Disney put 1.5 billion dollars into Epic Games back in 2024, and both companies went quiet after that. Disney’s CEO said at the time that they were going to build something big together, but he never said what it was and people have been guessing for two years straight with nothing to go on.
Bloomberg just reported that the first game to come out of the deal is an extraction shooter where you play as Disney characters and fight your way to an extraction point, and it could drop as early as November 2026. Four people who work at Epic or used to work there talked to Bloomberg about what is going on with the project, and that is really the first time anyone has said anything real about where all that money went.
Disney And Epic Extraction Shooter Plays Like ARC Raiders
The concept is the same, you pick a Disney character and then shoot your way through enemies until you hit an extraction point and get out. Same idea as ‘ARC Raiders,‘ ‘Escape from Tarkov,’ and ‘The Cycle.‘ Bloomberg did not say which Disney characters are in the game, though, and nobody knows what you are fighting against or whether this whole thing is a standalone title or just another mode inside ‘Fortnite,’ which is a big question that still has no answer.
Bloomberg’s sources said Epic is aiming for November 2026 and that is fast. Extraction shooters are hard to get right, and the games that have worked in this genre, like ‘Tarkov,’ went through years and years of post-launch patches before people actually stuck with them.
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Epic has the servers and the money to push something out on that kind of schedule, and Disney has enough characters to stock an entire roster ten times over, but if the game does not feel good to play, then none of that is going to save it, and that is what people who follow the genre are going to be watching for.
People Inside Epic Have Called The Game “Not Very Original”
Bloomberg also reported that internal reviewers at Epic called the extraction shooter “not very original,” which is a rough thing to have leak when you are sitting on a 1.5 billion dollar partnership. Other people at Epic pushed back on that and said they believe the game will come together before it ships.
So there is a split inside the company, and neither side is being quiet about it, which is never a great sign this close to a potential launch. The extraction shooter is also not the only game in the deal. There are two more being built under the Disney partnership, and the second one got “middling” feedback from people inside Epic, which was bad enough that workers got pulled off the third project and reassigned to try to fix the second one.
Epic’s communications team responded to the Bloomberg report and said it does not reflect what they are actually building, but they did not explain what the games look like or say when the other two are coming.
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And this is all happening while Epic is still dealing with the aftermath of cutting close to a thousand jobs earlier this year, which included the artist who created Jonesy and a worker with terminal cancer, and ‘Fortnite’ also lost three of its game modes around the same time. Epic needs this Disney deal to land more than Disney needs it to land, and that is just the reality of where the company is at right now.
