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disney-invests-$1.5b-in-epic-games,-plans-new-“games-and-entertainment-universe”

Disney invests $1.5B in Epic Games, plans new “games and entertainment universe”

Disney, epic, epic games, fortnite, gaming / /

Steamboat Willie in Fortnite when? —

Major move continues Disney’s decades-long, up-and-down relationship with gaming.

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What is this, some sort of

Enlarge / What is this, some sort of “meta universe” or something?

Disney / Epic

Entertainment conglomerate Disney has announced plans to invest $1.5 billion for an “equity stake” in gaming conglomerate Epic Games. The financial partnership will also see both companies “collaborate on an all-new games and entertainment universe that will further expand the reach of beloved Disney stories and experiences,” according to a press release issued late Wednesday.

A short teaser trailer announcing the partnership promises that “a new Universe will emerge,” allowing players to “play, watch, create, [and] shop” while “discover[ing] a place where magic is Epic.”

In announcing the partnership, Disney stressed its long-standing use of Epic’s Unreal Engine in projects ranging from cinematic editing to theme park experiences like Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge. Disney’s new gaming universe will also be powered by the Unreal Engine, the company said.

Content and characters from Disney’s Marvel and Star Wars subsidiaries were some of the first third-party content to be included in Epic’s mega-popular Fortnite, helping establish the game’s reputation as a major cross-media metaverse. Disney says that its new “persistent universe” will “interoperate with Fortnite” while offering games and “a multitude of opportunities for consumers to play, watch, shop and engage with content, characters, and stories from Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, Avatar, and more.”

While a $1.5 billion investment sounds significant on its face, it only represents a small portion of a company like Epic, which was valued at $32 billion in a 2022 investment by Sony. Since 2012, nearly half of Epic has been owned by Chinese gaming conglomerate Tencent (market cap: $356 billion), an association that has led to some controversy for Epic in the recent past.

Here we go again

In announcing the new Epic investment, Disney CEO Bob Iger called the partnership “Disney’s biggest entry ever into the world of games… offer[ing] significant opportunities for growth and expansion.” But this is far from Disney’s first ride in the game industry rodeo; on the contrary, it’s a continuation of an interest in gaming that has run hot and cold since Walt Disney Computer Software was first established back in 1988.

Two logos plus an X means a partnership is official, right?

Enlarge / Two logos plus an X means a partnership is official, right?

Disney / Epic

That publisher, which operated under several names over the years, mainly published lowest-common-denominator licensed games based on Disney properties for dozens of platforms. Disney invested heavily in the Disney Infinity “toys-to-life” line starting in 2013 but then shut the game down and left game publishing for good in 2016. Since then, Disney has interacted with the game industry mainly as a licensor for properties such as the Sony-published Spider-Man series and Square Enix’s Kingdom Hearts 3.

After acquiring storied game developer LucasArts in 2012 (as part of a much larger Star Wars deal), Disney unceremoniously shut down the struggling game development division just six months later. But in 2021, Disney brought back the Lucasfilm Games brand as an umbrella for all future Star Wars games.

While today’s announcement doesn’t include any specific mention of linear TV or movie adaptations of Epic Game properties, the possibility seems much more plausible given this new financial and creative partnership. Given the recent success of linear narratives based on video game properties from Super Mario Bros. to The Last of Us, a Disney+ streaming series targeting Fortnite‘s 126 million monthly active players almost seems like a no-brainer at this point.

Disney’s stock price shot up nearly 8 percent to about $107 per share in 15 minutes of after-hours trading following the announcement, but has given back some of those gains as of this writing.

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Harmonix is ending Rock Band DLC releases after 16 years, ~2,800 songs

DLC, downloads, epic, epic games, gaming, Harmonix, Rock, rock band, song / /

Don’t look back in anger —

Previously purchased songs will still be playable via Rock Band 4.

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After 16 (nearly unbroken) years of regular DLC releases, <em>Rock Band</em>‘s avatars haven’t aged a day.” src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/RockBand4_NoHUD_03-640×360.jpg”></img><figcaption> <p>After 16 (nearly unbroken) years of regular DLC releases, <em>Rock Band</em>‘s avatars haven’t aged a day.</p> </figcaption></figure> <p>Here at Ars Technica, we remember covering <em>Rock Band</em>‘s weekly DLC song releases <a href=way back in 2007, when such regular content drops were still a new concept for a rhythm game. Now, Harmonix has announced the last of the series’ roughly 2,800 downloadable releases will finally come on January 25, marking the end of a nearly 16-year era in music gaming history.

Previously purchased DLC songs will still be playable in Rock Band 4, Harmonix’s Daniel Sussman writes in an announcement post. Rock Band 4 live services, including online play, will also continue as normal, after online game modes for earlier Rock Band games were finally shut down in late 2022.

