Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, is laying off 39 employees in Bellevue.
The local layoffs for the Cary, North Carolina-based company were disclosed in a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) filed with the state of Washington on Thursday. According to the WARN, the layoffs will begin at the start of December.
It's the second time in two weeks a gaming company has signaled layoffs in Bellevue. ProbablyMonsters cut an undisclosed number of employees in mid-September.
Attempts to reach Epic Games on Thursday were unsuccessful.
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney sent an email to employees in late September saying the company was laying off about 830 employees, representing about 16% of its workforce. The company has more than 40 offices globally.
The company is also selling off the music distribution site Bandcamp to Songtradr, a music licensing company, and it's spinning out most of SuperAwesome, an ad platform to safely reach young audiences. Those two moves will result in about 250 more people leaving the company.
"For a while now, we've been spending way more money than we earn, investing in the next evolution of Epic and growing Fortnite as a metaverse-inspired ecosystem for creators," Sweeney wrote in his email. "I had long been optimistic that we could power through this transition without layoffs, but in retrospect I see that this was unrealistic."
In the email, Sweeney also noted much of Fortnite's growth is coming from creator content, a lower-margin business. Epic Games has been in net-zero hiring, and the company has cut costs in marketing and events.
"We're cutting costs without breaking development or our core lines of businesses so we can continue to focus on our ambitious plans," Sweeney said in his email. "About two-thirds of the layoffs were in teams outside of core development."
Laid-off employees are getting six months of severance, career assistance and visa support, and laid-off employees in the U.S., Canada and Brazil are getting six months of health care.
Epic Games, founded in 1991, operates a 3D creation tool called Unreal Engine, and it has an online gaming store.
