Disney gets more IP in front of more 13-25 year olds. This is a very impressionable age group, and can create life long fans. This is a good value proposition for Disney. Epic probably gets an increase in valuation -- lifeblood for tech companies.
Collaboration skins are massive for revenue. However, I'm concerned this relationship will force uncool collaborations with Fortnite and reduce it's appeal. Disney has had some flops recently. Long term the trick for Fortnite is to become the most sticky online videogame in history, with most games bleeding audience over time. Epic is more than just Fortnite, but I imagine this deal is entirely about Fortnite.
The thing about Kingdom Hearts is you assume it's a vapid Disney corporate tie-in, but then you play it and realize it's actually a vapid Square Enix corporate tie-in. That's the actual draw for Kingdom Hearts fans: an absolutely incomprehensible mess of a plot[0] that just so happens to use a shitton of Disney and Final Fantasy characters.
The score as a whole is one of the best parts of the game. But I didn't find it vapid at all. I consider it an allegory about globalism. Sora's quest is to restore the integrity of each "world", integrity that was lost when the worlds were "connected". The denizens of connected worlds become "heartless", etc.
This only applies to the first game, though. After that I have no idea what's going on.
When kingdom hearts was released I got my first glimpse of how some people seem to throw their logic and taste out the window for Disney. It just seemed the dumbest thing to me. And why was the sword a key.. [edit: this was my teenage selfs opinion]
surprisingly one of the simpler questions to answer. The Keyblade is the key that can open (or close) any door. And that was the theme of the first Kingdom Hearts: doors. the big villians plan is to destroy all worlds by opening the door to the Dark World and flooding the existing Light dimension with hoards of monsters. you also spend a lot of time closing off the doors to the heart of the world to protect their cores (monsters destroy core = destroyed world).
In addition to bashing enemies and being a large narrative hook, it's a nifty explanation for why you are able to simply tap on a chest and open anything you want. Or break and enter into a bunch of buildings (although the game forgets constantly that it can do that).
Because it was a really fun action RPG with camera control issues, that then got fixed in Kingdom Hearts II (actually sooner with Final Mix Plus I think but most people weren’t importing that). It started life as a collab, and it took on an identity of its own almost from your first moment in the game. I literally don’t have a conception of what Donald or Goofy are like outside of Kingdom Hearts anymore, well except for Donald’s contribution to the Ducking Hardcore Mix of It’s a Small World.
I only played Kingdom Hearts 1 and 2 on the Playstation 2 as a teenager, and I did enjoy them while playing, but I have to admit that I have absolutely no idea what the hell happened story-wise by the end of the second game. The story just got increasingly convoluted and harder to follow, and the juxtaposition of serious Final Fantasy characters and Disney characters never really stopped being funny to me.
100% agreed on the story. There’s a recap video that’s probably not too hard to find on youtube which takes 30 minutes to explain the story up to the start of KH3 and I remember a predictable amount of it. There’s also this gem: https://youtube.com/watch?v=fCWjSOSWiUw
I only know enough about what “Aqua got ‘Norted” means to put an apostrophe in front of ‘Norted. (Xehanort possesses people or whatever.) I also literally never saw Aqua in any game I played before KH3, except maybe as an extra I didn’t notice.
Somewhere in the middle between the serious recap and the short joke remains this incredible video essay trying to explain the series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwEwxKkCGJE
I didn't play KH for the story; it was just a fun ARPG. I couldn't tell you the plot to the Mana games either, and they had some ridiculous stuff too (traveling by cannon?)
The first KH was fun I guess. And the combat mechanics Square made for KH are now the standard in Final Fantasy. But the story of KH went completely off the rails in all the sequels and spinoffs and I don't understand how anyone still cares about the story anymore.
KH is a beautiful mess that makes absolutely no sense at all, from the idea to the execution, a complete fever dream that is somehow a very enjoyable experience, but only if you embrace the silliness of it all.
If you're a teenager that may be much easier... or much harder, in cases such as yours.
To me at least, I liked Kingdom Hearts as a kid despite the Disney stuff, not thanks to it. I played it after Final Fantasy IX and X so I really enjoyed the change from turn-based combat.
Same reaction here with Magic: the Gathering, and all their collabs (Marvel is on the horizon-ugh) but still enjoy playing the game. And they’re apparently single-handedly keeping Hasbro afloat.
Funny enough Disney also recently launched their own TCG: Lorcana. A whole new way to leverage that IP!
Disney is at risk of becoming irrelevant? And people are upvoting this take?
As if all the Disney Adults in the world are just going to snap out of it. As if all the children who love Disney stuff currently are going to grow out of it. In what world is this considered an informative and knowledgable take?
Even at its lowest point financially, Disney IP has never been irrelevant at any point.
I’m not a disney fan but I enjoyed those games. They’re just good action RPGs with fresh advancement bonuses. Very Square Enix, which makes sense, of course.
KH3 also made me realize that they can start to target child and adult fans via recently popular titles (e.g. Frozen) and ~30 years ago popular titles (e.g. Toy Story), respectively.
At risk? They haven’t had hit movie for years. They have destroyed just about everything they’ve touched, from Indiana Jones to Star Wars to Snow White.
I didn't know Pokémon is the single highest-grossing franchise. That's wild and kinda unexpected given its age relative to Mickey Mouse & Friends in 2nd.
a bit off topic, but the global cultural impact of Frozen on kindergarten girls is absolutely insane. we all have memories of whatever the trend was when were a specific age, but nearly every 3-6 year old girl on the planet knows everything there is to know about the Frozen universe and had managed to get hold of some piece of merchandise (even if it's only a hair clip). And it's been like that for the past 8 years!
Frozen came out ten years ago and frozen 2 came out five years ago. I think that qualifies as a few years.
Granted life has been tough on the movies since some odd event in 2020
It's relative. No-one else has produced a media franchise that earns as much or more than Disney any more recently.
