Epic Games Head of Publishing Strategy Sergiy Galyonkin leaves company

Following the announcement of mass layoffs at Epic Games, another major player is leaving the company. Sergiy Galyonkin had been with the company for just under 8 years, having helped develop and launch Epic Games Store. He was the Director of Publishing Strategy at Epic Games, and was working to make the platform more prominent in Eastern Europe, but this week Galyonkin announced that his time with Epic Games is up. He officially resigned and is vacating his position with the company.

Sergiy Galyonkin would share official word of his resignation on his personal Twitter on October 2, 2023. Although the mass layoffs reported at Epic Games last week were not mentioned in the statement, Galyonkin shared he did not feel he was a good fit for the direction the company was headed. His full statement can be seen below:

Sergiy Galyonkin shared his statement of resignation from Epic Games on his personal Twitter, claiming he wouldn't be a good fit in the company's latest era.
Source: Sergiy Galyonkin

Today is officially my last day at Epic Games. These eight years have been some of the most exciting of my career, and I am deeply grateful to my former Epic Games colleagues and Tim Sweeney for allowing me to help build Epic 4.0.

I am also immensely thankful for the generous $144M donation Epic Games sent to various charities to help Ukraine in the early days of the Russian invasion of 2022. At that time, Epic Games was ahead of some G7 countries in providing support. It means the world to me, and while I wasn’t always polite during those discussions, I will forever be grateful.

We launched Fortnite, which later became one of those self-reinforcing cultural phenomena I wrote about just a year prior. We proved that free-to-play without pay-to-win can work at scale. We challenged the status quo in game distribution with the 88/12 revenue share.

Now, Epic Games is on its way to transforming from a game developer, engine creator, and publisher, into a platform - Epic 5.0. I am not a good fit for this new version of Epic; it requires people of a different kind.

I plan to remain in the gaming industry. I also hope to be more vocal now that I don’t have to worry about the PR department knocking on my DMs.

Again, thank you to everyone I worked with at Epic Games - it was an incredible journey, and I will always cherish it.

Sergiy Galyonkin began work at Epic Games in 2016 when he was hired as the Eastern Europe-focused Head of Publishing. Before that, he created SteamSpy, which was instrumental in automatically gathering player data and breaking said down into stats such as unit sales and aggregate play-time on a given game. Galyonkin used his knowledge from work on SteamSpy to develop similar analytic systems for the Epic Games Store. In doing so, he was instrumental in EGS’s official launch back in 2018.

Galyonkin didn’t signal where he might end up following his resignation from Epic Games, but claimed he’d still be working in the games industry. As such, we may see him show up elsewhere in the very near future. Stay tuned for further updates on this story.