Cary’s Epic Games lays off 1,000 amid Fortnite downturn

Cary video game developer Epic Games announced Tuesday it will lay off 1,000 workers as the company cited falling player interest in its hit Fortnite franchise.

This is Epic’s second mass jobs cut in the past three years. In September 2023, the company laid off 830 employees companywide, including 170 in the Triangle.

Epic Games did not immediately say how many North Carolina workers were impacted by its latest workforce reduction, which the company informed staff about in a March 24 letter. By Tuesday afternoon, multiple Triangle-based Epic employees had posted on LinkedIn that they had lost their positions.

“I’m sorry we’re here again,” Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney wrote to employees. “The downturn in Fortnite engagement that started in 2025 means we’re spending significantly more than we’re making, and we have to make major cuts to keep the company funded.”

Fortnite is a vibrantly colored shooter game that took the global gaming industry by storm after Epic released its “battle royale” version in 2017. “Despite Fortnite remaining one of the most successful games in the world, we’ve had challenges delivering consistent Fortnite magic with every season,” Sweeney wrote.

In his letter Tuesday, Sweeney stressed that artificial intelligence did not contribute to the layoffs. He alluded to his antitrust challenges against Apple and Google, costly years-long legal processes that ultimately returned Fortnite to billions of smartphones worldwide. “In being the industry’s vanguard we have taken a lot of bullets in a battle which is only in the early days of paying off for ourselves and all developers,” Sweeney wrote.

He said affected workers will get “at least four months of base pay” and that his company will hold a meeting Thursday to discuss Epic’s future direction.

Epic stopped sharing valuation amid metaverse push

Now a billionaire, Sweeney cofounded Epic in 1991 and moved it to Cary later that decade. Epic scored wins with its Gears of War series and popular graphics tool, Unreal Engine, but the success of Fortnite propelled the mid-sized studio to become one of the world’s most valuable private companies.

In the early 2020s, Epic celebrated a series of increasing valuations, culminating in a 2022 investment from Sony and the parent company of Lego that valued Epic at $31.5 billion. But the North Carolina game developer’s momentum has since slowed, and Epic declined to share its new valuation after Disney took a $1.5 billion equity stake in the company in early 2024.

Sweeney’s effort to leverage Fortnite to offer customers experiences in the metaverse, a network of immersive virtual spaces, has been expensive. The CEO noted these costs contributed to the 2023 layoffs, which affected roughly 16% of Epic staff.

The latest layoffs come less than a week after another Cary video game developer, Red Storm Entertainment, announced it would cut 105 jobs at its headquarters and stop developing games as its parent company, Ubisoft, seeks to lower spending.

This story was initially printed March 24, 2026 at 12:11 PM.