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Disney to take $1.5B stake in Epic Games

cnbc.com

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Re: Disney to take $1.5B stake in Epic Games

#11
post #9

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.

Maybe but they've been wanting to get in to gaming for a while now, so this is probably mostly about that.

Re: Disney to take $1.5B stake in Epic Games

#12
post #5

Wow! What will Disney do to Unreal Engine's pricing plan? Does Sweeney remain in charge?

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.

Re: Disney to take $1.5B stake in Epic Games

#13

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, everyt…

Disney has had access to it, there were a lot of Fortnite Avengers promotions. It obviously worked well enough for them to want to invest.

Re: Disney to take $1.5B stake in Epic Games

#14
post #3

Epic does what Facebook couldn't. The Metaverse is real I bet Zuck never ever played an actual video game in his whole life https://compote.slate.com/images/760b74a3-7156-4dbe-90bd-b02...

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.

Re: Disney to take $1.5B stake in Epic Games

#19
post #10

I wonder if Apple has any regrets about its battle with Epic... Seems like they could have been a great launch partner for the Vision Pro...

They aren’t the only game studio. If Apple rolled over on Epic, it would lead to their entire revenue model around the App Store falling apart.
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