Disney downplays rumors of EA purchase—’happy’ to keep licensing its IPs

In a Dec. 11 interview, Disney’s head of gaming Sean Shoptaw discussed the company’s ongoing commitment to licensing its properties to other developers while avoiding commenting on claims that Disney’s looking to buy out EA.

Back in October, there was chatter of Disney wanting to become a “gaming giant,” with executives pushing CEO Bob Iger into acquiring EA, which has worked with Disney for years through various Star Wars games.

In the interview with Axios, Shoptaw didn’t outright deny the rumor, but his comments suggest that Disney isn’t particularly interested in pulling a Microsoft and spending loads of money to turn its partners into in-house studios. Instead, he said the company is still “happy with where we are now strategically in the work that we’re doing.”

Ever since Disney pulled out of making its own video games, it’s relied on outside partners like EA to adapt its franchises. It’s a strategy that has so far proved successful; Shoptaw specifically highlights titles like EA’s Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and Gameloft’s Disney Dreamlight Valley as examples of this, adding, “It’s not just this easy assumption to say, “Well, Disney could do that in-house.”

Shoptaw’s comments do make sense. Aside from the two mentioned earlier, this licensing strategy is also responsible for Insomniac Games’ Spider-Man 2, which was a runaway success critically and commercially. Why spend money acquiring studios when they’re perfectly capable of releasing quality games based on Disney’s IPs already? Between the upcoming Star Wars Outlaws, Indiana Jones, Iron Man, Black Panther, and now Blade projects, it seems Disney has no intention of slowing down and is extremely confident in its current approach.

Granted, it’s not been perfect. The Axios interview highlights Disney’s partnership with Square Enix, which yielded games based on the Avengers and the Guardians of the Galaxy. The former was an underwhelming live service which has since been abandoned (only lasting three years) and the latter, while something of a critical darling, underperformed in terms of sales.

Despite this, Shoptaw said Disney remains open to partnering with Square Enix and/or the development teams involved again, saying, “They’re great studios, great partners.” Admittedly, Disney and Square Enix are still in bed with each other thanks to Kingdom Hearts, which Shoptaw calls an “incredibly successful partnership.”

Hopefully Disney sticks to this strategy and doesn’t get bitten by the acquisition bug. It’s not an exaggeration to say the company owns too much already. Plus, the games industry is already becoming more and more consolidated and we’ve seen how detrimental this can be. Embracer Group, for example, hoovered up multiple studios, only to smack them with redundancies if not shut them down completely.