Disney has also produced some of the most recent highest grossing box office films https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films. Again, this is relative. We've just had a pandemic followed by writers and actors guild strikes.
If you take "for years" to literally mean "more than one year", sure. I think it's colloquially understood to be far longer than that. "Encanto" came out in 2021 and I'd consider that a hit. The soundtrack saw wide play, everyone I know who's seen it loves it, and they're merchandising the hell out of it.
To be fair, I saw "Wish" with my family and we all enjoyed it, but it obviously didn't come close to "Frozen 2" numbers. They're not all hits. With animated film taking years to produce, those perhaps aren't the metric to use. It'll be another few years before the next major animated film by Disney is released.
The Marvel movies release more frequently and seem to print money. "Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume 3" came out last year and has done $845MM¹.
I guess I don't know what we mean by "hit" then. I tried to address it from cultural impact, box office earnings, and movie quality. On any one of those criteria I don't think it's been that long since Disney has had a hit. If a film needs to push "Frozen" numbers to be a hit, then I'll concede they haven't had one in years.
I think generally people consider a movie to be a hit if it 1. is profitable (they immediately talk about a sequel) and 2. if it does better than expected.
The second part is the problem - if Pixar releases a movie that is good, more than recoups costs, and otherwise is a fine addition to Dreamworks lineup, it could still be considered a complete flop by most everyone.
E.g., "The Good Dinosaur" which (apparently) eventually made enough that it was "worthwhile" - didn't break any records and didn't really make money, so it's a flop (Onward even more so).
It's complicated even more by a movie being able to be a flop, cult classic, and widely loved at the same time.
I flagged this - it seems too clearly flame bait. If it was an honest mistake, my apologies. Disney had three movies in 2023 which took more than $200 million at the US box office
As much as I despised for example the first new Star Wars, The Force Awakens:
"The film grossed $2.07 billion worldwide, breaking various box office records and becoming the highest-grossing film in the United States and Canada, the highest-grossing film of 2015, and the third-highest-grossing film at the time of its release"
People forget that the movie came out nine years ago and shouldn't pass for "recent years", which the discussion above is about. The movie also primarily sold through hype to kids who grew up with the prequels, which had little to do with the quality. People, including me, still lived in denial back then. It wasn't until the second movie that my friends realized how terrible Star Wars had become and promised to never watch a Disney movie at the cinema again. A reputation Disney seems to have embraced considering the countless discussions of their decline.
"It grossed over $1.3 billion worldwide, becoming the highest-grossing film of 2017"
and part 3:
"grossed over $1.077 billion worldwide, making it the seventh-highest-grossing film of 2019 "
Cannot really be called flops either. And the Mandalorian is highly succesful as well. And probably some other movies, I don't know, I do not follow. My point is, that I share the criticism of how bad Star Wars became under Disney, I dropped out, after they seriously introduced yet another death star. But commercially they were highly succesful.
Brand erosion takes time, so "force awakens" was seen by nearly every star wars fan, giving it a try. But if they were disappointed they were less likely to see it's sequel "the last jedi" which numbers show that I believe. If trust was further shaken by the quality of "the last jedi" then the numbers for it's sequel "the rise of skywalker" would reflect that. If trust was further shaken by the TV offerings like "Mandelorian" or "Book of Boba Fett" or "obi-wan kenobi" show, then those would also progressively have less and less viewership and less and less subscribers to streaming services like Disney+.
A business can do something that makes a ton of money and still tarnishes their brand and their relationship with their fans. So those fans thinking its a flop, even if it was a financial success isn't quite wrong.
They were flops even if they made money because their expectations were so infinitely sky-high.
Force Awakens? Everyone who had ever seen Star Wars went to see it (extended family had a tradition of seeing Star Wars movies when they came out). Later ones didn’t have that, and we’ve never seen the last one.
Elemental obviously outperformed expectations but was no Toy Story. Wish is not doing well and looks unlikely to recover.
We’re long gone from the era of every single Disney (or Pixar) animated film being an absolute instant classic and powerhouse.
(Part of this may be the huge number of live action remakes - even if financially successful they seem entirely forgettable).
Star Wars is destroyed beyond redemption by now, and the same goes for Indiana Jones. Pixar is also on a downwards trajectory, and whoever says otherwise is deluding himself/herself.
Pixar is just a movie studio now, churning out basic animated movies. They’re no longer head-and-shoulders above everyone, and other studios are certainly competitive or even outclassing.
Turning Red and Teenage Kraken have a superficially similar plot and the Pixar one is much “better made” in many ways, but neither is earth-shattering.
And how much did those movies cost to make? I think the movies you are referring to were expecting to make 500m or more. They needed to make about 500 to break even!
Disney said have some successes last year. But they aren't as impressive as you might think
Box Office is not the yardstick disney uses, that's just the first phase of the disney wheel. They make oodles of money in merchandise and theme park content that's based on the same (expensive) IP as the movie. When they don't break even on the movie, they'll generally break even or make money on the IP behind the movie.
Here's the problem with that analysis, how do you attribute revenue to a specific movie? Will people attend the theme parks or spend more at them because of [movie X]? It's the same problem you have with streaming. Will people subscribe or stay subscribed to D+ longer because of [movie X]?
Until you can answer one or both in a repeatable, predictable way, we can wave our hands and say "it makes money later!" or "it doesn't make money later!" and neither is provable.
One other aspect that we CAN prove: streaming kills DVD sales. That's a revenue stream that is gone and won't be coming back so we have yet another deficit to fill.
Until then, Box Office and merchandising are the ONLY numbers that we, analysts, and stockholders can point at where "You put in $X and got out $Y" for their movie business. And as of right now, that puts Disney's 2023 numbers deeply negative.
To be clear, I totally agree with you. I think the success of theme parks and merchandise has been covering up mediocre IP from Disney for a while, and that fact is dangerous to their future prospects.
