Can someone explain to me what Epic does that necessitates over 5000 employees?
this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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Unity has 7700 employees, and they only create a game engine.
I have a hard time wrapping my brain around it taking 7700 people to create a game engine. But I'm not in that industry and have no idea what's involved.
Me neither, but iirc Valve has 300 employees total. It seems massively out of proportion.
Yeah like Twitter had 7500+ employees before Elon went and fired 90% of them. Sure the site is worse off for it, but it still runs. Clearly most of that 90% were nonessential to the function of the company.
A lot of these tech companies are bloated like that
AFAIK most of them are salespeople.
An engine is not just a kernel of 3 dimensionality logic and lighting principles. Engines are there to speed the development of games, and so are composed of lots of tooling and infrastructure for game developers to use. I’ll bet the core technology engineers and testers number 2000 and the rest are researchers, customer relations people, advertising, marketing, sales, lawyers, international market specialists, website managers, HR, corpdev (large deals / mergers) and of course the management layer. Really a lot of large corporations need a lot of the same apparatus. It would be great if you could find out, company by company, how many people it takes to actually build the product but the total number has to do with how many it takes to run the business.
It's hard for me to wrap my brain around since I've never worked in an org that large. Even when I worked at a large company my org was small compared to that.
Not just a game engine, Unity is a software company with numerous services. Mainly game related though. There’s the Unity ads platform which probably employs hundreds in Finland alone. Unity is used from entertainment to manufacturing industry.
Isn't that 2022 numbers? They've fired a lot of people lately, not sure the number they're at now
Yeah, my quick search unearthed the number from 2022.
Fortnite alone had >2k people working on it at once when it was at its peak. Add in a bunch of extra departments and that makes a little more sense
🤯 Tho I suppose the customer facing side of the house would be so be sizeable for something as big as Fortnite.
If they see value in it I don’t see why employing more people is exactly a bad thing
Didn't say it was.
Poor Bandcamp :(
I'm surprised it survived the Epic acquisition without enshittification.
I really hope it can continue to do so now it's starting to be passed around. It seems to be a good place for employees, artists and users alike.
Without it, there's just the 15c a year from Spotify.
Wonder how much of this is due to automation.
Isn’t automating stuff kind of one of the big main points of a technology company?