Good morning! No one loves getting a 👋 from the IRS, so spare a thought for Microsoft’s tax team who just got slapped with an unexpected $30 billion tax bill 🧾

🌶 Daily highlight 🌶

Epic Games rolled out an overhauled UI for the Fortnite home screen, with a focus on monetization and creator success.

One key shift was to recommend a plethora of experiences on the home screen. Here, Fortnite is guiding users to look past its own Battle Royale experience and instead try creator-made maps – a move aimed at increasing creator supply by driving higher engagement and monetization for creators 📈 

Fortnite also reordered its nav bar, nudging users to navigate through the in-game store to get to key play tabs. A/B tests likely showed that incremental in-app revenue ‘justified’ adding friction to a core user action 🚧

With financial pressures leading to layoffs and in-game currency price hikes, its not surprising to see Epic continuing to be aggressive with monetization and growth. For all the young kids complaining, welcome to the real world!

♨️ Latest launches

Big tech

• Uber Eats lets users order from two stores at once

• TikTok expands eligibility for its creator rewards program

• Twitch lets creators block users from watching their streams

• Tesla announces $8k “self-healing” vinyl wraps

• Google Meet rolls out 1080p support for group video calls

General and early-stage

• Dropbox refreshes its UI and launches an AI search tool

• Box unveils a custom portal to share specialized content

• Captions launches a dubbing app supporting 28 languages

• Character ships group chats where AIs can talk to each other

• Recs launches a ‘social wallet’ to share recommendations

🔍 Other good finds

• Go big. Why product teams should fail ~50% of experiments

• Tags. Microsoft, Adobe and others launch a unified AI symbol

• Clarity. FTC proposes “no junk fees” rule for tickets & hotels

🧈 Twitter nugget

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- Amol