Epic Games’ director of publishing strategy is leaving the company

03.10.2023 - 05:26 / videogameschronicle.com / Tim Sweeney

Epic Games‘ director of publishing strategy, Sergiy Galyonkin, is leaving the company.

In a statement released on Monday, Galyonkin said today is his last day at the Fortnite maker.

It’s unclear if his departure is directly related to widespread job cuts at Epic. Last week, the company announced plans to lay off around 830 employees, or 16% of its total workforce.

Announcing his departure, Galyonkin said he was “not a good fit” for where Epic is headed as a company.

Galyonkin is the creator of Steam Spy, a website which launched in 2015 that automatically gathers data from Steam user profiles before analysing its and generating statistics like approximate game sales and average playtime per game.

He joined Epic in February 2016 as head of publishing for Eastern Europe, before taking on his current role in August 2017, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Galyonkin’s learnings from Steam Spy were used to help develop Epic’s Steam competitor, Epic Games Store, which launched in December 2018.

“Today is officially my last day at Epic Games,” Galyonkin said. “These eight years have been some of the most exciting in my career, and I am deeply grateful to my former Epic Games colleagues and Tim Sweeney for allowing me to help build Epic 4.0.

“I am also immensely thankful for the generous $144M donation Epic Games sent to various charities to help Ukraine in the early days of the Russian invasion of 2022. At that time, Epic Games was ahead of some G7 countries in providing support. It means the world to me, and while I wasn’t always polite during those discussions, I will forever be grateful.

“We launched Fortnite, which later became one of those self-reinforcing cultural phenomena I wrote about just a year prior. We proved that free-to-play without pay-to-win can work at scale. We challenged the status quo in game distribution with the 88/12 revenue share.

“Now, Epic Games is on its way to transforming from a game developer, engine creator, and publisher into a platform – Epic 5.0. I am not a good fit for this new version of Epic; it requires people of a different kind. I plan to remain in the gaming industry. I also hope to be more vocal now that I don’t have to worry about the PR department knocking on my DMs.

“Again, thank you to everyone I worked with at Epic Games – it was an incredible journey, and I will always cherish it.”