New Disney CEO to make gaming a big priority but that may not be a good thing

Come March, Disney will have a new CEO in charge; one who will push for a renewed focus on video games – and not just Fortnite crossovers.

In case you hadn’t heard, Disney CEO Bob Iger will be stepping down this year, after running the company for nearly 20 years. He left before, in 2020, but his replacement, Bob Chapek, didn’t work out and in 2022 Iger was asked to return to the role, which he agreed to do… but only for two years.

He’s now set to leave his role for the final time on March 18 and become a senior adviser on Disney’s board, until he properly retires at the end of the year. In his place will be Josh D’Amaro, a Disney employee of 27 years who, according to those familiar with his work, is set to lead the company into becoming more involved with gaming.

Previously the chairman of Disney Experiences (the company’s theme park division), D’Amaro was reportedly one of the people responsible for Disney’s investment of $1.5 billion in Fortnite maker Epic Games.

As such, it’s believed gaming will be a big priority for D’Amaro once he takes over, although not necessarily in a way that will please adult gamers.

‘He sees the digital realm – and Epic is a manifestation of that – as a very important place for fans to interact with their favourite characters, franchises and brands in a comprehensive way that you can monetise and that will serve fan interest in a way that, other than a theme park, it’s really impossible to do,’ Kevin Mayer, Disney’s former chief strategy officer, told The Hollywood Reporter.

‘It democratises the theme park experience in a digital way. Not everyone can get to a theme park; it has limited capacity. Epic Games and that universe has unlimited capacity.’

This is a reference to how Disney and Epic are working on a ‘persistent universe’ that connects to Fortnite and serves as a hub for engaging with Disney franchises, much like a virtual theme park.

Disney has always had a strangely distant relationship with the video games industry. While there’s certainly been no shortage of Disney games over the years (especially now that it owns Marvel and Star Wars), the company itself has typically been content to merely license its properties out to other companies and has otherwise had little involvement in making them.

There was a brief period when Disney tried developing and publishing its own games, including non-franchise titles ranging from the excellent Split/Second: Velocity to a reboot of Turok (not to be confused with the other upcoming reboot). Although their biggest push was for toys to life franchise Disney Infinity.

In 2016, though, Disney basically gave up on all that and shut down publishing arm Disney Interactive Studios. All the developers Disney had set up or bought out went with it, although Disney Infinity studio Avalanche Software was snapped up by Warner Bros. and went on to make Hogwarts Legacy (though now Warner Bros. itself is about to be sold off to Netflix).

Disney as a company is 100 years old and it was in the perfect position to influence, and dominate, the fledging video games industry in the 80s, but it was never that interested. That apathy continued into the 21st century and the whole of Iger’s reign, but D’Amaro looks like he’s going to handle things differently.

Does this mean Disney will start investing in its own home-made games again? Maybe pursue new partnerships or reignite old ones? Or maybe re-release lost games from its backlog? The answer is probably no to everything.

If the Fortnite investment is anything to go by, D’Amaro isn’t so much interested in traditional single-player fare, or any sort of premium experience, but eternally monetisable theme park-esque experiences Basically, large, glorified shopping centres full of money-making opportunities that can last forever as opposed to finite one-off games.

And while D’Amaro reportedly told staff that ‘willingness to change and take risks is what keeps the brand going,’ Disney’s only going to want to target the biggest audiences and those belong to live service games like Fortnite and Roblox.

Disney has reportedly shown a disinterest in collaborating with Roblox due to concerns over child safety, but perhaps plans will change once D’Amaro takes over.

D’Amaro could look into investing in other game companies, beyond Epic Games (it certainly has the funds to buy out plenty of them if it wanted), but the games industry has been losing investors since 2023 and many of the biggest names have already been snapped up anyway.

With so many stories of games failing to meet sales expectations, which has contributed to the constant layoffs throughout the industry, the video game market is too volatile for most investors. So, Disney’s not going to take any real risks, even if it can afford to.

Instead, investors are flocking to AI companies, even if many are predicting that bubble is going to burst soon. Much like how investors and executives latched onto NFTs and the metaverse, generative AI is being pushed as the new tech that’ll solve almost every problem you can think of and thus make even more money.

Despite its unpopularity amongst many ordinary people, a lot of the games industry has readily embraced the tech. Larian Studios is using it to make concept art for its next Divinity game, Arc Raiders used it for its voice performances, and Microsoft has plans for AI to make entire games.

If anything, D’Amaro is only going to accelerate Disney’s interest in generative AI. This past December, the company announced a $1 billion investment in OpenAI so that its Sora AI app can draw from Disney’s wealth of properties and thus allow people to make their own short videos using Disney characters.

The deal’s yet to bear fruit but it sounds like a disaster waiting to happen and is a shocking move from a company that rivals Nintendo in how protective it is of its brands.

But it’s this degree of interactivity that D’Amaro is reportedly interested in and so it’s reasonable to assume he’ll approach video games in the same way. Games that can be constantly updated with new content, both official and made by players, is what he wants… not a new DuckTales game.

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