The Epic Games Store’s next free titles have been announced.
02.10.2023 - 22:13 / pcgamer.com / Tim Sweeney / New
Steam Spy creator Sergiy Galyonkin, who has also spent the past six years serving as Epic Games' head of publishing strategy, has announced that he has left company. Galyonkin's departure comes just days after Epic confirmed significant layoffs at the company that put more than 800 people—16% of Epic's total headcount—out of work.
«Today is officially my last day at Epic Games,» Galyonkin wrote in a post shared to Twitter. «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've always thought it was a little ironic that Galyonkin, the man behind Steam Spy—one of the most useful and popular Steam-related websites ever created—would end up working at Epic Games. He left his position as a senior analyst at Wargaming.net to become Epic's head of publishing for Eastern Europe in 2016, but just a year later moved up to director of publishing strategy, a position he's held until now. In the years following, he wrote, Epic launched Fortnite, «proved that free-to-play without pay-to-win can work at scale,» and squared up to Steam with the Epic Games Store's more generous 88/12 revenue share. Galyonkin maintained Steam Spy through it all.
But apparently other things have changed in that time, too. «Now, Epic Games is on its way to transforming from a game developer, engine creator, and publisher into a platform—Epic 5.0,» Galyonkin wrote. «I am not a good fit for this new version of Epic; it requires people of a different kind.»
The references to Epic 4.0 and Epic 5.0 are a sort of internal measure of major company milestones. As this Polygon report from 2016 explains, Epic 2.0 began when the company connected with GT Interactive, the publisher of the original Unreal, while Epic 3.0 encompassed its partnership with Microsoft on the Gears of War games. Epic 4.0 began in 2012 when Tencent purchased roughly 40 percent of the company.
Epic 5.0 will presumably involve Epic's transformation into «a leading metaverse company,» as Epic CEO Tim Sweeney described it in the layoff announcement last week. What exactly that means isn't clear: We said two years ago that the metaverse is bullshit, and frankly I don't think the situation has changed one iota since then. But Sweeney's singleminded pursuit of that goal has left Epic in a bad spot. Sweeney admitted when the layoffs were announced that Epic has «been spending way more money than we earn» as it's poured money into «the next evolution of Epic and growing Fortnite as a metaverse-inspired ecosystem for creators.»
It's not clear whether Galyonkin resigned from Epic voluntarily, or was caught up in the layoffs: To my reading, the
The Epic Games Store’s next free titles have been announced.
Epic has announced a foolproof plan to tempt devs and publishers to put their back catalogues onto the Epic Games Store: throw money at them. Announced yesterday, the Now On Epic program will offer game makers (and licence holders) 100% of the revenue generated by older games they put on Epic for the first six months of their time on the store, as opposed to the 88%/12% split that selling games via Epic usually entails.
Epic have dropped a bunch of details as to planned improvements for the Epic Games Store in the on-going race to out-Steam Steam - the Coca-Cola to Epic's Pepsi Max. Amongst other things, we can expect more robust search features, support for third-party subscriptions, better EGS launcher performance, a download manager with improved controls, and a new "for you" personalisation tab - all of that rolling out across 2024 and 2025.
The Epic Games Store’s next free titles have been revealed.
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has admitted the company was grappling with a "financial problem" 10 weeks before announcing sweeping layoffs, in an unexpected admission during Unreal Fest earlier this week.
The Epic Games Store’s next free titles have been confirmed.
Epic Games is raising the price of its Unreal Engine for developers outside the gaming industry.
A week after laying off almost 900 employees, Epic Games announced that it's increasing the price to use Unreal Engine—just not for the game development community.
Epic Games' head of publishing strategy Sergiy Galyonkin has announced that he is leaving the company after eight years.
Epic Games' director of publisher Sergiy Galyonkin has left the company.
Epic Games‘ director of publishing strategy, Sergiy Galyonkin, is leaving the company.
Sergiy Galyonkin - aka Mr. SteamSpy himself - has left Epic Games after almost a decade at the Fortnite maker, including six years as its director of publishing strategy, saying that he is no longer “a good fit” for the publisher.