Epic Games laid off around 1,000 employees a few days back, and one of the people let go was a programmer-writer named Mike Prinke, who has terminal brain cancer. His wife, Jenni Griffin, posted about it on social media and explained that losing the job means losing the healthcare coverage and life insurance that the family was relying on to manage his condition. The post picked up fast and eventually reached Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, who responded publicly and said the company would step in.
Sweeney wrote on social media that “Epic is in contact with the family and will solve the insurance for them” and apologized for not catching the situation before it became public. Griffin has since updated her post to confirm that Epic reached out. But it took a viral social media post for the CEO to even find out about it, and that is the part that has stuck with people online.
Jenni Griffin Revealed Her Husband Cannot Get New Insurance
Griffin’s post laid out the full picture of what the family is dealing with. Mike Prinke has terminal brain cancer, and his healthcare coverage through Epic would have continued for about six months after the layoff, but his life insurance ended immediately the day he was let go.
The bigger problem is that because of the terminal diagnosis, he cannot apply for a new plan anywhere. No insurer will cover him. Griffin wrote, “If the people who made this decision understood the full human impact, they would not have intended this outcome,” and asked people to share the post in the hope that it would reach someone at Epic who could do something about it.
The post gained traction quickly across X and Reddit, and ‘Fortnite‘ fans in particular started pushing it because Prinke had worked on the game. That is how it ended up in front of Sweeney. If that post had not gone viral, there is a real chance the company would never have found out, and it would never have done anything about it, and that is what has made people angry.
Related: Epic Games Lays Off Over 1000 Employees As Fortnite Engagement Continues To Drop
A company with that many employees laying off a thousand people at once was always going to miss individual situations like this, but laying off someone with a terminal illness and having no system in place to catch that before it happens is what most of the criticism has been about.
Sweeney Apologized And Said The Company Did Not Know About Prinke’s Medical Situation
Sweeney responded to a post resharing Griffin’s story, saying that Epic is working with the family to sort out the insurance. He also explained that there is “high confidentiality around medical information” at the company and that Prinke’s health status did not factor into the decision to lay him off because the people making that call did not know about it.
He apologized “to everyone for not recognizing this terribly painful situation and handling it in advance,” which is one of the few times Sweeney has publicly taken responsibility for how the layoffs have affected specific people.
Prinke is not the only person whose family is dealing with the fallout from the Epic layoffs, and a lot of people have pointed out that his situation only got addressed because his wife’s post went viral. There are likely others in similar positions who did not get that kind of attention, and that is what has made this story feel bigger than just one case.
In Case You Missed: YouTuber Typical Gamer Wants To Buy Fortnite Ballistic Before Epic Games Shuts It Down
Epic is one of many major studios that have cut staff over the past couple of years, and the gaming industry as a whole has been going through rounds of layoffs and closures that have left thousands of people out of work.