However, trying to balance this critique with some fairness to their strategy, it is difficult to disambiguate "the strategy isn't working" from "the strategy is helping us float across some mediocre years until we chance upon the next Frozen". It's kind of like VC returns, where it's 10 "%" of their IP (Star Wars, Mickey, Frozen, Toy Story, Marvel, etc.) that drive 90% of their performance. 2023 was definitely a poor "vintage" for Disney IP.
That being said, Disney has rebounded from many spells of mediocrity, and their theme parks, merchandise, and old IP (now monetized through Disney+ as you say) have kept them afloat through those poor periods.
Most recently they've only been able to jump-start the IP engines through acquisition (Pixar 2006, Marvel in 2009). I'm not a Disney shareholder myself, but I agree that the IP tap seems to be running dry and that's very concerning. I don't think Epic Games has anywhere near the value ceiling that Marvel and Pixar did.
> One other aspect that we CAN prove: streaming kills DVD sales. That's a revenue stream that is gone and won't be coming back so we have yet another deficit to fill.
Which is why Disney+ is its own streaming service. Keeps all the eggs in the same basket.
So far, streaming hasn't made nearly the same amount as DVD sales and it's ridiculously expensive to run one.
That said, licensing to other streaming services often does work. You get revenue for the cost of a contract vs having the infrastructure costs and nebulous ROI. You get the added benefit of direct attribution because you can tell "we licensed [movie X] for $X for Y years".
That would traditionally be the case, but the merchandising is bombing too, and (anecdata time) I can confirm this through personal observation: 80%-off sales of Star Wars merchandise in a local toy store, and my kids and their circle having a keen sense of which IP they like (unsurprising spoiler: it’s the stuff based on good movies, not the stuff based on bad movies).
I think the surest example of this is the Lego Star Wars toys more and more being obviously adult-targeted.
Not everything can be Frozen, but the pallet of Wish merchandise at Walmart is still there and now all marked down (except the Lego because they know that someone will buy it eventually for parts).
Elemental merchandising was completely non-existent and that was a mistake, people enjoyed that.
Well this is just straight up false. Moana was a massive success. Frozen is a monstrous success for them. Star Wars not being a success is objectively false. The Force Awakens is the second best selling Star Wars movie of all time.
I think they should be compared to how well a literal rerelease of the original would do.
I think part of the evidence is just how absolutely long lived Frozen 1 has been. Nothing has been able to even come close to unseating that, not even its sequel (they were very smart to keep everything similar enough so that Frozen 2 merchandise can substitute for Frozen 1 in a kid’s eye).
It’s very indicative that people jump to movies that have been out for a decade or more, and probably can’t even name most of the more recent releases.
Hit movies don’t really seem to matter to Disney in the grand scheme of things. It’s more about selling merchandise of their already established brands.
A movie needs to bring in twice its budget to be profitable[1] is the common rule of thumb. The budget doesn't include things like marketing, and the fact that the box office is shared with the theatre owner.
So in your example, it potentially lost money for Disney. The wikipedia article almost says as much [2]
"Although it underperformed at the box office ..."
Was Encanto the one they dumped on Disney+ real quick? It might have strongly affected popularity of the song (which is catchy as all hell, and can stand with Let It Go) since that was perhaps the peak.
None of the recent Disney animated movies have been “direct to DVD” terrible but they haven’t been exceptionally better than everything else.
It used to be that everyone basically considered Disney (and upstart Pixar) to be at the top of the class, and even extremely successful movies like Despicable Me to be a tier or two below.
If instead of buying IP and stealing from public domain works they invested more into creating new IP they could actually make a lot of money.
I'm sick of them being allowed to increase their entertainment monopoly on children instead of being told to just create new original works. It's not like they have a shortage of talented people...
It's stealing in the cultural appropriation sense, not the copyright sense.
When you create a new work based off a public domain work, you own what you added to that work. If your adaptation happens to be extremely successful, that effectively recopyrights the character, because the version people care about is the one you own. If someone else wants to use the public domain character, they have to aggressively distance their use of that character from yours.
Disney spent decades re-imagining Europe's folk tales[0] through his lens. Their movies are the ones people think about when you mention Snow White, Cinderella, Pinocchio, etc. Notably, the visual designs are unique enough to get independent copyright protection. So independent uses of those characters don't look like themselves.
This, BTW, is why anyone who wants to renounce copyright over their creative work should opt for CC-BY-SA and not a public domain dedication. Share-alike clauses prevent this sort of gradual appropriation.
The material which was public domain is still public domain, Disney did not “re-copyright” anything. Just google how many different versions of Pinocchio has been made independently from Disney. Gulliermo del Toro won an oscar for his version. If you havent seen that it is your own fault, not the fault of Disney or copyright law.
Stephen Sondheim had a pretty succesful musical based on Grimms tales.
But yeah, if you want people to care about your version, you have to bring something new to the table.
There’s a French live action Beauty and the Beast which was rereleased in the US to take advantage of the hype around Disney’s remake - and it’s actually darn good for a $5 supermarket checkout movie.
Tangled (Repunzel), Moana (uses and remixes actual Polynesian myths), Frozen (based on the snow queen), Peter Pan, Little Mermaid - a stack of recent Disney movies have been based on existing IP. You just don't notice because they culturally steamroll the originals.
The most recent movie Wish - is just callbacks to other Disney movies, so does it count as original IP?
And this excludes their reboots - but also excludes Pixar which has done some original albeit lacklustre stuff recently.
As far as Frozen goes, at least they got something new to replace the Norway exhibit at Epcot, because it got so old and stale, that Norway disowned it, and refused to pay for the renewal
ILM used Unreal Engine to make StageCraft and kept iterating on it until it’s the awesome tech that it is. They have a vested interest in seeing the underlying engine continue to prosper.
They made a point of highlighting the use of Unreal during the production of Season 1, but then it's completely absent from their discussion of later seasons, instead only referencing an in-house renderer they call Helios. Have they specifically said anywhere that they're still using Unreal Engine?
