The 11th Hour Dispatch — Friday, October 26, 2018
YOUNG MONEY
Epic Games, the masterminds behind the cultural phenomenon Fortnite, has raised a massive $1.25 billion, making it the second-largest gaming investment in history. Participants in the round include KKR, ICONIQ Capital, Smash Ventures, aXiomatic, Vulcan Capital, Kleiner Perkins, and Lightspeed Venture Partners. They join existing heavyweight minority investors Tencent, Disney, and Endeavor. With the insane boom in popularity of Fortnite, Epic Games has been expanding into merchandising and funding esports tournaments in the community, so it wouldn’t surprising to see more of this with this insanely huge amount of money. Fortnite has racked up over $1 billion revenue and has been downloaded “hundreds of millions” of times.
BINGE WATCH
Sad day for film nerds. The classic cinema streaming service FilmStruck just became WarnerMedia’s latest casualty. Since AT&T acquired Time Warner, WarnerMedia has been slashing niche ventures one by one. The Warner Bros. Digital Network/Turner co-venture joins Korean drama service DramaFever and alternative comedy digital studio Super Deluxe in the grave. WarnerMedia is instead looking to substantially bulk up its companies aimed at a mass-market audience.
FilmStruck will officially shut off November 29 and stopped accepting new subscribers today. Turner would not reveal how many subscribers would be losing access to their precious art films. To add insult to injury, this not only means that FilmStruck is gone, but it also means that the Warner Archive is dead. Warner Bros. shut down the classic film library’s service earlier this year and migrated its films over to FilmStruck to give it a second chance at life. Guess that worked out well.
BIG BUSINESS
SMDH. It’s come to the light that Andy Rubin, creator of the Android mobile software, had actually been accused of sexual misconduct when he left Google in 2014. And to make things worse, Google not only swept it under the rug, but it offered Rubin a $90 million exit package and a glowing public sendoff.
After this news broke, Google CEO Sundar Pichai hopped on the computer and sent out a company-wide email revealing that 48 people have been fired from Google for sexual harassment over the past two years, 13 of which were senior manager level or higher. None (other than Rubin who was not “technically” fired) received an exit package. Pichai called the New York Times article that revealed Google’s secret “hard to read.” That article noted that Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin had created a permissive culture and named several executives that had questionable personal relationships that bled into their professional lives.
NOTHIN’ BUT ‘NET
Here’s an interesting list of nostalgia from Gizmodo detailing the 100 websites that made the internet.
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