Bloomberg is reporting that Epic Games is going to release an Arc Raiders-style extraction shooter, but with Disney characters. It is unclear if this will be a standalone title, or part of the Fortnite universe.
Disney invested $1.5 billion in Epic in 2024 with a view to creating games based on its franchises, and this is said to be one of three games currently being developed. Epic and Disney have already teamed up many times to release characters into the world of Fortnite.
The sources for Bloomberg claim the extraction shooter lacks any originality, but “some of the employees are optimistic that Epic will get it right by the launch date”. The extraction shooter market is already flooded, the most recent release, Marathon, is just about holding its own against the others but do we really need another one?
Less than a month ago, Epic Games announced it was laying off over 1,000 employees from its workforce.
Citing a downturn in engagement with Fortnite that has continued since 2025, which has meant that they are “spending significantly more than we’re making,” Sweeney states that they are making these cuts to keep the company funded. The studio is also cutting contract work, marketing and removing job listings as part of an effort to make $500 million in cost savings.
Sweeney states that this is not related to AI – “To the extent it improves productivity, we want to have as many awesome developers developing great content and tech as we can.” – but rather the greater competition for player attention, the constant need to keep Fortnite as engaging as possible being a tall task, and Epic’s own unique problems of choosing to go to court over mobile gaming with Apple and Epic. That’s a situation that they are only now starting to resolve, with Fortnite only returning to the Google Play Store globally last week.
Epic is also raising the price of Fortnite V-Bucks as “The cost of running Fortnite has gone up a lot and we’re raising prices to help pay the bills”
Source: Bloomberg (Paywall)
