Epic Games has been under fire for the massive layoffs this past week, where they let go of thousands of people. It was not a pleasant sight, especially when you are one of the best developers in the industry, responsible for an important game engine and the best battle royale from the past few decades.
The company had to come out with a blog post explaining their position in taking this harsh decision in order to keep functioning. CEO Tim Sweeney made a post on social media mentioning how the downsizing was not “performance-based” like the rest of the industry.
A lot of people online had a bone to pick with Tim after this post, including one of the important Valve Ex-employees. Chet Faliszek, who was a writer for Valve and contributed to a lot of important games from the company, came out to shoot at Tim Sweeney on TikTok.
The ex-Valve writer was visibly angry at the layoffs
Chet Faliszek may not be involved with games such as Half-Life or the Portal series anymore, but he constantly pops up online to drop his critical thoughts on online gaming communities. Which obviously is not always appreciated by some of the users online.
He had a lot to say about Epic Games and its CEO, Tim Sweeney. He directly questions Epic’s decision to lay off over a thousand employees, and questions what they are actually thinking. After all, the company is shutting down “Fortnite Rocket Racing, Ballistic, and Festival Battle stage.”
“It’s not like they’re a publicly traded company. It’s not like there’s some need to hit the stock market thing. This is Tim Sweeney. This is Tim. A thousand people are more than those who work at Valve.” He adds further.
Social media reaction to Chet’s comments
Chet Faliszek is known for being very upfront on social media about his morals. Just recently, he called out all the gamers who were praying for the downfall of employees working on Highguard. Unfortunately, the game shut down, and employees were laid off.
It’s no different this time, as soon as the news about Chet Flaiszek voicing his opinions on Epic layoffs got out, social media users on Twitter/X made sure to have a field day with mixed reactions.
But most of the reaction to this situation is leaning towards praising Valve. Especially with meme images of Gabe Newell, the CEO of Valve. While tagging in with Chet to criticize Epic Games’ practices.
Bottom line is, it’s sad to see constant layoffs in the industry, and it has happened in almost every corner of the AAA gaming world so far. While Chet makes some fair points, there are legit market factors working to pull down the gaming economy, as we have just seen with PlayStation. All we can do is hope for a better future for the hardworking game developers.
