Why Disney Games Won’t Build or Acquire Studios, Even with Publishers Slowly Moving Away from Licensed IPs

Two months ago, Disney Games announced a massive $1.5 billion investment in Epic Games to support the creation of a persistent universe within Fortnite featuring the company's major intellectual properties.

Yesterday, VentureBeat reported that Disney Games is hiring new industry executives to prepare for a new wave of investments. Bjorn Tornqvist has recently joined as the new vice president of games technology after a couple of decades at Ubisoft Massive (he was most recently the technical director for Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora), while Ray Gresko, formerly chief development officer at Blizzard Entertainment, is joining the team as senior vice president of product and development.

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Disney exited in-house game development several years ago, opting to license its prized franchises to third-party developers and publishers. However, due to the continuous rise in game budgets (Marvel's Spider-Man 2 reportedly cost Sony $300 million, a third of which was spent just on the license), major publishers are slowly moving away from licensed IPs. Electronic Arts famously announced the news to investors in late February while canceling a Star Wars first-person shooter game in development at Respawn.

Given this major ongoing shift in the games industry, could Disney be interested in building its own studios again or perhaps acquiring existing ones? We asked MIDiA Research Games Industry Analyst Rhys Elliott for his opinion.

It is unlikely that Disney would create a studio from scratch. There’s too much risk involved. In some cases, established AAA studios take five years or more to make a game from the ground up, and these studios are versed in operating games. For example, Xbox created the AAA studio The Initiative in 2018 to work on Perfect Dark, and six years later, we haven’t seen anything tangible from that team. Disney does not want these costs on the books.

The likelier outcome is that Disney