Only a few “live service” games can host a collaborative live event like Fortnite Over the years, tens of millions of players have watched the concerts, see JJ Abrams debut star Wars Footage and letting Emperor Palpatine canonically chat shit FortniteWatch movies, or even start new seasons with Galactus himself eating the world. So suffice it to say that the thought that Disney and Epic Games would be showing off the fruits of their $1.5 billion investment in Epic Games at D23 this past weekend created a certain amount of anticipation. Instead, fans have had to wait quite a while for things they basically knew were coming.
Last Saturday evening, Epic and Disney announced that players could jump onto a specially created island in Fortnite to attend the Disney Horizons panel at D23, which promised both news about Disney’s theme parks and the first official details about Disney’s investment in Epic. The deal, announced in February, included not only the billion-and-a-half dollar stake, but also plans to create “an entirely new gaming and entertainment universe that will further expand the reach of beloved Disney stories and experiences.” What actually came out of it was a virtual replica of the Honda Center in Anaheim, California – adorned with giant models of The Mandalorian‘s Din Djarin and Spider-Man on either side of a waiting screen playing trailers for previous Disney productions Fortnite Crossovers on loop.
And it was a much of waiting. The doors of the “experience” opened an hour before the time when both Disney and Epic expected the D23 panel Fortnite-relevant news, but since the panel itself was more of a musical number than a news event, it kept getting pushed back. What could players do in the meantime? Dance, mainly. Repeatedly pressing emotes would raise a community “cheer bar” that, as it filled up, would cause non-player avatars to light up and dance in the sea of crowds below the player area. There were collectible coins to collect all over the arena, mostly for experience for the season’s Battle Pass progression. You could sit down in a seat if you had a unfiltered View of something that consisted mostly of a blank screen or trailers you could watch on YouTube for over an hour.
When the livestream actually began, things were pretty abrupt. According to the panel’s moderator, Josh D’Amaro, head of Disney Parks and Products, over a million people watched live. Fortnite (Disney later confirmed it was around 1.2 million.) These dismal numbers compare to previous live events like Galactus destroying the island at the end of Chapter 2 in 2020 (around 15.3 million) or the in-game concerts by Travis Scott and Marshmello before that (around 12.3 and 10.7 million respectively), but part of the appeal of Fortnite‘s in-game events are the actual gameplay that surrounds them. Players can actually tangibly interact with the game through these things and see the impact it has on them. That’s what really makes them a huge draw.
Stopping by and watching people in business casual attire announce a series of crossover skins is a lot less exciting than a music concert or the status quo of the entire game being gobbled up by a giant planet eater. And yet, for the most part, D23 was just that. Once the Fortnite Announcements were over – crossover skins for Disney villains, The IncrediblesAnd The Mandalorianand the first trailer for Fortnites new Marvel season, “Absolute Doom” – the video display was abruptly turned off so that no one outside the Honda Center dared to witness a Disney Parks announcement in real time.
It is no surprise that the event was perhaps more blatantly focused on corporate interests than anything else: it is simply what Fortnite is now a “metaverse” as an excuse to overload its original content with a sea of IP crossovers. The last time Fortnite had devoted an entire season to a crossover collaboration that was like nothing the game had done before, now a Marvel season is just more of the same. But as an early window into what to expect from Disney’s latest push to anchor its properties in the world of video games, Lucasfilm’s Dave Filoni, Disney Animation’s Jennifer Lee, Pixar’s Pete Docter and Marvel’s Kevin Feige are lined up to Fortnite Skins wasn’t exactly a culture-shattering moment.
Of course, there will be more to the deal. Several members of the Disney team on stage stressed that this is all still in the early stages. The most tangible, non-Fortnite Part of the deal announced this weekend was Lucasfilm’s continued collaboration with Epic’s Unreal Engine to develop a new Mandalorian-Theme ride update for Millennium Falcon: Smuggler’s Escapebut even that repeated things the two companies were already doing.
Perhaps “more of the same” is a reflection of the current ambitions of Disney and Epic in equal measure, but one would have hoped that two of the biggest companies in entertainment working together seriously could have kicked things off with a little more pizzazz. Unfortunately, all that was left was an empty digital theater filled with the bodies of aimlessly cheering NPCs, coins to collect, and the promise of purchasing skins in the future while quietly expressing emotions to keep the cheer bar flowing.
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