Epic Games is now ‘financially sound’ says founder Tim Sweeney

Following 800 job cuts last year, Founder and CEO of Epic Games, Tim Sweeney now revealed that the company is financially sound. This announcement came during the most recent Unreal Fest in Seattle, where Sweeney also addressed a large number of lay-offs, saying it was done in order to get company finance in order.

Last year already saw several lay-offs as many companies rapidly expanded during the video game boom of COVID-19, however, since everything is back to normal, the same companies, including Epic Games are now going back to normal.

“Last year's Unreal Fest began with some sad news. The company had to get its finances in order, and we just had some major layoffs. We spent the last year rebuilding and also really executing solidly on all fronts,” Sweeney said.

“I'm happy to tell you now that the company is financially sound, and that Fortnite and the Epic Games Store have hit new records in concurrency and success. Fortnite hit 110 million monthly active users last holiday, an all-time peak,” he added.

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All time peak for Fortnite and EGS

Alongside Fortnite, the Epic Games store also achieved an all-time high of 70 million users, as per GM Steve Allison. As of now, EGS is the only direct competitor to Steam and speaking of which, developers making games on Unreal Engine will now enjoy even more benefits.

The company has revealed that the Unreal Engine royalty fee on other platforms like Steam is also being reduced from 5% to 3.5%. There is, however, a small catch as the developers also need to release the game on Day 1 on EGS. 

The devs already enjoyed no royalty on sales of games made using Unreal Engine on EGS. What’s more is that the new reduced rate applies to any store, including the one on mobile devices, meaning even that mobile game developers can now also get a better cut of earnings.