Epic Games创始人兼CEO Tim Sweeney发布了Epic大规模裁员的官方公告，并在Unreal Fest 23上提到了未来的收费模式。

※2023/10/10 – 已追加Tim氏的官方演讲视频

大规模裁员

• 相当于16%雇佣规模的约830人被解雇（约三分之二的裁员来自非核心开发团队）
  被解雇的员工还将获得包括6个月基本工资以及其他职业过渡服务、签证支持等在内的丰厚福利。
• Bandcamp出售：归属音乐市场公司Songtradr旗下
• SuperAwesome出售：成为由现任CEO凯特·奥带领的、以SuperAwesome品牌独立运营的公司
• 因Bandcamp和SuperAwesome出售，约250人离开Epic
• 新市场Fab的发布延期至2024年

详情请见：Layoffs at Epic – Epic Games

原本感觉Epic一直在不断扩张，不过看来也有很多困难啊……

Epic Games Japan工作人员也会受到影响？？

现在虽然受日本法律保护，但既然是这样，想必不久后也会向大家发布重要通知。

首先，我想花些时间从客观角度看待现在的自己，并听取各位的意见。时间很多，欢迎邀请对“我”感兴趣的人。

请多关照。

— EPIC IMAI (@epic_imai) October 1, 2023

虽然没有详细信息，但……就是那么回事吧……接下来会怎样呢……

在新奥尔良举行的Unreal Fest 23上
CEO Tim Sweeney先生提到了裁员和收费模式

Tim Sweeney addresses Epic Games Layoffs… #UnrealFest pic.twitter.com/49t4Tf20SA

— Immature (@ImmatureGamerX) October 3, 2023

在Tim先生演讲的后半段可以确认到

裁员部分的演讲 全文（自动转写）

这并不是合适的规模。我们原本以为自己处于合适的规模，而且我很喜欢最初的计划。但是，这是必要的生存时刻，也是我们所实现的事情。其中一点是，我们稳定了财务，这样在迈向“宇宙”时就不会资金耗尽。这会影响到一切。我将谈谈这一点，以及它如何影响我们的所有权益设置和努力。我们早些时候决定的一项原则，大约在10周前，当我们意识到遇到了必须迅速解决的财务问题时，就是不会平均分摊痛苦。相反，我们梳理了业务的各个部分，明确了为了完成使命我们绝对需要什么。于是，它以相当不同的方式影响了公司内部的不同部分。Unreal Engine工程团队只受到3%的裁员影响。业务、销售和市场团队中有许多人员损失超过30%。这将适用于我们所做的一切，并会导致部分工作的质量下降。

This wasn’t the right size. I think we were the right size, and I love our original plans. And But this is the survival moment that was necessary and what we did accomplish. The one thing is we’ve stabilized our finances so that we won’t run out of money as we go to the universe. This has implications for everything. I’m going to talk about that and how it affects all of our equity sets and efforts. and one of the principles we decided on early on was about 10 weeks ago when we realized we were running into a financial problem that we had to solve quickly, is that we wouldn’t spread the pain around equally. Rather, we went through and identified all the parts of our business and exactly what we absolutely needed in order to accomplish our mission. And it affected different parts of the company in rather different ways. The Unreal Engine engineering team was only impacted with the three % layoff. Many of the business, sales, and marketing teams suffered more than 30 % of the loss. This is going to have applications for everything we do, and it’s going to result in a degradation of the quality of some of the work.

对此我感到抱歉。不过现在，公司里的每个人都在思考如何重新平衡优先级，并以新的方式重新分配团队，以满足大家的需求，我们会度过这一关。不过，这次努力和这些痛苦让我们审视了业务的每一个部分，并对自己提出了非常严苛的问题。但这也再次强化了我们真正相信我们的战略。正如我们长期以来一直在做的那样，我们最终做成了两件事：我们为世界各地的创作者构建技术，并在此基础上构建我们自己的娱乐体验。业务建立在二者的协同之上。由此我们认识到，我们业务的核心在于服务全球实时3D创作的全部需求。Unreal Engine Toolset 的出色之处在于，它为各行各业的实时3D提供了90%的所需内容。不同的行业有不同的需求。游戏开发者需要一套东西，进行虚拟制作的电影人需要另一套，建筑师需要一些东西，汽车制造商需要炫酷的材质系统，等等，等等。

