Summary
Disneyrecently announced in apress releasethat it’s invested an astonishing $1.5 billion intoEpic Gamesto acquire an equity stake in the games company as part of a collaboration to create a “new persistent universe” that includes Disney’s biggest properties.
Right now, the plan seems to be to do all this through Epic Game’s wildly popular (and profitable) free-to-play battle royale Fortnite, but the press release says the new universe will offer a “multitude of opportunities for consumers to play, watch, shop and engage with content, characters and stories” from its various franchises, allowing players to “create their own stories and experiences” and “share content in ways that they love”, whatever that means. It’s all sounding like the companies are trying to build a new metaverse, which is in keeping with Fortnite’s recent push to establish itself as more than a battle royale game as well as Epic’s longstanding interest in the metaverse.
Other recent non-battle royale releases from Fortnite include Fortnite Festival, Lego Fortnite, and Rocket Racing.
The collaboration isn’t entirely out of the blue – Disney and Epic Games have already been collaborating for years, with Fortnite being host to countless “content integrations”, as Disney’s press release soullessly describes it. Disney has also used Epic’s Unreal Engine in the development of video games, cinematic editing and animation, and in the creation of Disney Parks attractions.
I am not a Fortnite player, nor am I a fan of many Disney IPs. This wouldn’t have been very interesting to me anyway. But there is something about the cold, clinical way that this collaboration is being described by the very companies involved in it that just rubs me the wrong way. The word ‘content’ is used four times in the press release, each time referring to parts of the Disney IP. It quickly and blatantly betrays the way Disney actually views the things contained under its umbrella – not art, not meaningful, just… content.
The dizzying array of Disney’s many IPs and media is reduced to a contiguous, formless idea, as if it’s all just meant to fill up its streaming services and movie schedules. Of course Disney doesn’t care about the specifics – it’s all just to make money. Thinking about Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, one of my favourite games from last year and part of Disney’s well of IP, getting thrown into a bucket of all its other slop labelled simply “content” is very upsetting.
That attitude becomes even clearer when you watch the trailer for the collaboration,uploaded to Twitterby the Epic Games Newsroom account. It doesn’t get into details about exactly what the collaboration will be producing, but it does slap four words right at the end of the video: play, watch, create, shop. It’s obvious Disney would want to monetise the free-to-play game with purchases, but to make it a core part of the experience only highlights what I hate about the corporation.
Of course Disney isn’t collaborating with Epic Games because it wants to make the best, most meaningful gaming experiences in the world for its fans. It’s doing it because Fortnite is reliably profitable and it wants its fingers in the pie too. In a recentearnings call, Disney CEO Bob Iger talks about “growth and expansion” into the video game industry and how it’s a good way to target younger audiences who spend just as much time on video games than on TV and movies, according to the demographic information he was shown. “The conclusion I reached was we have to be there,” Iger says.
It’s the most depressing approach to entering the video game world, and it doesn’t surprise me at all. Big corporations like Disney only enter new industries with the intention of making content with the broadest appeal, which is why we keep getting the blandest possible media from the conglomerate, and that’s also why it’s so easy for all of it to be written off. What Disney is signaling to its audience is that this “persistent universe” will inherently be shaped around the company’s real goal: getting our money. Players are already sick of live-service games ripping us off – does every big company now want to jump in and make it worse?
