Sharp decline in Official Responses from Epic throughout the community.

[Zeblote]

@muchcharles

They’ve released around 4 games on a 6 month or less cadence (Paragon, Roborecall, Fortnite, Fortnite: BR). 3/4 of them are “games as a service” which require major ongoing attention, especially in the initial launch period. My guess is they are just busy and have pulled resources to focus on first launching and then fighting fires on those games.

Fortnite: BR has had 810,000 concurrent players, and has probably taken a huge effort to have rolled out as smooth as it has. They’ve said publicly UT4 people were pulled off of UT4 in creating it. Some of the engine community team may have be splitting time helping out with community stuff on those games (I haven’t kept up with the forums for the games so don’t know that for sure), etc.

Fortnite: BR hasn’t necessarily brought in a lot of new monetary resources yet, given that it hasn’t been monetized. PUBG, as mentioned earlier, surely has brought in some major cash: $60,000,000 if all copies were sold at $30 and Bluehole paid 5% without a special negotiated rate (it’s only ~$15 in China though, so that is a big overestimate). But even with an influx of money, bringing in the right people always has a large lead time. Hopefully they can increase staff rapidly and avoid causing employee burnout.

All that activity is having lots of benefits to the stability/performance/battle-hardenedness of the engine. If your game uses a similar setup to any of their production games, things are now really getting solid without as many surprises as you would run into in the past.

If that was the case, surely they could just say that instead of hiding and ignoring everyone?