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this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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Can someone explain to me what Epic does that necessitates over 5000 employees?
~20 game studios, unreal engine (probably has 15 divisions itself across games, films, ads, etc), epic games store, artstation, sketchfab, metahuman, quixel, metaverse projects... how many employees should they have?
No idea, that's why I asked. I wasn't aware of much of what your listed.
Thanks for taking the time to answer tho instead of assuming I was upset that they employ people.
The article covers all of what we answered quite well, so if you read the article why else would you be asking, and if you didn’t read the article, why are you participating in the comments?
Why are you so hostile to someone that in the end is promoting a healthy discussion?
How is asking a question that was covered in the article promoting a healthy discussion?
All it does it shows you didn’t read the article, and if you didn’t read the article how could you contribute to a discussion about an article….?
And if you think me pointing out the obvious is being “hostile”… well that an interesting take.
I'll concede the article lists a bunch of brands. That's doesn't explain to me why it takes 5500 people to run a game studio.
Rockstar has over 2000 employees and puts out a fraction of the amount of games.
The number of employees is a completely irrelevant metric, there is no explanation other than they thought they needed that many. No different than any other company is existence even……..
And don’t they also own Bandcamp which I think they are selling.
Yes and yes.
They have a game engine, they make games, they have a store front.
Why would the amount matter?
Because I'm curious?
Article covered it.
Goddamn, so many unhelpful answers.
There are lots of threads online about this, and no clear firsthand answers, but as far as I could parse the Internet consensus:
Hired too many people, that's why they're laying people off right now
Unity engine team is the same size as unreal, but unity is constantly trying to sell ads and services to the point that their engine department is just another department of many departments that are all trying to hoover up revenue, rather than the engine being their main focus.
Here's an example thread with a bunch of snooty assholes and a couple reasonable answers: https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/16owfy1/7700_employees_at_unity_can_someone_who_works/
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
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.
AFAIK most of them are salespeople.
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.