Fortnite studio Epic Games lays off over 1,000 employees

It turns out people just aren’t Fortniting the way that they used to. Sweeney points to a “downturn in Fortnite engagement” that started in 2025 and has continued into this year, and since Fortnite needs a large base of regular players to make money off its microtransactions and cosmetic items, that’s bad news for Epic. You can’t remain a “forever game” if you don’t have players willing to spend real money on you forever. 

Fortnite, both the original base-building game and the battle royale variant that turned it into a cultural phenomenon,  turns 10 in 2027. Meanwhile, Roblox, the online game creation platform that launched in 2006 and is bigger than Fortnite by almost every metric, has lost over a third of its stock value so far in 2026. Fads come and die, and even something that seems fully entrenched in the culture, like Roblox, can collapse. That’s especially true when it’s hit with a litany of bad press, as Roblox has seen over the last several years. These are the erstwhile success stories that many studios have tried to replicate over the last several years, lighting fire to untold mountains of money in hopes of acing a test that even the two market leaders are now failing. Executives like Sweeney stay permanently rich while the developers who actually make the games, whose industry has been in non-stop turmoil for several years, are faced with constant lay-offs. Many are leaving the industry altogether. It’s almost like the games business doesn’t actually work as a business anymore.Fortnite studio Epic Games lays off over 1,000 employees