One unfortunate Fortnite developer was laid off twice by Epic Games

Despite earning an estimated $6 billion in revenue in 2025, Epic Games has laid off over 1,000 staff due to Fortnite's apparent "downturn" in revenue. This news comes as the game industry is in turmoil, with layoffs impacting thousands of developers across numerous studios. Epic's last round of layoffs cut 830 staff from the company in 2023. One especially unlucky developer was laid off both times around.

Melissa Wafful was an early career program manager at Epic for over a year until she was laid off in September 2023, alongside 829 of her colleagues. This represented 16% of Epic's staff in a year when the company was estimated to earn $5.6 billion (£4.2 billion) in revenue. Fortnite was, and remains, one of the biggest multiplayer games in the world.

Less than a year later, Wafful was rehired at Epic as a project manager, where she worked for another two years until the next round of layoffs. This time, they affected over a thousand people at the company, despite an estimated revenue of over $6 billion (£4.5 billion) last year - approximately $1.2 million (£900,000) per employee.

While Sweeney says that the layoffs "aren't related to AI," he mentions that Epic has "taken a lot of bullets," presumably alluding to the developer's costly lawsuit against Apple, which came to a head last year.

Wafful's LinkedIn profile says she has a passion for sharing national days and notes in her 'looking for work' post that yesterday was National Chocolate Covered Raisin Day. She says she needs to "disconnect" for a while, but will be looking for a job alongside scores of her former colleagues in the coming days.

Looking through the countless LinkedIn posts and social media messages, the laid-off Epic employees all seem to share a deep love of Fortnite, Epic, and each other. There is little bitterness, despite the circumstances. The layoffs have impacted employees across the company, from decade-serving veterans to fresh faces who've been at the company for less than a year. And, for Wafful, it's the second time she's been laid off by the same company in three years.