Did any of you spend time as a kid playing that Mall Madness board game where you got to shop for pretend stuff with a pretend credit card? That really conditioned me for consumer restraint later in life, let me tell you. And it must have had some impact on Epic Games’ Tim Sweeney, too, because he just bought a mall of his very own.
Well, OK, Epic Games bought the Cary Towne Center mall in North Carolina to convert it into a massive headquarters for the Fortnite developer.
The deal set Epic Games back by $95 million — a drop in the studio’s $17.3 billion bucket, really — and gave them 980,000 square feet to play with in return. The studio will need it, too, since it employs a shopping mall’s amount of employees (some 2,200 worldwide). The new headquarters, located just down the road from the current building, is expected to be completed by 2024.
The whole mall won’t just be made into Epic HQ, however. There are plans to construct a sports and rec center on the site for the town.
Cary’s mayor welcomed the deal to repurpose the dying mall: “We’re extremely proud that Epic has chosen to call Cary home for their new global headquarters, and we greatly appreciate the company’s recognition of Cary’s existing assets as well as the unlimited potential of the area for their growing business.”