This 2021 article mentions that external productions using StageCraft services can choose to use either Unreal or Helios for rendering, so the Unreal integration may still be available for those who want it, but obviously ILM didn't write a brand new renderer for the fun of it. Unreal must not have been cutting it for their own productions.
> StageCraft leverages Helios ILM’s real-time cinema render engine. It is a set of LED screens that work as a 360 extension digital set, allowing filmmakers to explore new ideas, communicate concepts, and execute shots in a collaborative and flexible production environment.
"Ask HN: What's the state of the art for drawing math diagrams online?" (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38355444 ; generative-manim, manimGPT, BlenderGPT, ipyblender, o3de, how do we teach primary math intuition with the platforms that reach them, how do we Manim in 3 or even 4D?
> Is there a way to vary the [UE] AutoLOD for longer shots?
UE5 (and other 4d graphics and physics simulators) automatically reduce the LOD Level-of-Detail for objects in the distance.
Is that LOD parametric with StageCraft software?
(For example, reportedly Cities Skyline 2 is bad slow because they included meshes for characters' teeth and expected AutoLOD to just make it work on the computers kids tend to have. It doesn't work on reasonable machines because the devs all have fast pro GPUs to develop on, so they don't know what the UX is for the average family (that would be happy to turn down the polygon count themselves for what we can learn from the gameplay). Having game devs dogfood with real-world devices that families afford would be good for these firms too.).
Hopefully they'll continue to sell games through non-Epic stores that people have already invested in.
And hopefully, they'll make sure their products work with Proton and thus popular Linux-based handheld gaming devices.
This. Virtual Set Production is almost entirely Unreal engine. Fortnite is just a marketing platform. The real meat is the digital production pipeline that made Mando cool. That enabled Star Trek’s recent series’, and provides a “holodeck” for their just unveiled holo-floor.
I don't think Fortnite is just a marketing platform. They wouldn't have bothered suing Apple and Google over app stores if it were merely a loss leader to remind film execs that Unreal Engine is a thing.
While I agree with you that Fortnite shouldn’t be considered a loss leader, the strategy behind challenging Apple in court is more nuanced. Epic also operates a rather large software/games store and I am sure they would love to see it grow.
AFAIK Unreal was only used in the first season of the Mandalorian several years ago. Disney switched to using ILM's Stagecraft software, which is what they use for their films as well.
All other Media and Entertainment companies are either owned by Comcast/AT&T or are Tech companies (netflix, amazon,apple,sony,youtube,tiktokk) that have carved out a chunk of the media and entertainment sector.
Disney is basically on the back foot here, at a time when the attention economy is wrecking chaotic unpredictable havoc on the the media sector.They had to do something cause shareholder revolt has been brewing for a while.
Given how much the Discovery arm seems to be in control, Warner Bros Discovery may be "new media" in old media clothing.
Skydance is trying to buy National Amusements to take over Paramount and arguably be a similar new media in old media clothing if that deal goes through.
> Sony Pictures started in 1987, so that should qualify as old media too.
I know objective that's almost 40 years ago and probably does qualify for old, but that still seems too recent in Hollywood Empires. But Sony Pictures also has the advantage it bought truly old media Columbia/TriStar and didn't seem to kill them and kind of left them to continue to do their thing, so maybe Sony gets more of a pass too.
> And there is also Lionsgate.
Lionsgate was formed in 1997.
Maybe you are thinking about MGM (and its famous Lion logo), which Amazon has been trying not to kill since it acquired that ancient studio brand, but also is very much appearing to be Amazon still being Amazon just wearing that brand (which was on life support or already a zombie when purchased) like a skin at this point?
Really? I thought Disney was doing well. Their subscription service is only behind Netflix and Amazon, the latter of which includes its service in Prime so is not an equal competitor. Further, their ownership of Marvel has provided them some of the largest grossing films of all time, and their Star Wars acquisition seems to be paying off. The parks seem to be quite strong, but I've only experienced the Japan ones. Overall I find it difficult, from a layman's perspective, to believe Disney is in trouble but welcome any other information.
I would guess none based on the breakdown on page 10. They would have written in the “Direct to consumer” section that licensing costs were the reason for the losses. Instead, they specified that technology costs and costs to create the media were the tradings for the losses.
They've had several big box office fails, partially because the Disney+ has been cannibalizing those viewers (why go see it in theaters when I can wait three months and watch it on Disney+ for no additional cost?).
Also they've over saturated the MCU with a million movies and TV shows every year. People have just been burned out on it and they've only recently decided to cut back production on those and be more focused.
> Their subscription service is only behind Netflix and Amazon
Because it's drastically cheaper in an obvious dumping exercise, and has some interesting IP kids and grown ups that used to be kids want to (re)watch. However there really isn't that much content on it, nor is new content coming that quickly, so at some point after everything of interest has been seen, people will start unsubscribing.
This is why Netflix is constantly churning out new stuff of very varying quality (utter shit next to masterpieces) - you need to keep people paying the subscription.
This is the root issue with these - people subscribe to Disney+ et al because it has everything (Ariel voice) and then they get bored having watched it all, the kids are satisfied by a single dvd on repeat, so you let the subscription lapse.
I had D+, Prime, and Netflix at one point and now have none.
>Disney gets more IP in front of more 13-25 year olds. This is a very impressionable age group, and can create life long fans. This is a good value proposition for Disney.
Perhaps.
Perhaps, also, it's the old media playbook interpreting what young people want as "jam advertisements in front of them".
>Long term the trick for Fortnite is to become the most sticky online videogame in history
They might achieve this (certainly World of Warcraft holds the title). But I think video games are inherently faddish.
If I had to go one way or the other, I'd bet this is a bit of a desperate move by Disney who are becoming less relevant and whose cash cow (Marvel) is withering.
I was actually thinking about World of Warcraft when I was thinking about a game that failed to be sticky. World of Warcraft peaked in subscriber count in 2010, and has generally seen steady decline since then. I think the numbers for WoW look worse when you consider how sharply it's share of the video game market has declined. The video game market has ballooned in size while Wow's user base is slowly bleeding out.