I’m sorry for that. But right now, everybody in the company is working to figure out how we’re going to rebalance our priorities and to retask the teams in new ways in order to serve all of your needs, and we’ll get through that. But this effort and going through these pains really caused us to look at every part of our business and ask very hard questions to ourselves. But one of the things that this really reinforced was that we truly believe in our strategy here. I think, as we’ve been doing for a very long time now, has finally done two things. We’re building technology for all the creators in the world, and we’re building our own entertaining experiences on top of that. The business is built around the synergy between the two. One of the things we came out of this realizing is core to our business is that we serve all of the world’s real-time 3D creation needs. The wonderful thing ????? Unreal Engine Toolset is that it provides 90% of what everybody needs for real-time 3D in every industry. Then different industries need different things. Game developers need one side of things, filmmakers doing virtual production need another, and architects need some, and automotive makers need fancy material systems, and so on, and so on.

我们已经构建出一种结构，里面有许多为行业内所有人需求提供服务的小团队。从事这些工作的工程团队基本上只受到裁员轻微影响。工程工作会继续，销售工作和支持工作等也会继续，只是规模会更小。我们致力于服务 under-launch 和生态系统的所有不同部分。我们意识到，我们所做事情的魔力在于服务每一个人。我们业务真正的核心战略，不只是成为一家像通用电气那样、拥有众多事业部并服务多个不同产业的公司，而是把每个人连接到实时3D之中，打造一种类似 Open Letters 的东西，这才是我们的目标。我们所做的大规模 Fortnite 跨界合作，不只是与 Disney 和 Marvel 合作的电影和电视内容，还包括 Fortnite 的其他内容，以及通过在 Fortnite 上举办演唱会所产生的音乐人内容；所有这些不同作品，确实都依赖于我们提供能把这些不同产业连接起来的工具集。这就是我们的使命。无论顺境逆境，我们都会继续下去。

We’ve built up a structure in which we have a lot of different small teams serving the needs of everyone in the industry. The engineering teams doing this work are largely lightly affected by the layoffs. The engineering work continues and the sales work and support work and so on continues, but at a smaller scale. And we’re committed to serving all the different parts of the under-launch and ecosystem. We’ve gone through this realizing that the magic of what we do is in serving everybody. The real core strategy of our business, which is to not just be a general electric style company with a bunch of divisions, serving a bunch of different industries, but to connect everybody together into real-time 3D and something resembling the Open Letters is our goal. The massive Fortnite crossovers, we’ve done more than film and television content with partnership with Disney and Marvel, what others of the Fortnite and musician content by doing concerts on the Fortnite and all these different pieces truly rely on us providing the tool set to connect all of these different industries together. That’s what we’re going to do. We’ll continue through good times and bad times and doing it.

我们意识到了其中一项原则。我们很艰难，但你们也很艰难。这个行业里的很多公司，真的，或者在某些情况下比我们还糟糕地在卖。我们不能把我们的问题当成我们自己的问题。最近行业里一直在讨论引擎版税。自2014年推出5%收入分成模式以来，我们围绕版税进行的唯一对话，就是能不能再降一点。包括最近在内，我们多次讨论过这个问题。最近的讨论还包括“不是，我们真的需要这笔钱。我们需要这笔钱。”但这并不是永远如此。多年前我们的一位投资者曾指出一个有趣的统计数据：引擎业务大约只占我们推荐供应商的0.04%。因为 Moody 非常受欢迎，而且还有其他引擎和内部引擎，其中大多数都没有收入分成。你可以联系我们的销售团队，然后谈判版税费率或新的 origin。如果我们能够扩大规模并取得更大成功，我希望未来可以降低这一比例。

