Why is there a story about Fortnite on the front page of the Washington Post’s site? Beats me. Here’s a link, but it’s paywalled, and it doesn’t seem like it’s available for a gift link.
Seems the occasion is the five-year anniversary of Fortnite? And some sort of new Marvel tie-in, based on the fact that they got a quote from the Russo brothers’ PR team about something something Fortnite videogames Thanos something something: exactly the sort of insightful stuff you’d expect from whatever PR agency works for the guys who did those Infinity Stones movies.
But the most interesting thing to me was this paragraph:
So Fortnite is so successful Epic doesn’t do PR? Or they just don’t do PR with the Washington Post? I wonder what the story is behind that line. I wonder why Disney/Marvel made sure to pony up an obligatory quote, which seems like the bare minimum you’d want to do for mainstream press coverage. But Epic couldn’t be bothered?
Epic be like:
Seriously though, maybe they got weird vibes from the article’s writer? Like they were afraid the article would be about how the game is ruining the youths or something?
Is there a beef between Epic and Amazon? WaPo belongs to Bezos, and sometimes little tiffs occur. (When I worked on a video game for Amazon, they refused to fly their people into the Denver airport because they were peeved with the state government. They would fly to Cheyenne and drive down…)
That’s what I thought, which would have been a real failure of communication, because the article was a total puff piece that Epic could have dressed up or even helped shape with a few quotes.
But I keep forgetting about the Amazon link with the Post and now I’m wondering if @Nightgaunt might be onto something. Maybe some toes got stepped on during Amazon’s clumsy dance to get online with games like New World and whatever is going on with their Lumberyard engine. In which case, yeesh, that’s even pettier than fretting about the writer applying a negative slant.
Wait, seriously? Like you couldn’t book travel into Colorado on the company dime? I’ve done a lot of travel for various corporate gigs and I’ve never heard of such a thing!
Well, I was with the dev studio in Colorado, and when the folks on the Amazon side came to visit, they couldn’t fly directly in. I imagine there was no way for them to not patronize Colo hotels and restaurants, but other than that, their instructions were to not spend money in the state at all.
The “reason” was that Colorado had passed a law collecting sales tax from online purchases. Bezos himself made the rule that Amazon would not do business with Colorado (and a couple other states as well, if I recall). We were lucky they even signed a deal to work with a Colo company like us at all.
(Another fun fact: This was a game we were making for the Amazon Fire phone, a super top secret project at the time, and a pet project of Bezos. We had to keep the prototype devices in a safe, and only in certain parts of the building, away from windows, etc. Turned out to be a secret project no one wanted to buy once it launched.)
Come on: living the paranoid life of a spy. Priceless!
