People shouldn’t suffer to make other people love Fortnite

You have probably heard that about the most recent story about Epic Games and the great pains it took to keep Fortnite relevant. This story says a lot of good and simultaneously bad things about the studio.

On the one hand, we’ve learned how flexible and agile Epic Games is internally - in a matter of weeks, it flipped from a pay to play fortress-building zombie-survival title into a free-to-play Battle Royale. A company like Activision Blizzard or Electronic Arts would probably not be able to make such a shift in months as the decision would be buried under the bureaucratic process of business assessments and plan drafting.

On the other hand, the game developers who are the core and the soul of any studio got the worst end of the deal. WePlay! is a tournament operator and you can imagine that some people in our company occasionally output 70 hours a week. They are happy to make great shows and see the fruits of their work. But you can only enjoy and benefit from this lifestyle when the rush is followed by:

a) bonuses

b) downtime

Epic Games’ game developers can’t count on reliable downtime and it sounds like they are not compensated for the “volunteer” work they do.

This brings up the old issue of the game industry - the developers need to unionize. We’ve learned that some studios and publishers use predatory tactics to get as much money out of fans as possible (the most recent example), and while we players can protest with our wallets and things like review bombing, game developers often need to keep their heads bent over keyboard and work in silence to support their families.

I’d feel much better about playing games like GTA V, Fortnite and StarCraft 2 knowing that its developers have job security and fair work hours.