On February 7, Disney announced that it had invested $1.5 billion in Epic Games. According to sources of The Information, she bought a stake in the company with an aggregate valuation of Epic Games at $22.5 billion.
Fortnite
Neither Disney nor Epic Games have publicly disclosed the size of the purchased stake. According to The Information, it is about 7%.
Two years ago, the market value of Epic Games was much higher. After Epic Games received $2 billion from Sony and parent company LEGO Group in April 2022, it was valued at $31.5 billion.
Last September, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney announced that his company was facing financial problems. She began spending more than she earned partly because of her desire to turn Fortnite into a full-fledged UGC ecosystem resembling a metaverse. To cope with the problems, Epic Games decided to sell the Bandcamp music platform, make SuperAwesome an independent advertising provider, and also carry out mass layoffs. The cuts affected 16% of the staff, or about 900 people.
It is also known that the Epic Games Store is still unprofitable. However, this fits into the strategy of Epic Games. The company treats the store's losses as a long-term investment and predicts that it will start making stable profits no earlier than 2025.
Epic Games intends to continue to actively develop Fortnite and Epic Games Store, as well as other key products like the Unreal Engine and Epic Online Services, MetaHuman and ArtStation.
Together with Disney, she is going to launch a "new universe of games and entertainment" in Fortnite. In it, users will be able to "play, buy, watch and interact with content" created based on the Disney franchises. It is unknown when this universe will appear in Fortnite.