It's hard to get accurate data, but Fortnite has roughly 100x more users than World of Warcraft. Counterstrike is an even smaller userbase.
> ”World of Warcraft peaked in subscriber count in 2010, and has generally seen steady decline since then.”
Sure, but even in 2024 this 20-year old game has a paid monthly player count well into the millions. Extremely successful by any measure. And perhaps one of the most profitable game franchises of all time.
A game that has lasted twenty years as a commercial project has definitely not failed to be sticky!
There’s a lot of hope and desire for “forever games” particularly from investors but there is no such thing. They will all have a peak and a steady decline at some stage. Social networks exhibit this pattern as well.
This isn't about WoW, this is about Disney & Epic. If Fortnite fails to be stickier than WoW then this investment will be pretty bad.
World of Warcraft is probably the stickiest game in history. I can also see how an investment in Blizzard in the year 2010 might have been overly optimistic about WoW's future.
On longevity+userbase I think Minecraft and Roblox might have both beat. Both are 15+ years old, with enormous userbases, crucially their userbases include huge numbers of kids.
WoW and Counterstrike have large loyal fanbases, but I'd be surprised if the age of the average user didn't increase by around 1 year per year.
Exactly - a very successful business can be had serving an existing group of customers for life, but eventually it will die out if new blood isn’t entering. Perhaps the only new kids playing WoW are literally children of people who met in the game …
Epic games has the potential to be the virtual Disney World - just available to everyone on the planet instead of those with enough money to visit a park IRL. Disney has a great flywheel where their IP drives content, toys, and experiences. This is just the latest experience, and it’s something they can’t build themselves.
I bet you can expect more content on fortnite to be with Disney IP; skins, events, maps, everything. It’ll be a great way to promote new movies/TV shows with cross-platform events. Fortnite has already had great luck with this sort of thing, so it makes sense for Disney to want access to it. Maybe you’ll even see IRL Fortnite experiences in theme parks or a Fortnite IP based movie or TV show.
> Epic games has the potential to be the virtual Disney World
This is what everyone said about Lego, and a bunch of other collabs that came before. It was never true and it's not true now. Turns out people don't want a "virtual world", they want a fun game.
> Turns out people don't want a "virtual world", they want a fun game.
Arguably, there are people who want a "virtual world" -- and they currently just play Roblox to get it. Enough of them like it, that every major retailer stocks "Robux" gift cards
Steam has a ton of social features too, and that helps keep it popular. Is it a "virtual world"? I don't think anyone would define it that way.
The primary thing you do in Roblox is pick a game you want to play, which is largely isolated from the other games. Plenty of people will never touch the social features.
Some of the most annoying cash grabs I've seen were the ingame music festivals attempted by several video games in 2019-2021.
It turns out that when you can't even get audio synced up so that everyone is hearing the same music, the vast majority of the artists bail or drop a pre-recorded set because they weren't informed how a hypothetical live playback mechanism would work, and you don't even have the rights to the game it's based on... you don't have a polished experience, you have a metaverse scam.
A bunch of the collabs have been super successful. They don’t need to build a permanent Second Life type metaverse BS. Look at their concerts in Fortnite’s universe. Very successful at attracting eyes and money.
“Virtual Disney world” doesn’t mean VR roller coasters, it means Disney themed digital experiences (eg fun games). Disney and Epic have a decent track record building fun and profitable experiences for people.
To be fair, you did mention replicating the “Disney park experience IRL”, so yes it does mean VR Disney rides since that’s the closest that you’ll get to that experience. A flat screen is not going to come close to it.
Just for context, there are ~26,000 people signed in to the LEGO version of Fortnite right now, and it's 11pm Pacific/2am Eastern (there are ~179,000 people on the standard Fortnite). At primetime, there are typically 100,000+ people on the LEGO Fortnite.
Which FYI puts it in the same league as War Thunder and Team Fortress 2, ie, a profitable free to play game, but not exactly important in terms of redefining culture or being The Next Big Thing.
Hell, RUST is an old, mediocre, "Cursed runes" survival MMO crafting-them-up and it has 100k people playing right now, despite tens of better versions of the exact game formula having been released since.
100k players mid-day is "has-been" multiplayer video game territory. It's "also-ran" MMO territory.
Euro Truck Simulator 2 has 30k people playing right now
All these options are more than the people playing Cyberpunk lol
I've played fortnite on an off since there were seasons. I have no idea what the storyline is, there are some cut scenes when there is a new season but it make no sense. Claiming there is a storyline is a stretch, I think it is just cover for changing up the map/gear to keep it fresh.
I'll agree. My partner plays and I play a little. There seems to be a story but it matters little and doesn't seem to make sense (i guess the plot points that change the map matter)
There is definitely a storyline going on if follow the cutscenes and pay attention to the map. Ever in the earliest seasons they were doing map-based story telling. For example, trucks showed up and started moving shards to one of the towns on the coast. Random updates would move the trucks. Many plot elements develop this way over time.
The core plot is asking "Why are we stuck in this loop?" It does get convoluted, but it's there.
Various agencies are involved, the Zero Point (which causes the looping behavior) has manifested as many things over the seasons. Aliens and inter dimensional being seek after it.
Maybe you had to be there, but the first batch of seasons and even chapter 2 had many online theorizing and trying to guess what's next.
Its because its fun to shoot things in video games, and wreck cars, and building forts and demolishing entire buildings and trying to keep up with my kids.
Why are spiderman, darth vader and predator there? Money. There's no coherent story telling, which is fine, the game is still fun. People play it for the fun factor, not the story.
> Epic games has the potential to be the virtual Disney World - just available to everyone on the planet instead of those with enough money to visit a park IRL.
How? EPIC doesn’t have a VR platform at the moment.
The deal still makes sense though. Disney needs to control a video game platform.
