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"I spent the past week debugging the rivalry system while recovering from pneumonia, and just in the past few days, I’ve had multiple directors tell me how much they appreciate everything I do," wrote Evan Kinney, a principal engineer at Epic Games who worked across Fortnite and Unreal Engine, confirming that he was among those laid off by Epic today.
According to his LinkedIn, Kinney had been at Epic for nearly nine years, joining as a Senior Software Engineer in July 2017 before being promoted to Principal Engineer in June 2025, less than a year before today's cuts.
His posts on X have since gone viral, drawing over 13k likes and half a million views - numbers that will likely be much higher by the time you read this.
"I am genuinely so confused and bewildered," he wrote.
In a follow-up post, he went further. "I have done so much for this company and our games. So many late nights, so many weekends, so many live events, and competitive events, and new features, and new seasons. Solid performance reviews every time, with multiple people mentioning how critical I am and what an impact I make across multiple teams. Just to be thrown out. I don't get it."
It is a reminder that behind Tim Sweeney's memo and the headline figure of 1,000-plus jobs cut, there are people who showed up and did the work right up until the moment they were told they no longer had a job to come back to, which is frankly devastating.
Epic's layoffs were announced earlier today, with Sweeney citing declining Fortnite revenue as the primary cause.