We realized that one of the things, one of the principles we came through realizing this. It’s hard for us, but it’s also hard for you. A lot of companies in the industry are selling for it too, really, or in some cases worse than we are. We can’t take our problems as our problems, it’s our problems, and we won’t. Engine Royalties have been discussed recently in the industry. Let me tell you guys, since we introduced the 5% revenue sharing model in 2014, the only conversations we’ve ever had about the royalty are, Can we lower it? We’ve had those discussions a number of times, including recently. The recent discussions have included like, No, we really need the money. We need the money. But that’s not entirely the case forever. A funny stat that one of our investors pointed out years ago was that the engine business makes about 0.04% of the vendors we recommend. Because Moody is really popular and there are other engines and internal engines, and most of them are without revenue sharing. You can call our salesforce and then negotiate a royal fee or or a new origin still. If we were able to scale and succeed at a larger scale, I do hope that we can lower that in the future.

我们认为，通过为客户提供服务，生态系统不会因此崩坏。就我们的商业模式而言，我们真的这么认为。这是一个为我们成功而设计的商业模式，而且我们也必须成功。大多数团队根本不需要支付任何版税。但最终，我想大家都会把它看作：我们在这里都是专业开发者。而 Unreal Engine 团队，你正在使用的那个团队，是你团队的延伸。如果你没有向我们为引擎付费，那你就得雇用真正厉害的人来自己做，并且还得付钱给他们。而这会成为你的业务成本。因此我们认为，面向游戏开发者的结构非常健全。我们的引擎业务有一段时间存在一个问题，我们打算在这里修正它。那就是，我们有一个任何人都可以完全免费使用的引擎。但是，如果你从不发布需要缴纳版税的产品，那么你就一分钱都不用付。而这不会影响最终目标。我们明年要改变的一件事是，针对最终目标之外的行业，例如汽车行业等，我们将转向基于企业软件许可的模式，并从新奥尔良推出许多产品。我们还没有可公布的具体条件。但我只是想为了透明起见，当着大家的面把这件事说出来。我们会转向那样的模式。它不会异常昂贵，也不会异常便宜。但如果你要在游戏行业之外制作产品，而且不为其支付版税，那么是的，它将会变成像 Maya 或 Photoshop 之类的、按许可方式授权的软件。这只是我们试图把引擎收入拉回正轨，并重新与那些在各行业实际工作的团队建立关联的一个变化。过去六年里，Fortnite 为我们提供了大量资金，这件事有些奇怪，因为我们业务的不同部分与它们的收入来源脱节了。我们有很大的团队在服务不同的行业垂直领域，为定制客户构建各种功能。

We see ourselves as serving our customers and not becoming ecosystem overboard as and we are the ones that complain about it from time to time. In terms of our being able for business model, we think it’s really so. It’s a business model designed so that we succeed, we need to succeed. And most teams are paying any royalty at all. But ultimately, I think everybody comes to look at it as like, we’re all professional developers here. And the Unreal Engine team, the the team that you’re using on the on-the-own, it’s an extension of your team. And if you weren’t paying us money for the engine, you’d have to hire really awesome people to build your own and you’d be paying them to. And these would have to cost for your business. And so we think our structure for game developers is really sound. There has been a clerk of our engine business for a while we’re going to patch that here. And that’s that we have an engine that’s completely free for anybody to use. But if you’re never shipping a product that’s royalty-bearer, then you never pay any money at all. And this doesn’t affect the end goal One of the things we’re going to change next year is for industries other than the end goal, such as the automotive industry and so on, we’re going to move to a based enterprise software license and a lot of product from New Orleans. We don’t have terms to announce yet. But this is just I wanted to get this out in front of everybody for transparency. We’re going to move to a model like that. It’s not going to be unusually expensive or unusually inexpensive. But if you’re going to be building a product outside of the game industry and not paying royalty on it, then yeah, it will be a licensed piece of software like soft, like Maya or Photoshop or whatever that was to be changed. That will just be a change that tries to bring our engine revenue back and associated with the teams that are doing the work in the industries. A funny thing about being funded so heavily by Fortnite over the past six years is we’ve had that different parts of our business get disconnected from their revenue streams. We have big teams serving different industry verticals, building this and that, some features for custom clients.

