To the leadership and engineering teams at Epic Games,
Let’s be blunt. The recent news of massive layoffs and staggering financial losses within your company is not surprising to the very people you supposedly serve: the gamers. For years, we have watched with increasing bewilderment as Epic Games—once a champion of PC gaming and innovative technology—has gone out of its way to alienate its core audience through baffling decisions, perceived hypocrisy, and outright hostility towards gamer choice and open platforms.
You are currently blaming macroeconomic headwinds and “industry-wide challenges” for these massive workforce reductions, but you are actively ignoring the self-inflicted wounds causing your massive drop in player engagement. You are bleeding players because you are aggressively fighting the hardware sitting inside their machines and the operating systems they prefer to use.
1. The Stubborn Reliance on TSR over Machine Learning
Your adamant refusal to implement AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) across your flagship titles, specifically Fortnite, is technically indefensible.
Temporal Super Resolution (TSR) is an impressive feat of heuristic engineering, and a great baseline for the engine. But the hardware has moved on. We are in an era where AI-accelerated hardware is the universal baseline.
- NVIDIA has leaned heavily into Tensor cores.
- AMD’s RDNA3 and RDNA4 architectures are heavily utilizing AI acceleration.
- Apple Silicon is packed with Neural Engines.
By refusing to simply implement an official FSR 3+ toggle—an open-source, widely adopted industry standard—you are forcing millions of non-RTX users to rely on TSR’s often blurry, artifact-heavy implementation. It no longer feels like a technical constraint; it feels like corporate hubris. You are demanding that Unreal Engine’s native, non-ML tools be the standard, even if it means delivering a demonstrably worse image and lower framerates to your players. Let’s be real here, TSR is a joke compared to what exists, no matter how hard you try to shove it down gamers’ throats.
2. The Linux/Proton Hypocrisy
The refusal to support Proton and the Steam Deck ecosystem is where your anti-consumer stance crosses into outright hypocrisy.
Epic ownership of Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC) makes this a bitter pill to swallow. You created the simple toggle that allows other developers to enable EAC for Proton and Linux. You gladly empower other studios to support Linux gamers, yet your CEO publicly refuses to do it for your own flagship title, citing paranoia about combating cheating “at scale” on open kernels—a stance you have not a single shred of evidence to support, even with countless titles already using your own anti-cheat on Linux.
By refusing to flip that single toggle, you are actively gatekeeping your games from the fastest-growing form factor in PC gaming right now: the Linux-based handheld market. You are locking out millions of potential players unless they jump through the hoops of dual-booting Windows. It’s an ecosystem war, plain and simple, and gamers are the collateral damage. You don’t actually give a flying f*** about us, you only care about your pockets, which is ironically exactly where this is all hitting you.
The Bottom Line
When you gatekeep your game from growing hardware platforms to spite a competitor, and refuse to leverage the AI hardware sitting inside your players’ GPUs just to protect your proprietary engine tech, you alienate your player base. The massive waves of disinterest and crashing engagement are the direct result of hypocritically refusing to flip the basic toggles that modern PC gamers expect.
Stop fighting the computers your players own before it’s too late and you become just another piece of obscure lost media.