Unreal Engine isn't a VR platform, it's a tool that can be used to create a VR platform.
"The Platform" in this context is a position that allows you to collect ~30% fee of revenue generated. Unreal Engine's position is much much smaller. Using my definitions Epic gamestore technically counts as a VR platform, but isn't positioned to become market leader.
You're correct but being overly pedantic. Not only is Unreal one of the biggest engines chosen for use with VR games but it's also one of the easiest and most effective for modders to retroactively inject the ability to use a game in VR.
Unreal is just an engine just like Valve’s source engine. It’s a tool for developers and it’s not a destination for consumers. I’m right in pointing out that you guys are confusing a game engine for a video game platform. They are two very different things, and I’m not being “overly pedantic”.
As someone else already mentioned, Unreal isn’t the Epic or Steam platform. SteamVR != Source engine
> Virtual worlds don't need to be VR
Yes, but flat pancake games are even poorer at simulating a Disney theme park IRL than VR. It doesn’t even come close to a substitute, especially for the rides.
I see huge potential for NFT integration as well. Imagine buying a Mickey Mouse skin in Fortnight and being able to use it in one of Epic Games' other games too. Lots of possibilities.
And most importantly of all, game publishers do not want you to be able to use something you buy in Game A to decorate your character in Game B, because they want to skim more money out of you buying a new artificially scarce item in Game B.
Hell, Valve literally already did this with all CS:GO skins carrying over to CS2, it required zero blockchain, doesn't actually give you "control" over the item, and was only done because players have spent literal tens of thousands of dollars on skins and Valve needed to throw them a bone so they would be slightly less upset about CS:GO being essentially memory-holed.
Disney had a group looking at NFT and metaverse initiatives, but as far as I have seen, they all got canned in last year's layoffs. manager and everything. The company is huge, so it's not impossible that other group like that might remain employed there, somewhere, but at the very least the interest have waned.
This is basically just fortnite. When they wanted to make a racing game, they did it in fortnite. When they wanted a rhythm game, they did it in fortnite. Fortnite is a game browser and engine, not a set of mechanics.
Also if the intention is to limit the use of the property to epic games, why not use a plain old database? Nft seems like overkill
Will be interesting to see what % stake Disney got. Tencent currently owns 40% of Epic and Sony has another 5%. Given their last valuation of $32B it doesn't seem like Disney will end up with more than 3-4%. Still a good chunk, but not quite enough to call the shots.
Probably, they had to let 830 (16%) go to reach financial stability and got rid of Bandcamp and SuperAwesome for another 250. [1] Apparently they were "spending way more money than we earn" to try and turn Fortnite into a metaverse concept. However, lately they say they've been getting by on low margin creator content revenue sharing that seems to not be enough. Based on the letter, the layoffs and divestitures brought them to financial stability again.
Oh make no mistake, they're still burning a ton of money trying to get their cross play metaverse thing off the ground. Those dev teams didn't lose a single person in those layoffs, in fact, whole departments were gutted and some of the engineering talent was reassigned to the metaverse team.
Disney use Unreal Engine for their dynamic greenscreen LED wall which they film The Mandalorian and others against. That's got to be at least as important as Fortnite characters.
I'm almost certain that the Unity licensing debacle caused a number of Disney department heads to say "we need to make sure this doesn't sneak up on us on the Unreal side for our cinematic production pipeline." Whether or not this deal was already in the works, it certainly didn't hurt it.
That was true many years ago (that ILM used UE for the LED wall) but they switched out UE for a dedicated software tool by the second season of Mandalorian, called Helios.
Epic doesn't charge for use of Unreal Engine in vfx, and overall I don't think vfx is a very profitable space for most software companies. It's a low margin business, mostly outsourced. I doubt that Hollywood studios are going to pay any vfx provider a share of revenue in any case.
It's still not a significant source of revenue. How many per-seat licenses do you think they will sell to vfx companies, who usually operate on paper-thin margins?
Yeah that was my first thought. I'm sure the gaming part means something to them, but they probably think of them more as a Real Time Special Effects company.
FTFY. They had their own game publishing arm since 1988, Disney Interactive Studios, and owned first-party studios like Avalanche Software, which was sold off to Warner Bros.
Don't forget Lucasfilm Games, nee LucasArts. They published a lot of games, both star wars properties and otherwise. They're now owned by Disney as well.
Interesting to bring this up - always wondered which way the creative influence went between Monkey Island and Pirates of the Caribbean (if i recall correctly, the game is based off the ride, but the film was allegedly inspired by the game)
I recall the first film opening with bars of a song which also features prominently in the ride.
Apparently the song itself was written for the rides in 1967 [1] and I assume is based off even older pirate shanties. Certainly reminds me of songs from the book Treasure Island (1883).
I thought there was a book somewhere in the mix as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Stranger_Tides
Wikipedia tells me the book inspired monkey island, the ride inspired both the book and monkey island, and the book inspired the fourth movie.
Eh, Lucasflim Games was pretty much shutdown in 2013 and only stuck around as a shell just to license out to, uh, checks notes EA. They're nothing like what they used to be when they enabled games like Rogue Squadron, KotOR or Jedi Academy.
Toontown Online used to be a fairly popular mmo in the 2000s. The game itself is gone but the game engine was open sourced as Panda3d (C++ with Python bindings). The project is still active too, with modern features like PBR still being added. I personally like how it's code-first (vs editor-centric like Godot), but the GUI options are really fugly and clunky.
Yeah, I'm not sure why Disney of all companies would be so enamored by another company's entertainment IP that they'd spend $1.5B to have dibs on it. There has to be a better explanation than Fortnite skins.
This has the same pattern as the Vivendi deal with Blizzard back in 2007.
In both instances, the game end of the deal had peaked already, and there was nowhere to go but down. Nothing a few billion dollars can’t fix, maybe some “new content,” says the business guys.
Meanwhile their product becomes worse by the month. The magic is fading. All the people who made it great move on, not wanting to deal with the business parasites who showed up to squeeze a buck. Repeat.
