Epic Games CEO says company will ‘solve’ insurance for terminally ill former employee

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has spoken out after a former employee battling terminal brain cancer lost life insurance as part of the company’s March 26 layoffs.

In a post to X on March 29, Sweeney said Epic had reached out to the family to address the former employee’s loss of insurance and apologized for not handling it prior to the layoffs.

“Epic is in contact with the family and will solve the insurance for them,” Sweeney wrote. “There is high confidentiality around medical information and it was not a factor in this layoff decision. Sorry to everyone for not recognizing this terribly painful situation and handling it in advance.”

Today’s statement follows a social media post from the former employee’s wife, who said her husband, a terminal brain cancer patient, lost his life insurance as part of the layoffs and would be unable to obtain new coverage due to his pre-existing condition.

“So now, as I face the reality of losing my husband… I’m also facing the reality of what type of funeral/burial I can afford,” she wrote. “How I will keep a roof over our heads. How I will protect our son and the life we built together.”

The March 26 layoffs affected more than 1,000 Epic employees. In a letter published to staff alongside the layoffs, Sweeney explained the company’s reasoning, citing a decline in Fortnite engagement that began in 2025 and led to significant revenue losses.

“Despite Fortnite remaining one of the most successful games in the world, we’ve had challenges delivering consistent Fortnite magic with every season,” Sweeney wrote in the letter. “We’re only in the early stages of returning to mobile and optimizing Fortnite for the world’s billions of smartphones; and in being the industry’s vanguard we have taken a lot of bullets in a battle which is only in the early days of paying off for ourselves and all developers.”

In the letter, Sweeney also said impacted employees would receive severance of at least four months’ base pay and six months of Epic-paid healthcare coverage in the U.S. Life insurance, however, is typically treated as a separate benefit and was not mentioned in Sweeney’s letter, suggesting it was not part of the severance package.

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The Play It Your Way update has dropped in PEAK, and it completely introduces the way we have played the game so far. If you felt that the general gameplay was a hard challenge, it all changes now. This guide will give you a quick overview of all the major changes and what you can expect from the patch.

Complete PEAK Play It Your Way update patch notes

Here’s an overview of all major changes made as part of the new patch.

Custom Runs

You can completely change how runs worked so far in PEAK. You can make them as easy or hard as you want. You can also choose which tools to spawn with and what kind of hazards you can encounter on your run. You can also tweak how the environmental hazards work and how severe/relaxing their effects are.

Mini Runs

If you don’t have time for a full-scale adventure, you can try out Mini Runs. They will allow you to play a single biome of the daily map. These quick runs can be quite intense without being unnecessarily long.

Campfire Autosaves

It’s now easier to pause and resume our adventures without losing much progress. All you need to do is reach a campfire. You’ll be able to save all your progress automatically by accessing a campfire, and you can quit. You can later resume the adventure from the autosave, and this works until you win, lose, or begin a fresh run.

Additionally, you can hang out at a campfire without any hunger or fog progression. It will only extinguish after the scout leaves.

Zombie Phobia mode

If you hated the zombies, you can now disable them completely on Custom Runs. However, you can also use the Zombie Phobia mode to make things less graphic if you want.

Here are some minor changes that are part of this patch.

• Achievements that need to be done in a single run will now maintain their progress if a player disconnects/reconnects (such as Gourmand or Mycology badges)
• Fixed a long-standing issue where interacting with a rope shooter’s rope immediately after it was fired could cause a division by zero, causing chaotic behaviour, including locking the player’s controls or sending them to the void.
• Fixed issue where sometimes scouts would not revive when reconnecting in cases where they should have.
• Made the endgame scout report work properly after disconnecting and reconnecting to a game.
•  Audio sliders and kick button will now show up immediately when a new player joins without needing to re-open the menu.
• Scouts that were skeletons when they disconnected will still be skeletons when they reconnect.
• Fixed a bug where Player 3 and Player 4 would spawn in the same location.
• Rescue Hook now doesn’t put you in a ragdolled state for as long, making it easier to use.

The post PEAK Play It Your Way update patch notes: Biggest changes and more appeared first on Destructoid.