According to IGN, executive Disney intends to fully acquire Epic Gomes, the developer of Fort Night. This information comes from Alex Heath, a senior tech journalist, who in The Town podcasts said that, after investing $1.5 billion in Epic, Disney’s executives had been waiting for the right time to buy the dollar-based universe game.
The Fortress Night is undoubtedly the bead in the Epic product mix, alongside the widely used fictional engines in the field of game development, and is the company ‘ s two most important money-changing trees. Over the past year, the situation in Fortress Night has not been encouraging, and this is part of Epic’s reduction of 1,000 staff last week. At the same time, Disney has invested heavily in Fortress Night, with dozens of Disney IP skins and entanglements in the game (including Star Wars, Manwe, Pixies and Disney Animation), and a much-anticipated Disney-specific model is about to be launched to provide fans with a place to play, watch, create and shop together. Alex Heath said: “As far as I know, there are senior managers within Disney who want to buy Epic, just waiting for that moment. Of course, there are others who object. If Epic decides to sell one day and no longer operates as an independent company, Disney is, for various reasons, its natural home.” Alex Heath refers to the forthcoming Disney Model, a concept map that looks like a virtual Disneyland with a variety of subject areas and states that it will become “disney’s platform for play”. However, despite two years of development work, there is still no indication of when the model will be officially operational.
Last year, Chief Executive Officer Epic Tim Sweeney strongly criticized a report by the Wall Street Journal, which stated that the development of the model had been hampered by the slowness of Disney’s decision-making, which he called “bullshit”. Nevertheless, the report noted that the model had been published as early as March 2024 and would not be ready until the fall of the year, and that the projection was about to be validated. Alex Heath said: “Epic is a founding shareholder holding company. Tim Sweeney has full equity voting rights and can make decisions unilaterally. As we can see, he tried to break the closure of the app store by holding a public debate against apples and Google. When you run a company like Epic, it’s almost an ideological struggle to do it. He even admitted in the downsizing mail that it cost Epic.”
Disney’s strong in-house support for the investment of Josh Damaro, a senior director of Fort Night, won in the recent competition and became Disney’s new CEO. Although his term of office has only just begun, there is a perception that Damaro wishes to do so quickly this year. He had previously indicated that the go-live of the Disney model of Fort Night would be an important moment for the company ‘ s future development. Just this week, former Disney Senior Executive Kevin Meyer indicated that he expected Damaro to take a “bold initiative” this year to expand the company’s game business output. In an interview with the CNBC, Meyer stated: “I think Epic or some other video game asset will be an excellent complement to the Disney’s asset base.” Fort Night itself often faces dilemmas when introducing other models that are too far away from its core mass escape. By the end of 2023, the high-profile maximum racing, music and Lego models had eroded user interest. Epic had also previously acknowledged that it had been difficult to explain to consumers fully that the Fortress Night was more than just a big escape game. Sweeney mentioned in his letter of retrenchment that the plans for a new era seemed to be under way, “We will open the next generation of Epic with an ambitious release plan at the end of this year”.
Epic Games claims that layoffs were a response to the decline in the participation of Fort Night players, but analysts say that a reduction in the number of old high-runs is only one of their problems. Epic has for many years been engaged in costly legal struggles with Apple and Google, while funding Epic Mall to compete with Steam. There was also the explosive growth of Roblox, and the Fort Night has now been left far behind. Many players believe that Epic is running a staff cut to fill a performance deficit. The employees who stayed at the company indicated that they had no idea what the Fortress Night would become after nearly a quarter of the employees had left. Perhaps hope that the forthcoming new Disney content will turn things around?