hello world!

The part that has personally stung me the most is that the 1000+ people who we laid off are human beings who trust Epic Games for stability and a place to build amazing experiences! They have families, bills, and, as Tim stated, we did nothing wrong. This was not a performance-based layoff like so many companies do. I can personally testify to this as I saw the names of many who were let go; these people are people who built Fortnite, Epic Games Store, Epic Online Services, Fall Guys, Garage Band, Rocket League, Artstation, MegaScans, … from the ground up! Truly amazing and very capable human beings! This was the result of Epic Games' miscalculation of the market and the runway for Fortnite in its current format. It’s truly sad that it is the doers who got the pickaxe!

I haven't started looking into what is next for me; I'mostly focusing on helping the AWESOME PEOPLE impacted by the layoff, and spending time with my amazing fam (5 kiddos!). Spring Break is this week! Woohoo!

Things to know about me: I love people, and I'm a builder! So, within 2 hours of being laid off, I built the AWESOME PEOPLE List, and it went viral across LinkedIn! The best thing is that it made its way to talent executives at Rockstar, CDPR, Activision Blizzard, Rushdown Studios, etc. The talent execs distributed that list to their recruiters and told them to get these folks in for interviews! I'll write more about this in a future post, but this truly has brought me so much joy this week!

NOTE TO RECRUITERS & STUDIO HEADS: If you need to hire people who know how to build massively scalable and beautiful games. The AWESOME PEOPLE List is full of them!

Here we are, I'm starting this newsletter: UGC Playbook! In my last role, I was leading the UEFN (Unreal Engine for Fortnite) Accelerator program.

TL; DR - The UEFN Accelerator was a startup-esqe accelerator program where we provided money, mentoring, and marketing to help big brands and established video game companies to launch in the UEFN ecosystem.

So I’m writing the newsletter to continue to help people learn how to build and launch UGC experiences so they can meaningfully connect with new players and find success in the various UGC ecosystems.

There are so many topics that I’m excited to cover in future newsletters here to help people get started and carve out their corner in the UGC world!

The last thing I helped launch while at Epic Games was helping Mattel launch UNO Royale in Fortnite. I love the team at Mattel! They truly understand the future of UGC and have a good bearing on where it is going!