如果没有收入支持，那最近因为采用率增长而一切都还好。但随着我们成为一家低利润率公司并必须应对这一点，我们需要做的严格事项之一，就是让收入来源重新与我们所做的事情挂钩。这绝不会影响最终目标。我认为，免费并在某些税费上付费，是我们能提供的最佳交易。如果你不喜欢，那就得和 Salesforce 谈，协商 zero L，也就是前端那种情况下的合同，那也行。我们也致力于涵盖我们提供的所有其他服务。我们有 Epic Game Store。我们认为 Epic Game Store 是一种对抗当前行业许多痛点的良方：移动平台已成为霸主，并抽取了远高于地球上任何游戏处理商的支付处理费用。我们正在与之抗争。我们认为，未来几年内，也许会因地区不同而在不同时间点，我们将能够开放这些平台，把游戏商店带到 iOS 和 Android 上，并继续提供 12% 手续费的商店，以比以往大得多的规模服务客户。

Without revenue is supported, that’s been fine because we’ve seen adoption grow recently. But one of the rigors that we need to do as we become a lower margin company and have to cope with this is reassociate revenue streams with the things we’re doing. This will absolutely not affect the end goal. I think free and pay-up on some tax is the best deal we can offer. If you don’t like it, then we have to talk to Salesforce and negotiate the zero L, the deal in case of the front, and that works too. We’re also dedicated to containing all these other services that we provide. We have the Epic Game Store. We think the Epic Game Store is a cure to a disease that’s impacting a lot of the industry right now where the mobile platforms have become overlords and are extracting vastly higher payment processing fees than any game processor on Earth. We’re fighting that. We see one thing over the coming years, perhaps at different times in different territories, that we’ll be able to open up these platforms and bring the game store to iOS, to Android, and to continue offering a 12% fee store and serving customers at a much, much larger scale than we’ve served before.

Epic Online Services，是一套在线服务，我们是为 Fortnite 推出的。现在我已经向所有开发者开放。如果你想摆脱 Steam，或者摆脱各种单一平台生态系统，并像我们一样把所有玩家连接起来、了解彼此，那么这就是一个很棒的解决方案。我们今后也会继续使用它。再次强调，这确实是 Epic 将我们的商业模式与最终会成为所有公司现实之间进行协调的一个过程。我们之前曾暂时逃离过这种现实。现在，我们又回到了接近4000多人规模的公司状态，必须做出非常痛苦且需要排优先级的调整，如今我们将以不同的方式运营，以确保不会再次陷入那种小规模的困境。无论好坏，我们都会支持你，并继续我们正在做的一切。我们感谢你的业务。总之，Unreal Fest 不是为了这个，而是为了庆祝成果。大家都在用 Unreal Engine 制作很棒的东西。让我们开始表演吧。非常感谢各位的到来。

Epic Online Services, it’s a set of online services, we go for Fortnite. Now I’ve opened up to all developers. If you want to escape from your steam or escape from the various single platform ecosystems and connect all of our players to know their as we did, it’s a great solution for that. We’ll continue to use that to this. Again, this is really the epics process of reconciling our business model with the reality that eventually comes to exist for all companies. We escaped it for a while before. Now we’re getting back to having reached the scale of now 4,000-something person company to a really painful and prioritizing, and we’re desperately now going to be operating in a different way to make sure that we don’t get back into that tiny commission. Until we decide it’s good and bad, we’ll support you and we’ll continue everything we’re doing. We’re grateful for your business. But anyway, Unreal Fest isn’t about this. It’s about celebrating the accomplishments. Everybody is building amazing stuff with Unreal Engine. Let’s get on with the show. Thank you very much for coming.

虽然是自动转写生成的英文，但似乎有部分识别错误，我正在尽可能修正。若内容有误还请指正。
从识别内容来看，似乎是面向电影、电视、建筑、汽车等行业的收费模式将发生变化吧。过去一直免费真的很惊人，也是没办法的事。关于详细情况请等待后续报道。