For the first time ever, I am genuinely worried about Fortnite’s future.

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney announced this week that 1,000 people—about a fifth of all staff—would lose their job. The company brings in an estimated $6 billion a year but is “spending significantly more” than it is making, Sweeney said, citing a “downturn in Fortnite engagement”.

Let’s leave aside the question of just how Epic is spending more than $1 million per employee; let’s also leave aside the depressing fact that one of the most-played, most successful, most monetized games of all time cannot secure the future of its talented staff, now sacrificed to maintain sacred shareholder value. Let’s instead think about what this means for Fortnite The Video Game.

“What we now need to do is clear,” said Sweeney in his statement: “build awesome Fortnite experiences with fresh seasonal content, gameplay, story, and live events.” More revealing than Sweeney’s corpo-babble were the words of Fortnite producer Robby Williams, who posted on X that the aftermath of the layoffs would be “very hard and painful.”

“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,” he wrote.

Fortnite could go lots of ways from here. Not all of them are dreadful.

I can feasibly imagine a future in which Epic renews its focus on its core game modes of Battle Royale, Reload, and OG. If that happens, we might continue to see regular imaginative updates, in line with the fresh loot pool and rivalry system introduced in Chapter 7 Season 2 (although it’s inevitable some will hit, some will miss). That consolidation may already be in motion: alongside the layoffs Epic announced it was cutting three peripheral modes.

But it’s not hard to envisage a very different future, one in which remaining staff are under pressure to drive up precious “engagement” with fewer resources. It is clear that maintaining the status quo won’t cut it. Big number must go up—and the dev team, however talented, are swimming against the tide. Fortnite’s cultural cache is waning, fan goodwill is leaking away, and the general public have less money to spend.

And if Sweeney thinks a full-strength dev team has “had challenges delivering consistent Fortnite magic with every season,” then what does he expect to happen when he lops a limb off? After layoffs some tasks are inevitably absorbed by, or more accurately poured onto, remaining staff, who find their days stretching longer, their inboxes bursting. Tired, stressed minds rarely produce the “magic” Sweeney is hoping for.

From what Williams says, there’s no clear roadmap for what happens next. Staff appear to have been caught off-guard: principal engineer Evan Kinney said he was “confused and bewildered” after spending the past week debugging the new Rivals system while recovering from pneumonia.

The first priority for developers, quite rightly, must be to come to terms with the change and steady the ship. I’d be amazed if planned features were not delayed and burgeoning ideas shelved until it becomes clear just how bad the damage is. Then, somehow, they must look forward.

What happens in, say, a year if those remaining staff have not performed the miracle of both pulling in more players and convincing them to spend more money? Does Epic keep cutting, cutting, cutting? Does it look to the success of third-party modes like Steal The Brainrot, and try to copy them?

All this is taking place at a time where fan sentiment is at an all-time low. The apparent proliferation of AI art and music, revolts over price hikes for the V-bucks in-game currency, now, the game’s official subreddit is full of the names and stories of developers who have lost their jobs—with posts about Sweeney’s failures mixed in.

I know that Fortnite’s subreddit is not its fan base. I reckon that lots of players either don’t know or don’t care about what’s happened this week. But they will probably notice if updates slow, if the enormous ambition Fortnite shows season after season—new weapons, new maps, entire new systems—fizzles out.

I hope—really hope—that Fortnite’s devs strike gold and reverse the trend of gradually declining (albeit still massive) player counts. But I can’t help but fear the worst.