Sergiy Galyonkin – aka Mr. SteamSpy himself – has left Epic Games after nearly a decade on the Fortnite maker, together with six years as its director of publishing technique, saying that he’s now not “a very good match” for the writer.
After a variety of years within the video games trade, Galyonkin got here to wider web fame in 2015 because the thoughts behind Steam data-tracking web site SteamSpy, which estimated helpful information equivalent to playtime and recreation gross sales on Valve’s PC storefront by gathering information from customers’ profiles.
That information was particularly helpful for Epic, who employed Galyonkin as Eastern European head of publishing in 2016. Galyonkin then shifted into the position of director of publishing technique shortly after and helped the Unreal maker launch its personal Steam rival, the Epic Games Store, in 2018, utilizing a number of the information from SteamSpy. That identical yr, Valve up to date its privateness settings, chopping off entry to the information that SteamSpy had been constructed on.
“We challenged the established order in recreation distribution with the 88/12 income share,” Galyonkin mentioned of his time at Epic.
Announcing on Twitter that right now, October 2nd, was his final day at Epic, Galyonkin expressed gratitude to “my former Epic Games colleagues and Tim Sweeney for permitting me to assist construct Epic 4.0”.
“Now, Epic Games is on its option to remodeling from a recreation developer, engine creator, and writer right into a platform – Epic 5.0,” Galyonkin continued. “I’m not a very good match for this new model of Epic; it requires individuals of a special variety.”
He was additionally there for the launch of Fortnite in 2017, which he mentioned “grew to become a kind of self-reinforcing cultural phenomena I wrote about only a yr prior” in proving that “free-to-play with out pay-to-win can work at scale”.
— Sergiy Galyonkin (@galyonkin) October 2, 2023
Galyonkin expressed thanks for Epic’s donation of $144 million to help charities working in Ukraine within the wake of Russia’s invasion, saying “it means the world to me [and] I’ll ceaselessly be grateful”.
Galyonkin confirmed that he would stay within the video games trade, saying he “hope[s] to be extra vocal now that I don’t have to fret in regards to the PR division knocking on my DMs”.
Galyonkin didn’t verify whether or not his departure was associated to Epic’s latest announcement that it could lay off greater than 800 employees as the results of heavy funding and decrease than predicted income returns from Fortnite.