Take a look at how The Mandalorian (a Disney production) was filmed. Epic Games’ software played a large part.
It goes beyond just film & television. They offer solutions for the automotive industry, aviation simulation industry, mining sims, trucking sims, medical sims, architecture, live broadcast, …
I never expected a dystopian megacorp to start from a cartoon or videogame company. As a kid I figured it would kick off with walmart buying lockmart and just calling itself Mart.
This would be true if it were a full takeover. But, actually it is just a small injection of cash. Which will greatly help the flagging Epic, which recently had to endure a relatively large layoff to stay the course. Disney is just making a cool metaverse with Epic that includes both their IPs; Star Wars / Avatar / Indiana Jones / etc and Fortnite, which is why they're providing this money. They were working on the technology together well before this investment. Epic isn't fully owned by Disney with this investment. Tencent has a much larger share.
Apple has a weirdly pro-Disney bias: watchOS has built-in Disney faces, on a watch where there's no custom watchface support whatsoever. And this is apparently mutual: Disney shipped a D+ visionOS app when several other streaming services (Netflix, YouTube, Spotify) were telling Apple to piss off.
Disney investing in the company that has been the biggest thorn in Apple's side is... interesting. Obviously, the immediate motivation is "we wanna jump on the Fortnite zoomer bandwagon", but I can't help but wonder if Tim Sweeney's days are numbered here.
There is a massive amount of history between the two companies, with Jobs being the largest individual shareholder of Disney due to the Pixar acquisition and Iger sitting on the board of Apple until Disney+ was launched.
Apple has an excellent relationship with Disney, but they're still two separate businesses with different interests that only align in some areas. Disney and Epic also have aligning interests.
That said, I would like to see how much equity Tim Sweeney still has left when all is said and done because as far as I know he only had 51.4% prior to today. A controlling share, sure, but somehow I doubt Disney gave him $1.5B for ~1.3%.
I assume he’s recently been awarded new shares and that new shares were created for Disney, such that everyone else was diluted. I’m not sure some of the figures being reported can be verified as accurate yet.
Disney via the Marvel brand did a lot of collaboration with fortnite. It must have went well. They sell iron man,Thor, spiderman and other skins. one season ever had stark industries as a loction:
There are no friends in business. It is very common for large companies to be in close partnerships while also competing with or even suing each other.
Apple and Disney are themselves competitors in the streaming market.
Ally of Apple in what way? Do they give each other favorable deals or work closely together on any important projects? I haven’t heard of anything major along those lines.
I think an appearance of friendliness mainly came from Steve Jobs, and he’s been gone for a long time now.
I don't think anyone answered sufficiently, the main thing was yeah Steve Jobs was on their board of directors and was the CEO of Pixar, but that runs deep even though Jobs died 12 years ago.
There was some analysis/chatter also that basically Disney's entire strategy the last 5-8 years also was to pump up its valuation as large as possible and then get acquired by Apple.
Idk man, none of us had a drink at a bar with "Apple" and "Disney" to confirm the cozy relationship, others have provided business partnerships, what would satisfy you?
I’m not the one out there trying to personify a friendship into two giant corporations. It’s a popular perception, but I just don’t see a lot of convincing evidence.
So what? Disney gets to push Disney+ at a huge, well covered event. Apple gets a big streaming app on release day for their new headset at a time when their relationship with Netflix and other companies is not great. That’s no indication of an “alliance”.
Big deal, they made a Vision Pro app. They’re also still trying to grow Disney+ as quickly as possible in a very crowded market. They have a lot more motivation to try different things than Netflix, which is in a much more entrenched position.
We very nearly had the same company on both sides when the MPAA (of which Sony Pictures was a member) was fighting with Sony Electronics over video tapes.
Do you mean Betamax timeshifting? Sony didn't own a movie studio at that point. The entire reason they bought one was to prevent that sort of issue from ever happening again. Tail ended up wagging the dog, though.
I worked on a UT99 mod back in the day and was invited to the Raleigh office back in 2003 or so after our artist was hired by them. He still works there. Hard to believe how far the company has come.
So is there a term like "acquihire" - except it means more like "we sold a stake in out company so we would get access to their legal department" instead of "we sold a stake in out company so we would get cushy jobs"?
Disney boasts a diverse array of partnerships across various industries, and I believe that this specific collaboration won't adversely impact Disney's already formidable alliance with Apple. On the contrary, there's reason for enthusiasm regarding the possibility of Disney venturing into new territories where they haven't historically been prominent players. The prospect of Disney making substantial investments in these uncharted areas could lead to exciting developments and innovations, further strengthening their overall position in the market.
Apple is trying to maintain its draconian grip over the app store because of the sweet revenue it brings. With worldwide regulatory pressure, that dam will eventually burst. But they'll keep it going as long as they can.
Apple is happy to engage in backroom deals. There's a future where Apple could acquire either or both of these companies.
Oversimplified negativity towards Disney and Epic Games doesn't capture their diverse contributions. A more nuanced view and consideration of both positives and negatives is advisable.
I agree that you can't make this that simple, you never know what will happen. But I have been in the game business as a developer/ publisher / whatever for decades and worked for Disney. Disney more then any other company I know of (maybe except EA) has squandered its opportunities and acquisitions in the game space consistently. Disney Interactive has died and been recreated I think three times in my career. If I started to make a list of all the game companies or game adjacent (Maker Studio) I probably would miss a bunch. And none of them worked. Disney has a really strong culture that has not in the past fit well with the video game business.
I've come across a few articles in the last year and they all seem to agree that Sports and Gaming is where the money is because the fan base is so... passionate.
It makes sense that on the heels of Disney's collaboration with FOX and Warner Bros. Discovery (via ESPN), they would also get into the other market with fans as committed as sports fans.
Considering that the future of TV is streaming and being successful in this market has proven to be no slam dunk (no matter how big you are), Sports/Gaming is the hedge (for those who can swings these deals).
