Beleaguered Epic Games, peddler of the “Fortnite” video game, is laying off 870 employees, Bloomberg News reports citing “people familiar with the matter.”
Jason Schreier for Bloomberg News:
The job cuts, which affect about 16% of its workforce, were announced in a memo to staff, said the people, who asked not to be named disclosing information that’s not yet public.
Employees who were affected by the job cuts will receive six months of severance and health insurance, as well as accelerated stock vesting.
Chief Executive Officer Tim Sweeney owns the majority of shares while the Chinese conglomerate Tencent Holdings Ltd. has a 40% stake.
MacDailyNews Take: Epically karmic.
Epic Games should be a lesson in business schools worldwide. They created a hugely successful game, “Fortnite,” and then its Chief Executive Moron Tim Sweeney decided his next genius move would be to burn untold amounts on litigation and bad PR campaigns in a failed crusade get all of the benefits of Apple’s App Store for free. That money wasted on lawyers and laughable ads could, and should, have been invested in growing the business, promoting “Fortnite,” paying employees, etc.
Now Epic Games employees reap what Tim Sweeney hubristically sowed.
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I hear it’s the best season yet, but I do doubt there’s much growth left for them.
Sweeney should have spent more time running the company instead of trying to circumvent Apple’s App Store.
Let’s not forget their shifty, sneaky behavior in charging customers for things the customer never asked for
MDN needs to stop with their fanboy commentary. The App Store is a monopoly, it happens when a product becomes the standard. History is full of businesses or products that naturally become the industry. What the US government has to decide is, if breaking up the control of Apples and Googles App Store will cause harm or will it be a benefit to consumers if the companies have no control of hosting the apps. That is where it gets sticky.
What would breaking up Google’s Play Store look like? Samsung and Amazon’s App stores are significantly large and popular to currently stand as competitors to Google’s.
Breaking up Apple’s App Store, on the other hand, would have significant impact on Apple’s bottom line. I guess a bright side to having Apple’s App Store broken up would be denying countries like China a single point to control what Apps are installed in iOS devices in China.
The breakup of the app stores of Apple and Google will be messy and most likely will result in another monolpy down the road. I could see some independent business running the App Stores outside of Apple or Google interference and they will still charge some “handling tax/fee.” The government really doesn’t care about the effect on a business with their rulings just look what they did to Microsoft in the late 90s.