Epic Games is "laying off 1000 people." 23% of its workforce.
That number is bonkers. I feel like we've grown so desensitized to layoffs at this scale after a few years, that we don't think about the scale of 1000.
That's a highschool in a dense city. Or a small town in Canada, or a high-rise or two. That's so many lives and people who are dependent on that income.
What a nightmare world where we hear about layoffs constantly at this scale.
@mayintoronto What's wild is that, in Canada and the US, there is need of a fundamental reorganization of the way capitalism functions. And that happens with federal legislation. A lot of it.
But there's **no move whatsoever** to begin this process.
@prietschka and everytime someone tries to push for real change, the naysayers tell you that it's "not realistic".
M8 staying alive on the current trajectory is unrealistic.
@mayintoronto In the US there’s always money for elite priorities, never for anything else. Because we’re not a real democracy, barely a bourgeois democracy.
Until there’s some sort of complete breakdown we are absolutely fucked.
@mayintoronto "What a nightmare world where we hear about layoffs constantly at this scale."
I feel* like this a near constant when the end of tax season is near to create fake earnings boosts in a lot of American companies.
*Literally just a feeling from someone in a different country. I don't know when their tax season ends. I also feel they are empty capatlistic cunt husks.
Also fortnite and the epic launcher are fucking shit. In my opinion.
@octopuddle @mayintoronto not disagreeing with anything else you wrote, but there's not much *tax* reason to artificially boost your profits. That just means paying more taxes. Usually corporations bend over backwards to appear (for tax purposes) to have as close to zero profit as possible.
Not saying there's not a tax play here, but as someone familiar with this tax system, I don't immediately see it!
@adrake @mayintoronto I have worded it very badly and anecdotedly as it's not my wheelhouse.
I was mostly trying to refer to some things I've read over the past few years of layoffs being used to artificially inflate profits, and so inflate outlooks for shareholders.
I Hope that somewhat explains my anecdotal layperson ignorance.
@octopuddle @mayintoronto right, layoffs to juice numbers are a thing with public companies, because the public markets react strongly to quarterly results and executives are often compensated based on those short-term objectives.
But the weird thing here is that Epic is a private company, and the majority shareholder is the CEO! He doesn't need to juice numbers to make quarterly results look good to shareholders, because he is the only shareholder that really matters.
😡@mayintoronto Beloved and I were talking about how my gigs have slowed to a crawl, and we’re having to do financial planning based on his income, and if he too gets caught in the layoff purges, how we can pivot because neither of us are going to find work in our industry at our age.
There were 152,922 tech workers laid off in 2025. There have been 45,000 since January 1, 2026. LLMs are being used as a Trojan horse to destroy workers.
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