Epic Games cut more than 1,000 jobs. Tim Sweeney publicly said other employers would now get access to "once-in-a-lifetime" resumes. Then Chet Faliszek got on TikTok.
Faliszek, a former Valve writer whose credits include the Half-Life 2 episodes, Portal, Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, did not hold back. The video, posted to his TikTok account, laid out a pointed critique of Sweeney and the direction Epic has taken as a company.
Why would anyone at Epic work hard?
"Can someone explain this to me," Faliszek opens. "Why anybody who works at Epic should work hard? Cause Epic just laid off 1,000 people."
He pointed out that Epic is not a publicly traded company with quarterly earnings pressure to satisfy. There is no external board forcing Sweeney's hand. "This is Tim Sweeney. This is Tim," Faliszek said. "A thousand people is more than who work at Valve."
That last point lands hard. Valve, one of the most profitable companies in gaming per employee, operates with a headcount smaller than the number of people Epic just let go in a single round of cuts. The Epic layoffs announcement came alongside Sweeney admitting the company was "spending significantly more than we're making," which followed years of Epic aggressively expanding into music (Bandcamp), live events, and a store war with Steam that burned through enormous resources.
The Gabe Newell comparison nobody asked for but everyone needed
Faliszek did not stop at the numbers. He went straight at the philosophical difference between how Valve runs its business and how Epic has evolved.
"Tim has gone from making games to making one game, spending all his time doing that and trying to make as much money as possible," Faliszek said. "And I guess well, hey, Tim, Gabe's better at that than you."
Here's the thing: that is not just a burn. It is a substantive point. Gabe Newell built Valve into a company that generates extraordinary profit per employee precisely because it kept its headcount lean, gave staff real ownership over what they built, and did not chase every adjacent market it could find. Epic did the opposite, scaling aggressively and now cutting just as aggressively.
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Faliszek left Valve in 2017 and has no current financial stake in the company. His defense of Valve's model is based on his experience as an employee, not as a shareholder.
Faliszek described working at Valve as feeling like genuine ownership. "When I worked at Valve, I owned Valve. It was my company." He acknowledged the ambiguity there since Valve is a private company and his meaning was likely more about culture than equity. But the contrast he was drawing was clear: at Valve, people stayed because they felt invested. At Epic, that sense of investment has been eroded by repeated rounds of cuts.
What the layoffs signal for Fortnite and Epic's future
The cuts are not just a headcount statistic. Epic also shut down Fortnite Rocket Racing, Ballistic, and Festival Battle Stage as part of the same restructuring. A Fortnite producer has since asked players for patience as the remaining team "picks up the pieces," adding that the full impact on the game "for the rest of the year and likely beyond" cannot even be fully understood yet.
Faliszek connected this to a broader industry problem. "What we're doing to the industry now and the seniority, we're losing the care, we're losing the passion." He compared the situation to EA's treatment of developers who shipped a successful game only to receive a pink slip in return.
The key here is that Faliszek is not some random commentator. He spent years at Valve working on games that still have active communities. His perspective on what makes a studio function, and what breaks it, carries weight.
PC Gamer reached out to Epic and Sweeney for comment. The company did not respond to Faliszek's remarks specifically, instead pointing to a Newsroom post from March 24 that addressed the layoffs in general terms.
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