For years, major game publishers and developers have been chasing a particular north star: Fortnite. With its internet-shaking live events and copious celebrity cameos, Epic’s battle royale shooter became the epitome of what a live-service game could be, one that reached a level of cultural ubiquity that few other entertainment products could match while also raking in all kinds of money. And much of the games industry followed suit in an attempt to get a Fortnite-like cash cow of their own.

The results were disastrous. The biggest live-service games soaked up all of players’ time and money, leaving everyone else to fight for scraps. Layoffs, game cancellations, and studio closures followed. Now it turns out even Fortnite, the biggest name in the space, is struggling. Live-service games are an even bigger mess than I thought.

Yesterday Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney announced that the company was cutting more than 1,000 jobs (this came just three years after 830 jobs were cut). A number of reasons were given for the layoffs, but the most surprising was the current state of Fortnite. “The downturn in Fortnite engagement that started in 2025 means we’re spending significantly more than we’re making, and we have to make major cuts to keep the company funded,” Sweeney explained. He added that “despite Fortnite remaining one of the most successful games in the world, we’ve had challenges delivering consistent Fortnite magic with every season.”

The very thing that has made Fortnite such a success and the biggest player in the space is also what has made it so difficult to maintain. It’s a huge game, one that is constantly updated with new content, and that costs a lot of money to keep going. It’s not that Fortnite isn’t popular (it remains one of the biggest games in the world on a yearly basis) and it’s not that Epic doesn’t make money (analyst firm Statista estimated that Epic brought in more than $6 billion in revenue last year) — it’s that at the scale of Fortnite, even that is apparently not enough to make the game sustainable.

What this really means is that for the last few years, video game companies have been chasing a goal that is impossible to achieve. There have been some obvious live-service failures like Concord, Highguard, and FBC: Firebreak that simply weren’t popular enough to keep going. But the real problem is that even when a game is successful, it seems like it can never be successful enough because live-service games are so demanding. It’s not just Fortnite. Battlefield 6 was deemed a hit at launch, and EA invested heavily to make that happen, with four of the publisher’s major studios working on the game. EA called the game “a record-breaking success, shattering long-standing records for the Battlefield franchise.” And yet, the studios behind that success were still hit with layoffs earlier this month.

So what comes next? Fortnite is a hungry maw that’s expensive to feed, and now Epic will need to do it with an even smaller team. Perhaps the plan is to be more focused; along with the layoffs, Epic also announced that it was shutting down a handful of Fortnite’s game modes. It also previously raised prices because “the cost of running Fortnite has gone up a lot.” In his post announcing the layoffs, Sweeney said that moving forward the company needed to “build awesome Fortnite experiences with fresh seasonal content, gameplay, story, and live events.”

That sounds a lot like how Fortnite already operated. Only now it has to get done with 1,000 fewer people, including a number of long-term developers who helped shape the game, like design director Christopher Pope and character designer Vitaliy Naymushin. That sounds like a near-impossible task. In a post on X, Fortnite gameplay producer Robby Williams said that “our teams will have to pick up the pieces and try to keep moving forward but we cannot even fully understand what kind of impacts this will have on the game for the rest of the year and likely beyond.”

The best-case scenario is that the layoffs at Epic serve as something of a wake-up call for the industry. Previous studio closures and game shutdowns didn’t do much to slow down the release of new live-service games; Sony and Bungie just had a splashy launch for the extraction shooter Marathon, for example. But it’s clear now that live-service games, at least at the size and scale of something like Fortnite, are not a sustainable venture. If even the biggest game is struggling, there’s no longer much of a goal to chase after.