Epic’s mass-layoff of 830 workers (and offloading of 250 more to spun-out companies) yesterday may have been characterized by the company as largely outside of core development, but one online gaming studio has been hit particularly hard: Mediatonic, the company behind Fall Guys.
Following Epic’s Tim Sweeney’s assertion that Epic would continue to invest in Rocket League and Fall Guys, multiple Mediatonic developers surfaced on social media to clarify that in fact, the Fall Guys team was smacked with layoffs (“decimated” is the word being used by the workers themselves). Indeed, we spied several outlets declaring that the entire team had been sacked, but Epic Games has denied this.
While it's true that Epic Games-owned Mediatonic (Fall Guys) was hit very hard by today's mass layoffs, reports/rumors that the entire studio was shuttered are not true.
— Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier) September 28, 2023
In the meantime, the Fall Guys subreddit is collecting a list of all of the people affected (it seems to have targeted the art team, video team, and writing team in particular).
Fall Guys is a battle royale that we touch on only occasionally here on MOP; it was bought up by Epic in 2021, and within a year, Epic pushed it free-to-play – and yanked it off Steam in favor of the Epic Game Store, breaking Mediatonic’s promise not to do just that.
