That and the EGS seem to be where Epic funneled all their profits from the height of Fornite. That neither has worked out puts them on shakier ground. How many billions of dollars has been spent on EGS with it being way behind their revenue targets?
As things stand, Epic has very little in the way of a next big revenue source when Fortnite starts to fade as something new takes its place. That (probably) isn’t right around the corner but it will happen eventually. Their bet was on running major digital storefronts; that hasn’t worked out. UE will continue to make good money but not anywhere near enough to sustain the company as it is. UE is simply far smaller than something like FN.
This is likely them realizing this in conjunction with what you said. They need a new big revenue source in the pipeline, since digital storefronts won’t be it. Whatever that next thing is will need lots of money.
Cities Skylines sees a fairly decent improvement going to the 3D cache chips from AMD (17% speedup here for the 5800x3D). Whats your ability to increase the budget to go for a 7800X3D look like? If this is a genre of game you like and you want to hold off as long as possible between upgrades, it might be worth springing the extra. The difference the 3D cache provides in some games is rather extraordinary. City builders, automation, and similar games tend to benefit the most. AAA games tend to benefit the least (some with effectively no gain).
A 7600X should be more than capable of handling the game though. So it’s not a question of need but if it’s worth it to you.
You do not want 4800 CL40 RAM though, that’s too slow. I’d strongly recommend going for 32GB of RAM as well; 16GB can be gobbled up quickly, especially if you want to use mods in Cities Skylines.
Going up even to DDR5-6000 is not much of a price increase. I’d suggest 6000 and something in the range of CL36-CL40. There’s a lot of 32GB kits in those specs in the ~$90 range. I would not build a gaming system today with 16GB of RAM.