“Taking a longer look back, I see the Rock Band DLC catalog as a huge achievement in persistence and commitment,” Sussman writes. “Over the years we’ve cleared, authored and released nearly 3,000 songs as DLC and well over 3,000 if you include all the game soundtracks. That’s wild.”

A long-lasting content commitment

You’d be forgiven for not realizing that Harmonix has kept up its regular releases of downloadable playable Rock Band songs to this day. While we were big fans of 2015’s Rock Band 4, the Xbox One and PS4 release generally failed to reignite the ’00s mania for plastic instruments that made both Guitar Hero and Rock Band into billion-dollar franchises during their heyday.

Yet, Harmonix has still been quietly releasing one to three new downloadable Rock Band 4 tracks to faithful fans every single week since the game’s release over eight years ago. Before that, Harmonix had kept a similar weekly release schedule for earlier Rock Band titles going back to 2007, broken up only by a 21-month gap starting in April 2013.

Those regular releases were key to maintaining interest and longevity in the Rock Band titles beyond the dozens of songs on the game discs. For a couple of bucks per song, players could customize their in-game soundtracks with thousands of tracks spanning hundreds of indie and mainstream acts across all sorts of genres. And even after all that time, the last year of newly released DLC has still included some absolute bangers from major groups like Steely Dan, Linkin Park, and Foo Fighters.

Rock Band 2 at that game’s 2008 launch party at LA’s Orpheum Theatre.” height=”481″ src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/GettyImages-81960955-640×481.jpg” width=”640″>

Enlarge / A couple of folks absolutely getting down to Rock Band 2 at that game’s 2008 launch party at LA’s Orpheum Theatre.

Getty Images

Harmonix also deserves credit for making its DLC cross-compatible across multiple different games and systems. That copy of The Police’s Roxanne that you bought to play on your Xbox 360 in 2007 could still be re-downloaded and played on Rock Band 4 via your Xbox Series X to this day (Switch and PlayStation 5 owners are less lucky, however). And for songs that were trapped on earlier game discs, Harmonix also went out of its way to offer song export options that let you transfer that content forward to newer Rock Band titles (with the notable exception of The Beatles: Rock Band, whose songs remain trapped on that version of the standalone game).

Compare that to the Guitar Hero franchise, which also relaunched in 2015 as the online-focused Guitar Hero Live. When Activision shut down the game’s “Guitar Hero TV” service in 2018, 92 percent of the new game’s playable songs became instantly inaccessible, leaving only 42 “on-disc” songs to play.

What’s next?

While official support for Rock Band DLC is finally ending, the community behind Clone Hero just recently hit an official Version 1.0 release for their PC-based rhythm game that’s compatible with many guitars, drums, keyboards, gamepads, and adapters used in Rock Band and other console rhythm games (microphones excluded). While that game doesn’t come with anything like Rock Band‘s list of officially licensed song content, it’s not hard to find a bevy of downloadable, fan-made custom Clone Hero tracks with a little bit of searching.

Rock Band DLC, but we do get… this.” height=”360″ src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/ff-640×360.jpg” width=”640″>

Enlarge / We might not get any more Rock Band DLC, but we do get… this.

Epic Games

Shortly after its acquisition by Epic in 2021, Harmonix has been working on “Fortnite Festival,” the incredibly Rock Band-esque mini-game embedded in Epic’s Fortnite “metaverse.” Sussman writes that a “rotating selection” of free-to-play songs will continue to cycle through that game mode, and that support for Rock Band 4 instruments will be coming to Fortnite in the future as well (peripheral-maker PDP looks like it will be getting in on the Fortnite guitar act as well).

As for the last few weeks of Rock Band DLC offerings, Sussman writes that Harmonix is planning “some tear jerkers that sum up our feelings about this moment.” Here’s hoping we finally get an official Rock Band version of November Rain as part of that closeout; as Guns N’ Roses memorably said, “Nothing lasts forever, and we both know hearts can change.”

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Supreme Court denies Epic v. Apple petitions, opening up iOS payment options

App Store, Apple, Apple v Epic, epic, fortnite, gaming, Google, Policy, Supreme Court, Tech / /

Epic v. Apple —

Most of Epic’s arguments are moot now, but one point will change the App Store.

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Fortnite characters looking across the many islands and vast realm of the game.

Enlarge / Artist’s conception of iOS developers after today’s Supreme Court ruling, surveying a new landscape of payment options and subscription signaling.

Epic Games

The Supreme Court declined to hear either of the petitions resulting from the multi-year, multi-court Epic v. Apple antitrust dispute. That leaves most of Epic’s complaints about Apple’s practices unanswered, but the gaming company achieved one victory on pricing notices.

