of the layoffs. Many of the corporate sales and marketing teams had more than 30% of the layoffs. This is going to affect everything we do, and it’s going to affect the quality of some of our work. I’m sorry about that. Right now, everyone at Epic is working to figure out how we’re going to rebalance our priorities and reassign teams in new ways to meet all of your needs. We’ll get through this,” Sweeney said.

The company’s various divisions were “disconnected” from their revenue streams: they were spending more than they were making, while Fortnite was covering everything, but that didn’t last long either. They want to increase their revenue from the Unreal Engine, but not from developers, but from the automotive and film industries, for example. Starting in 2024, they will have to pay a license fee based on how many people interact with the engine (Autodesk Maya and Adobe Photoshop use the same system).

“One of the things we’re going to change next year is for industries other than gaming, like automotive and so on. We’re going to move to a per-seat licensing model for enterprise software. We don’t have any terms to announce yet, but I want to get this out in front of everybody for transparency. If we’re going to build a model like that, it’s not going to be unusually expensive or unusually inexpensive. But if you’re going to build a product outside of the game industry and not pay a royalty on it, then yes, it’s going to be a licensed piece of software like Maya or Photoshop,” Sweeney added.

According to him, the masters of the mobile platform (Google and Apple) in North America charge much higher payment processing fees than anything else. He hopes to have the Epic Games Store on iOS and Android so that mobile developers can serve gamers worldwide and pay Epic only a 12% cut. But again, there will be a price increase… but it won’t be the developers who pay. We will, when we buy a car.

Source: WCCFTech