Surprisingly few major acquisitions seem to turn out to be truly successful in the game industry. All too often, we hear about layoffs or, in the worst cases, closures, such as when Sony recently scrapped Bluepoint less than four and a half years after acquiring the highly regarded developer.
But that doesn't mean the giants are done with major acquisitions, and Puck News is now reporting on a potentially earth-shattering deal. It's on Puck News co-founder Matthew Belloni's podcast The Town that journalist Alex Heath says:
"I know for a fact there are senior executives at Disney who want to buy Epic and they're just waiting for that moment. There are others who think it's a bad idea. I think if Epic ever sold and decided to call it quits on being an independent company, Disney would be the most natural home for it. For a lot of reasons. For the park integration, can you imagine a Fortnite park to integrating Disney IP into all the open world stuff which they already announced and Disney's new gaming platform. I can see that but at the same time you have to understand Epic is a founder controlled company meaning Tim Sweeney has full voting stock control and can make unilateral decisions. It's really up to him. As we saw, he was the guy who went to battle against the app stores, against Apple and Google, to open those up. It's almost illogical per se when you're running a company like Epic to do something like that and even acknowledging the layoff like "that cost us." That kind of thinking is going to keep Disney a little bit at arms length."
Heat later notes that Fortnite has lost some of its lustre recently, but it's obviously still massive and would be a good fit for Disney, which would also gain control of Epic's Unreal Engine, a game engine that could be used for both games and movies. Plus, Disney games on the Epic Games Store could be a big draw for people.
What do you think, would Disney be a good owner of Epic?