Disney’s top gaming boss, the veteran Sean Shoptaw, has outlined the company’s vision for games amid what he described as a “massive disruption” in the gaming market today. Part of Disney’s investments and efforts in gaming today are in Fortnite, but it goes a lot further than that.
Speaking at SXSW, Shoptaw–Disney’s Executive Vice President, Global Games & Digital Entertainment–said Disney’s ambition for games overall is that they can stand alongside Disney’s film, TV, and theme park businesses in terms of drawing people to Disney’s worlds.
Disney does not want to make “box-checky” games, as Shoptaw described them. He said Disney made a key strategic change to its gaming business about a decade ago with the aim of shifting away from licensed tie-in games that re-told the stories of Disney’s movies to making games that told original stories within Disney’s worlds.
Disney Interactive Studios, the company’s internal game-development unit, shut its doors in 2016. After this, Disney shifted toward working with outside developers, and that’s set to continue in the future with Disney’s partnership with Epic for Fortnite and numerous other teams making games based on Disney’s IP.
“Roughly eight years ago, we made a conscious decision to really focus games in a way that we can serve this medium specifically. For a long time, we would do re-tellings of films and other things that really served more of a marketing purpose for the broader company. We really re-purposed games very intentionally to be true original stories built for this medium specifically,” Shoptaw said (via Laughing Place). The industry at large has moved away from licensed tie-ins, too, so it’s not just Disney.
“So working with filmmakers, working with the creatives around the company. And most importantly, working with the best game developers anywhere in the world across mobile games, console games, and PC games, to really make the best product. Make products that really did our IP justice with true creatives on both sides of the table.”
Shoptaw said his team took a focused approach of speaking with developers and finding the best, most original stories, as opposed to straight adaptations of a given Disney film or franchise.
The goal with this new approach is something Disney has always strived for: to create new franchises. This has long been a core focus for Disney, and it’s a strategy numerous other companies have adopted. Walt Disney’s 1957 diagram showed off how he planned to connect Disney’s theatrical films with numerous other revenue sources, including books, merchandise, music, and TV. Disney’s original diagram did not include video games, but an updated version of it surely would.
Fortnite is changing the game
Also during his discussion, Shoptaw said games like Fortnite and Roblox are effectively “massive social platforms” and this has led to a “massive disruption” in the traditional gaming market. On platforms like Fortnite and Roblox, people create content and watch content, in addition to playing, of course.
Disney invested $1.5 billion into Epic Games to create a Disney metaverse of sorts in Fortnite, and while the larger Fortnite x Disney project remains mysterious, just recently, Epic rolled out new UEFN tools that allow people to create all kinds of different Star Wars experiences within Fortnite. Before this, Disney and Epic teamed up for a Simpsons takeover in Fortnite, and it was a huge success, propelling Fortnite player numbers to their highest levels in a long time.
Shoptaw teased that this was a good example of what Disney could achieve with some of its other brands in the digital space.
“The Simpsons was a great illustration of one IP, in one story, for one season, but you can imagine us having a space where we can program and do that with all stories and things that we do around the company,” he said.
Fortnite is one of the biggest games on the planet, and it’s also expensive to run. Epic recently raised V-Bucks prices to “help pay the bills” and later laid off 1,000 people as part of a massive cost-reduction plan that also saw multiple games get shut down.
Connection to Disney’s parks
Disney’s real-world theme parks are massively popular in the US and abroad, and Shoptaw said Disney sees an opportunity to further engage its passionate fans with more gamification that extends beyond the gates of Walt Disney World or Disneyland.
“There are great experiences people have inside our theme parks every day, but when you leave, you leave. We think there is a way to carry that consumer through those experiences. Gamifying those experiences at the park to have relevance in the digital world. Creating connectivity through games. When you experience a great ride; you can do things that we feel can carry that consumer … when they get in the car, they can jump on their phone,” he said. “There is resonance to the things they’re doing between the physical and digital space. We’re just starting to tap into what that can mean, and really create hopefully really unique experiences that cross over.”
Before this, Disney’s new CEO, Josh D’Amaro, said Disney might sell Disney Cruise Line tickets or premiere new Disney movies inside Fortnite. Fortnite might also give players the ability to engage in some kind of Super Bowl activation next year when Disney’s ESPN hosts its first-ever Super Bowl.
