Sergiy Galyonkin, an industry veteran and creator of analytics tool Steam Spy, appears to have left Epic Games. For the past several years, he has served as the company’s director of publishing strategy.
Sergiy Galyonkin (Image credit: personal blog)
Galyonkin hasn’t publicly announced his departure, but his updated profile on LinkedIn indicates that he left Epic Games in September 2023.
The only comment from Galyonkin appeared on social media platform Bluesky. “In good news — I can write about video games again,” he wrote on October 1 (a screenshot was shared by ITC.ua).
It is also unclear whether he left Epic Games voluntary or was among the 830 people recently laid off by the company. Last week, the Unreal and Fortnite maker announced that it will be cutting 16% of its staff to stabilize its finances.
Update: Galyonkin eventually shared a statement on X (Twitter), confirming his departure and thanking CEO Tim Sweeney “for allowing me to help build Epic 4.0.” He also thanked the company for helping raise $144 million for humanitarian aid in Ukraine last year.
“Now, Epic Games is on its way to transforming from a game developer, engine creator, and publisher into a platform — Epic 5.0,” the statement reads. “I am not a good fit for this new version of Epic; it required people of a different kind.”
— Sergiy Galyonkin (@galyonkin) October 2, 2023
Galyonkin joined Epic Games in February 2016 as head of publishing for Eastern Europe. In August 2017, he became director of publishing strategy. When the company announced the Epic Games Store in December 2018, Galyonkin noted that he has been “working on this project at my day job for the past several years.”
So he was the one who helped Epic launch the platform and implement its core features and strategy, including timed exclusives and the 88/12 revenue share model.
Prior to that, Galyonkin worked as a marketing director and analyst at other game studios such as Nival, Wargaming, and 1C Multimedia. In the 2000s, he was also the editor-in-chief of Ukrainian video game magazine Gameplay.
However, most people in the gamedev community know Galyonkin as the creator of Steam Spy, an analytics tool to estimate the number of “owners” for each game on Steam. Launched in 2015, it initially collected data from user profiles and, despite not being 100% correct, became really popular among game developers and enthusiasts.
Galyonkin also used this knowledge and applied some of the lessons he learned when working on Steam Spy to the Epic Games Store. Here is what he told Kotaku in December 2018: “I’ve learned a lot about how games are tracking [week] over week, how effective are sales (not as much as people think, exposure is more important), and more importantly, I got to talk to hundreds of developers to learn what they want from a digital store and what they like and don’t like about existing one.”