Not a follower of Disney. I dont care for their products or efforts on Star Wars etc.
The first thing I could think of as to why is because they use Unreal Engine for their CGI background and effects in TV shows and (perhaps as well) movies.
I do remember seeing BTS of one of their TV shows (likely Star Wars) with giant TV's all round the set which creates backdrops, all in Unreal.
I will admit it is impressive but I noticed camera shots are looking limited. Start of something grander, I guess.
Apple, while being a hardware and (somewhat) software leader, has been in "let them eat cake" mode for quite some time.
Corporate leadership needs to start understanding that once they've saturated the market they need to loosen up or they're at risk of becoming a populist target.
This will be a boon for Fortnite's licensed character business, Disney's merchandising business, Disney+'s content, and absolute downgrade/extortion for all Unreal users. Guaranteed.
What do we think the valuation is? Do we think it's down, flat or up?
I'd hazard a guess at flat. Unity (a peer) got crushed by the market but they also don't have Fortnite which is a money printer and has only gotten bigger.
Considering Square Enix's relationship with Epic, Disney's relationship with Square Enix, and now Disney's relationship with Epic, I expect Kingdom Hearts IV to be a tightly coupled collaboration.
Well now.. it is not like I need another reason to avoid Epic, but.. I am obviously not the target demographic here. I personally think, from Disney's perspective, this is not a wrong move to make.
How does Disney funds all the failures? I cant understand it... it's like if the money never stops with some companies even losing money (or earning every year less and less).
Weird.
I realize this is from a ground level but: The games getting made by the Unreal Engine today are of such high quality and graphic fidelity.
They've really hit critical mass for the AA and AAA games, and paying the piper is looking like a smarter and smarter investment.
Do film companies write their own editing software, or 3d pipelines, or design and build their own cameras? Some of them, sure. But most of them are purchasing and customizing off-the-shelf solutions. It just makes sense.
It's a Battle Royale game with building. Third person shooter. 100 players are dropped off on an island, last one alive wins.
A circle is around the island that slowly becomes smaller. If you're out of the circle you take damage. This essentially speeds up the later parts of the game.
Probably true but they're throwing money around for exclusives because i'm sure they want a major cut of Steam's market, and so far that just hadn't happened.
I would not be shocked if future star wars, marvel, disney games are epic exclusive, and that could be the thing to get people to care beyond the weekly free game and fortnight.
People talk a lot about tencent buying a stake in epic but they basically are hands free and let epic go down the rabit hole of fighting apple in court and getting into financial troubles because of it.
Same thing with tencent letting Grinding gear games basically make poe 2 which is huge financial risk when they already had a succesful game that could have kept going, just for the sake of making it better for their players over time.
Disney however? yeah, now people will actually see what unrestricted capitalism does to a company, I really hope this is mostly just aimed at the fact that Disney probably uses unreal engine and doesn't want it going down, but the cynic in me thinks that disney as a corporation will try to squeeze as much as they can out of their money.
ah yes surely epic's entirely legitimate, bona-fide crusade against the indignity and injustice of walled-gardens will be enhanced by (checks notes) selling to the mouse?
> There is a growing graveyard of games/devs suffering from bespoke engine woes instead of just using Unreal...
Is there? I can't think of any examples that come to mind. Most indie devs I know that roll their own engine have no regrets. I am curious who comes to mind that says otherwise publicly?
In recent memory, the biggest two that come to mind:
- Halo Infinite's slipstream engine turned into spaghetti code due to 343's terrible employee cycling, most of the directors left around the same week, and now they're rehiring a brand new team made up of devs with Unreal Engine experience because the old engine would take too long to fix.
- The terrible console performance and engine woes of CD Project Red's Cyberpunk 2077 that almost led to the company being sued into hell led to them abandoning their own engine and switching to Unreal Engine for their next game.
Rolling your own engine seems to become troublesome when you're moving into AA territory (Cyberpunk/RED, FFXIV/Luminous, etc).
I guess at the low end (indies), you can design something lean that fits one specific use-case, and at the high-end (AAA) you really can afford to build/maintain something competitive. The middle-ground might be dangerous.
That being said, there are literally dozens of abandoned game engines out there from solo "game devs" who never actually got around to making the game.
Epic never did the metaverse. Sweeney talked about doing it, but they never shipped. Unreal Engine heavily preprocesses content in Unreal Editor, then trusts that content. For a metaverse, you need to do more of that server-side. Back when Sweeney was talking that up, I was expecting metaverse-in-a-box in Unreal Engine 7. That seems less and less likely.
The metaverse is real, and it's called Second Life. Which is a niche. It is a profitable niche. A "cash machine", one of the owners has said. So it stays around. Everybody else in the metaverse space lost money. Now that zero interest rates are over, and there's no more free money, this is even more true. Heavy Disney investment in a general-purpose metaverse seems unlikely. It doesn't fit their IP-based business model.
Fortnite's "creative mode" is a game level loader, not a metaverse. One creator makes a mini-game and uploads it, then others can visit. It's not a shared-world metaverse. Other game level loaders include Sinespace, Breakroom,and Sansar.
Decentraland is in between - each user uploads their own parcel, but it's part of a shared world, where you can see multiple parcels at once.
In a real metaverse, you have neighbors. A very large number of people can each contribute to building a big world. Such systems are very rare.
That's not in line with Disney's business model. "The media giant will work with the Fortnite studio to create new games and an entertainment universe where consumers can “play, watch, shop and engage with content, characters and stories from Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, Avatar and more,” Disney said in a press release." Think of this as an expansion pack for the Marvel Overextended Universe.
Collaboration skins are massive for revenue. However, I'm concerned this relationship will force uncool collaborations with Fortnite and reduce it's appeal. Disney has had some flops recently. Long term the trick for Fortnite is to become the most sticky online videogame in history, with most games bleeding audience over time. Epic is more than just Fortnite, but I imagine this deal is entirely about Fortnite.