Jedi Survivor
For years now, Disney has abandoned the video game publishing space, content to farm out its various licenses to a large number of studios. Now, a new report says that Disney may want to dive back into gaming in a big way with the purchase of a major publisher. And the name that keeps coming up is Electronic Arts.
This comes from a Bloomberg report where Disney execs are allegedly pushing CEO Bob Iger to get back into game publishing by buying EA. Iger is said to be “noncommittal” about the idea. These plans apparently have already been discussed last year, though EA supposedly also spoke with NBCUniversal, Apple and Amazon, and nothing has come of it yet. There was indeed a brief, erroneous report that Amazon had bought EA a while back, which turned out to be false.
Disney video game content has been all over the place both when Disney itself was publishing and when these licenses have been farmed out. Within EA, we’ve had the great Jedi series starring Cal Kestis. But we’ve also had some disastrous Battlefront launches that had to be fixed over a long period of time. Marvel has been a much tougher sell with two Square Enix games, Marvel’s Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy, underperforming. The most successful Marvel game is easily Sony’s Spider-Man but that’s…Sony, thanks to the web of rights issues over that character between them and Disney.
Why would this be bad for pretty much everyone?
- Disney has shown no real skill at managing video games over the years and there’s nothing to think that would change with them buying a huge publisher like EA. Maybe if EA was allowed to run completely independently it might work, but that seems unlikely given how Disney would want to use this acquisition synergistically with its other properties, and an already struggling Disney will have to try to manage an industry it has been shown to barely understand.
- On EA’s part, being owned by Disney would mean they are at the mercy of a megacorp that could then dictate their entire slate of releases. And that means more Star Wars and Marvel games, or whatever else Disney wants to push from its other properties at any given moment. While likely some successful staples would remain, like all the sports game and something like Apex Legends, a lot of devs may not enjoy becoming Disney minions and working on these licensed games indefinitely now.
- On the consumer side, this could mean that EA locks up all Star Wars and Marvel rights indefinitely. There are currently a lot of interesting Star Wars projects in the works from all manner of studios outside of EA, but that could change. While this may not scoop away Wolverine or Spider-Man from Insomniac, it could also restrict future Marvel games to EA and who knows what future, actually good projects that might erase. Even many of the “failures” like Guardians of the Galaxy have been quite good, and probably wouldn’t have existed at all under this model.
How likely is this to actually happen? Iger may be “non-committal” but clearly many at Disney are demanding an entry into gaming, and EA very much sounds like it’s more than willing to sell for the right price, so here we are. Disney’s $155.51 billion market cap is certainly larger than EA’s $34.7 billion, but that is a 20% chunk of Disney, so it’s not nothing. One thing I imagine would probably not be an issue is regulators, given that Disney is not a player in the gaming space, and if Microsoft’s Activision deal got approved, I don’t see why this wouldn’t.
I don’t think anyone actually wants to see this happen this other than a few top level executives at both EA and Disney. I do not imagine this being good for either company in the long run, and certainly not for consumers, but we’ll have to wait and see if it actually happens.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
