How Fortnite's success lead to intense stress at Epic Games

[LukeSavenije]

Sources: @AluminiumTech, polygon

 

The popularity of Fortnite has been great for Epic Games, they shared unreal engine to more, made battle royale popular and created a whole new hype. But the game’s explosive growth also led to months of intense crunch for Epic employees and contractors, from which some of them say they felt extreme pressure to work hours and hours to maintain Fortnite’s success and profitability, resulting in a toxic, stressful environment at the company.

Quote

Although contract staff were paid overtime, developers report a culture of fear, in which they were expected to pull long hours as part of their job. Some reported suffering health issues after working consecutive months of 70-hour weeks.

 

Polygon interviewed current and former employees of Epic, including full-time staff, managers, and contractors working in development, QA, and customer service departments. They all requested that their identities be protected, for fear of retribution from Epic or other employers in the game industry. Epic requires that current and former staff sign nondisclosure agreements limiting their ability to speak about the company’s operations.

“I work an average 70 hours a week,” said one employee. “There’s probably at least 50 or even 100 other people at Epic working those hours. I know people who pull 100-hour weeks. The company gives us unlimited time off, but it’s almost impossible to take the time. If I take time off, the workload falls on other people, and no one wants to be that guy.

 

“The executives keep reacting and changing things,” said the source. “Everything has to be done immediately. We’re not allowed to spend time on anything. If something breaks — a weapon, say — then we can’t just turn it off and fix it with the next patch. It has to be fixed immediately, and all the while, we’re still working on next week’s patch. It’s brutal.

 

“I hardly sleep. I’m grumpy at home. I have no energy to go out. Getting a weekend away from work is a major achievement. If I take a Saturday off, I feel guilty. I’m not being forced to work this way, but if I don’t, then the job won’t get done.”

 

"I know some people who just refused to work weekends, and then we missed a deadline because their part of the package wasn’t completed, and they were fired,” said another source. “People are losing their jobs because they don’t want to work these hours.”

 

We’ve continually hired, slightly more than doubling Epic’s full-time employee base since Fortnite launched in 2017,” Epic’s spokesperson said. “Throughout, we’ve always been eager to hire great people. The limiting factor on hiring is not financial but the speed at which we can find and onboard highly qualified employees.

 

“We’ve also worked to contract with great independent studios to contribute to Fortnite and relieve internal workload. Finally, we’ve refined our release planning of Fortnite features to incorporate the work of multiple teams working in parallel to reduce the burden on each individual team.”

 

 

Edited April 24, 2019 by LukeSavenije

[emosun]

meanwhile in 1999 a game studio released it's first and only patch for a 2 year old game that is an optional download as the game mostly works fine without it

[Guest]

What can anyone else expect from a purely money-driven company? This game is made purely to be addictive and make money. It's not the games success, it's the executives. 

[Neftex]

most of game dev industry is like this, and its awful. i went into programming with the idea of making games, but fuck this tbh

[LukeSavenije]

2 minutes ago, emosun said:

meanwhile in 1999 a game studio released it's first and only patch for a 2 year old game that is an optional download as the game mostly works fine without it

 

2 minutes ago, floofer said:

What can anyone else expect from a purely money-driven company? This game is made purely to be addictive and make money. It's not the games success, it's the executives. 

 

1 minute ago, Neftex said:

most of game dev industry is like this, and its awful. i went into programming with the idea of making games, but fuck this tbh

i mean, i actually rather have a weapon disabled, and come back after a while, fixed and everything

 

something epic didn't do for me

[PlayStation 2]

Where have I heard this story before?

Oh yeah, Valve. Cry harder with that wad of cash, Epic.

[givingtnt]

What's with a forum user being a source ?

 @AluminiumTech you work for epic games ??

[LukeSavenije]

8 minutes ago, givingtnt said:

What's with a forum user being a source ?

 @AluminiumTech you work for epic games ??

no, he gives me some articles from time to time

 

so he's my personal source you can say

[givingtnt]

4 minutes ago, LukeSavenije said:

no, he gives me some articles from time to time

 

so he's my personal source you can say

Ah right like he used to give me articles that were way out of date rather than posting them himself

 

I mean even this was posted this morning, but I guess I might have removed it because it wasn't following the guidelines.

[Ithanul]

1 hour ago, LukeSavenije said:

Although contract staff were paid overtime, developers report a culture of fear, in which they were expected to pull long hours as part of their job. Some reported suffering health issues after working consecutive months of 70-hour weeks.

Yeah, that will sure burn folks out.  Hope the employees had some habits to help de-stress.

 

I delt with 84+ hour weeks down range.  That will wear you out if you don't squeeze in some me time or workout. 

 

[RoseLuck462]

One reason why I won't support Fortnite.

[JediFragger]

Poor snowflakes.

[D13H4RD]

Well, that’s just the state of AAA these days.

 

If you’re after a job that isn’t going to take its toll on you quickly, don’t work in game development/CS as part of a large gaming-oriented corporation.

 

It’s been shown time and time again that production and profit takes precedence over employee satisfaction and such.

[suicidalfranco]

the reason why i change my career path from game design to just PLC programming

way simpler

normal office job, 8 hours a day, 5 days per week. 

No pressure, nothing gets rushed cause the key word is security and safety.

Get to travel for commissioning, when i do i get a paid week of rest for every week i'm out

Pays well, doubles when out of the country

PLCs are really interesting pieces of tech. My only complaint are the IDEs

[Trixanity]

Meanwhile in the Fortnite community...

[RejZoR]

Only thing Fortnite made was turn amazing company into scummy one. And that's about it. Remembers Unreal and Unreal Tournament times... Now I can't roll my eyes enough when I hear about Epic...

[GoldenLag]

good thing im not stressed about games. i can wait for everything to get their steam release. 

[AlTech]

13 hours ago, givingtnt said:

 @AluminiumTech you work for epic games ??

I'd never dream of it.

[Doobeedoo]

Can Epic just get back to working on Unreal Tournament though, to actually see the game finished one day. That'd be great. It's their game that has a name of their engine. There's potential in it. 

[Prariedog13]

just disable everything, then everyone will be happy

[Sauron]

15 hours ago, emosun said:

meanwhile in 1999 a game studio released it's first and only patch for a 2 year old game that is an optional download as the game mostly works fine without it

You can't really have a game like Fortnite under those conditions - it's not that Fortnite was ever broken to the point that it needed fixing through large patches but rather that the game model requires constant content updates.

15 hours ago, floofer said:

What can anyone else expect from a purely money-driven company? This game is made purely to be addictive and make money. It's not the games success, it's the executives. 

Unfortunately that's the case with many modern games, sometimes to a larger extent than this. In their defense, Epic didn't expect such a massive success and didn't have the personnel to handle it.

6 hours ago, suicidalfranco said:

My only complaint are the IDEs

Oh dear

Spoiler

 

 

[lewdicrous]

4 hours ago, Trixanity said:

Meanwhile in the Fortnite community...

This ruined my day.. thanks..

[suicidalfranco]

40 minutes ago, Sauron said:

 

Oh dear

  Hide contents

 

 

 

 

you get used to it... eventually.

[Gullerback]

seeing the turn around on some pretty massive problems that have happened over time, I'm not surprised by this at all

[emosun]

4 hours ago, Sauron said:

the game model requires constant content updates.

lol