I wrote about the Epic Games layoffs and the metaverse for the A.V. Club

Hey everyone,

I’ve got a new essay in the A.V. Club today about recent layoffs at Fortnite-maker Epic Games in the context of the company’s metaverse ambitions. Fortnite is one of the most successful video games of all time. So why has the company that makes it undergone two layoffs in three years, shedding nearly 2,000 jobs? The answer, as I see it, is Tim Sweeney, the company’s CEO and founder.¹

Here’s a snippet from around the halfway point in my A.V. Club essay that lays the groundwork for the main point of the piece.

🔗 You should read the rest before my commentary below. A huge thanks to Garrett Martin, games editor at the A.V. Club, for the opportunity. (As an aside, I still intend for ReaderGrev to be the main place I publish, but sometimes pitch, timing, availability and outlet all align and a story will land someplace else. Earlier this month, for example, the kind folks at Aftermath agreed to republish my essay about Marathon as satire on their site. Expect to see my work in a few new places in the near future! Ok, back to the essay.)

Truthfully, I am probably more ideologically aligned with Sweeney than not. I think he represents a kind of old internet anti walled-garden perspective which I mostly admire. One of the tensions in the piece is that I think Epic’s lawsuits against Apple and Google were directionally “good,” and I vaguely buy into the idea of the metaverse in an academic way. (As I write in the A.V. Club essay: “Is an internet oriented around text and multimedia uploads the end-state of only human interconnectivity? Probably not.”) I always threaten to read more Walter Ong to build out this point and then I never do, for better or worse.

But you have to live in the world as it exists, not as we might imagine it under the best circumstances. Within that frame, it’s pretty clear to me that Sweeney 1) hasn’t built the metaverse, not even close and 2) decided at some point that he could afford to finance lawsuits against the biggest companies on the planet in service of his ideological agenda, but not to pay some 2,000 employees. The first is a leadership failure, and the second is a choice — and in its own way, a different kind of failure of leadership.

I have a personal angle on this. I was recently laid off from The Washington Post, an ordeal I detailed in these pages. The media business, like the video game business, is extremely challenging. But many of The Post’s currently struggles can be traced to its owner. On the eve of the presidential election, Jeff Bezos decided to kill an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris, leading to an exodus of hundreds of thousands paid subscribers. You can make a good faith case that the editorial board shouldn’t be making endorsements. (I’m not sure I agree, but I’ve heard the argument before and get it. Regardless, it’s not obvious to me that Bezos was acting as a thoughtful and informed skeptic of the institution of journalistic opinion-making.) Whatever you think about the choice, the owner’s interventions cost the company ~250,000 subscribers that it probably couldn’t spare. People lost their jobs. So too, it feels, with Sweeney.

As always, I welcome folks’ thoughts and feedback. Appreciate you all reading. More from me soon. Cheers!

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If you have a tip, I can be reached on Bluesky or via email at mikhail (at) readergrev (dot) com.

Finally: I wrote the A.V. Club essay while listening to the soundtrack to the 2024 epic, The Brutalist. I particularly enjoyed Library and Overture (Bus).

1  For a parallel take on working in the games industry right now, I’d recommend this column from Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier.