TinyBuild shut down Versus Evil on the last day before Christmas | This Week in Business
This Week in Business is our weekly recap column, a collection of stats and quotes from recent stories presented with a dash of opinion (sometimes more than a dash) and intended to shed light on various trends. Check every Friday for a new entry.
Our top story this week is that TinyBuild announced that it was shutting down Versus Evil, the indie publisher it acquired in 2021.
It might have been an easy bit of news to miss, what with it being announced on Friday, December 22, the last working day before Christmas, when much of the industry had already set their out-of-office auto-replies and unplugged to spend some time relaxing with family and friends.
It was announced with a tweet at 1 p.m. Eastern time, a couple hours after our last regular newsletter of the year was sent out, so we didn't even get the chance to put it in our daily round-up.
We know companies often get accused of shenanigans in order to avoid bad press of the sort that would accompany things like shutting down a division that you just acquired two years prior, or laying people off on the last working day of the year. One might make you look incompetent, while the other might make you look heartless, and no business wants to look like that.
Even so, it's really unfair that people could even suggest TinyBuild would treat their employees so callously in an attempt to sneak that news by with the wider industry taking as little notice as possible.
But I know that's not TinyBuild's style, and I want to defend them from any such scurrilous accusations.
In fact, I'm so confident that this was just an unfortunate quirk of timing and the company wasn't trying to hide anything that I wanted to shout it from the rooftops and make TinyBuild's last-minute
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