It all started in August 2020, when Epic sought to work around Apple and Google’s app stores and implemented virtual currency purchases directly inside Fortnite. The matter quickly escalated to the courts, with firms like Spotify and Microsoft backing Epic’s claim that Apple’s App Store being the only way to load apps onto an iPhone violated antitrust laws.

The matter reached trial in May 2021. The precise definitions of “games” and “marketplace” were fervently debated. Epic scored a seemingly huge victory in September 2021 when a Northern California judge demanded that Apple allow developers to offer their own payment buttons and communicate with app customers about alternate payment options. An appeals court upheld that Apple’s App Store itself wasn’t a “walled garden” that violated antitrust laws but kept the ruling that Apple had to open up its payments and messaging.

Today’s denial of petitions for certiorari means that Apple has mostly run out of legal options to prevent changes to its App Store policies now that multiple courts have found its “anti-steering” language anticompetitive. Links and messaging from developers should soon be able to send users to alternative payment options for apps rather than forcing them to stay entirely inside Apple’s App Store, resulting in a notable commission for Apple.

Epic’s goals to see Fortnite restored to the App Store or see third-party stores or sideloading on iPhones remain unfulfilled. This is not the case with Epic’s antitrust suit against Google, which in mid-December went strongly in Epic’s favor. With a unanimous jury verdict against Google, a judge this month will determine how to address Google’s violations—potentially including Epic’s request that it and other developers be allowed to issue their own app stores and payment systems on Android devices.

Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, wrote in a thread on X (formerly Twitter) that the Supreme Court’s denial means the “battle to open iOS to competing stores and payments is lost in the United States” and that it was a “sad outcome for all developers.” Sweeney noted that as of today, developers on Apple’s platforms can “tell US customers about better prices on the web.” And he noted that regulatory and policy actions around the world, including the upcoming EU Digital Markets Act, may have further impact.

Apple has yet to comment on today’s Supreme Court decision.

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No Plans for ‘Fortnite’ VR Support, Says Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney

epic, epic games, fortnite, fortnite quest, fortnite quest 2, fortnite virtual reality, fortnite vr, News, VR Game / /

Fortnite doesn’t natively support VR headsets, and although rumors have been floating around recently that allege the popular battle royale shooter may eventually include a VR mode, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney says it’s not happening.

Update (December 9th, 2022): In an interview with Tim Sweeney from The Verge, the Epic Games CEO made it clear that the company has “no plans” for a VR supported version of Fortnite. According to Sweeney, it just wouldn’t work well:

“The thing that we do in Fortnite every day as gamers is run through an environment rapidly, and it’s the kind of experience that involves intense motion and doesn’t work as well in VR,” Sweeney told The Verge.

This comes as stark contrast to previous rumors, which alleged that code found in recent updates included mention of Oculus. The rumor, detailed below, was most likely a case of leftover residue from Unreal Engine 5 development. The original article follows below:

Original Article (August 30th, 2022): Update 21.50, the game’s fifth and final update to Season 3, is rolling out today, and it seems data miner and itinerant Fortnite leaker HYPEX has gotten a look under the hood, maintaining that Epic has added “stuff related to Oculus.”

We haven’t been able to independently verify this, however HYPEX, who is known in the community as a reliable leaker, surmises this could point to VR support being added at some point in the future.

If Fortnite can manage the go native on the Quest platform like HYPEX’s tweet suggests, it’s a pretty big deal. Fortnite on Quest 2 would not only stand a chance at eclipsing its largest VR-supported competitors Roblox and Minecraft, but also offer up competition to multiplayer VR experiences and games like Meta’s Horizon platform, Rec Room, VRChat, and Population: One (2020). In short, Fortnite getting on Quest could make it one of the most popular VR games there overnight.

Of course, there’s the matter of shoehorning the large-scale multiplayer shooter onto Quest 2’s modest Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 processor, which is a challenge in its own right. Still, Epic Games has been a big proponent of VR since the launch the original Oculus Rift in 2016, having pioneered VR support for its Unreal Engine whilst putting out one of the slickest VR arcade shooters to this day, Robo Recall (2016). It basically wrote the book on optimizing games for VR headsets, and is a founding member of the OpenXR initiative, an open standard for VR/AR app development.

In more recent years however, the company has focused on building its own Epic Games Store distribution channel and pushing Fortnite way past its original conception point as a free battle royale shooter. It now includes multiple game modes, a creative sandbox mode, and regularly hosts live events such as concerts and special in-game events.

Earlier this year Epic secured a $2 billion investment to stoke its metaverse ambitions, something CEO and founder of Epic Tim Sweeney said at the time would “accelerate our work to build the metaverse and create spaces where players can have fun with friends, brands can build creative and immersive experiences and creators can build a community and thrive.”

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