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It’s never a good look when the company running what is still, inarguably, one of the most popular and successful games in the world lays off 1,000 people, as happened with Fortnite maker Epic Games this week. It makes you ask questions like: Is the game industry doomed? Or, alternatively: What the hell was Epic spending all its money (an estimated $6 billion of annual revenue) on, anyway?
I asked some people who should know what on earth was going on, and got a range of answers. Fortnite still tops the engagement charts on console, but maybe it really is well past its peak by now, and Epic keeps making unpopular moves, like raising the cost of V-Bucks. Or, perhaps, all the kids swarming the game to play Brainrot games aren’t spending anything. Or — most depressingly plausible to me — Epic, which is still a private company, is simply making its balance sheets look more attractive ahead of a much-rumored stock market listing.
Here’s another theory. Over the past four or five years, Epic has invested a tremendous amount into turning a very popular battle royale game into a social network, a virtual hangout space in which players’ persistent avatars flit between multiple different games and attractions. In a word: a metaverse.
Remember the metaverse? That thing the tech world was obsessed with after crypto mining and NFTs, and before generative AI? The thing Mark Zuckerberg changed the name of his company for (embarrassing!) and wasted an estimated $80 billion chasing before quietly giving up this year? Yeah, that.
