Epic Games, the developer of the incredibly popular "Fortnite," is eyeing a new corporate headquarters in Cary, North Carolina. The Wall Street Journal reports that the company has reached a deal to pay $95 million for the structure that will serve as their new corporate home, and the most interesting part is that the complex is now known as the Cary Towne Center mall.
The Cary Towne Center mall sprawls across 980,000 square feet, which Epic intends to convert to "offices and recreation space" with plenty of extra space for the company's future growth. The company also says that there may be space for some kind of use by the public, but hasn't revealed any specific plans for what that might look like. But the new Epic Games North Carolina campus will take a while to be completed, and the current plan is for it to be open sometime in 2024.
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Epic is currently headquartered in Cary, so the decision to purchase the mall came from a desire to stay there while spreading out with more space to grow. And Epic Games communications director Elka Looks says that a physical office as opposed to phasing in remote workers on an indefinite basis is important to the work they do:
"Much of our work is highly collaborative, and we want to give employees the ability to use an office when it is safe to do so."
Shopping malls in the United States are not the booming centers of commerce they once were, as online retail has bitten into a larger and larger slice of their business. Epic is not the first company to think of repurposing one as office space – Google is doing the same with the Westside Pavilion in Los Angeles, while a company called Urban Edge Properties recently made a similar announcement regarding a mall in Massapequa, New York.
