Epic wants its Fortnite-Disney metaverse project to be 'what every Disney fan has ever wanted,' but don't expect Mickey Mouse to pick up an assault rifle

In an interview with The Verge, Epic Games executive vice president Saxs Persson explained some of what we should (and shouldn't) expect from the publisher's partnership with Disney to create a "persistent world" for the media giant that will also connect with Fortnite.

“Disney wants a persistent place where all things Disney can be there, but they want to be part of an ecosystem we’ve built," Persson told The Verge. "We see the power of ecosystems interoperating as being really the magic here. From a player perspective, you want to be able to flow between a Fortnite experience, a Disney experience, or any experience really.”

Persson expressed a desire that players be able to get into this ecosystem "in the Disney front door or the Fortnite front door," indicating an extensive level of compatibility between the two. While it's still not clear what we'll be doing in Disneynite, Epic has already demonstrated its capacity for this sort of branded sub-game under the Fortnite umbrella with Lego Fortnite, a surprisingly deep survival game that seems to have largely been a success.

While Epic is focused on "interoperability" with Fortnite, there will be limits to what carries over between its distinct branches: "Not every outfit will be able to do everything. A [Lego] minifig doesn't hold a gun," Presson explained. "Brands should be able to enforce the brand guidelines to the degree that they're comfortable with that brand being associated with particular ratings."

"Some IPs are not teen IPs or mature IPs. They are E for everyone IPs."

Despite that limitation, Presson is still bullish on the endeavor, describing it as "one of those partnerships that you can only wish for," with the effort being an "all-in from both companies to make what every Disney fan has ever wanted."

As for what I want, well, Epic's plans for Fortnite and the Unreal Engine give me the ick. Epic CEO Tim Sweeney has made his ambitions for the games industry clear: He wants the Unreal Engine to be a unifying force, connecting all games using it in a single, interoperable, metaverse-marketplace thing buttressed by Fortnite and mega money efforts like the Disney "persistent world."

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That is not a vision of videogames I particularly want to see: A brand apocalypse digital amusement park, Fortnite's bizarre virtual concerts, real money digital action figures, and disrespectful historical commemorations becoming videogames much like how Google has made itself another internet over the internet. While I don't think this will come to pass, I'm concerned because Epic has found itself at the center of a nontraditional sort of industry consolidation.

The Unreal Engine has always been ubiquitous, but we're seeing more and more major developers forsake their in-house technology for the middleware. Similar to how Microsoft and Embracer's pandemic spending sprees tied dozens of studios' futures to their own, many developers large and small have made themselves dependent on Epic and its technology. It makes me nervous then to see Epic broadcast its goal of a future for videogames defined by homogenizing interoperability, with the output of this Unreal future heavily influenced by corporate notions of brand identity and family friendliness.

If you do want to be Mickey Mouse With a Gun, by the way, there's at least one Steam Workshop project to put him in Garry's Mod.