Vidjama Gmaes Work

Three weeks left to go in the season.

It’s time to talk about Fortnite again. There’s about three weeks left in the season and absolutely nothing going on on the story front. I’ve already mentioned a few times that I understand why this is happening, given Fortnite launched several new modes so the team likely didn’t have time to frontload an ongoing season story. Sure, we’ll get back to that in season 2 of Chapter 5 probably. Hopefully. With Epic gradually reducing the scope of Fortnite BR events I hope they haven’t completely ditched a story for this multiverse stuff.

But the other half of it is that Fortnite and Disney are doing some big collaboration, and this kinda goes into what I brought up a couple articles ago. You’ll notice at no point in the announcement did Disney or Epic call this a metaverse. I don’t think Tim Sweeney has given up his dream of the metaverse, and I also think Fortnite is probably the best bet at getting as close to it as possible. But he’s also smart enough to know that consumers tend to react to the M word with revulsion and contempt.

So the Disney/Fortnite ecosystem is about to become a thing, and I’m renewing my theory that the Legos and ESRB rating was step one and two in segregating the Fortnite cash shop and fragmenting the game itself. Because I’m sure Disney wants all the money that could come out of putting their characters on Fortnite, they invested $1.5 billion into Epic for shit sake. But they also don’t want Mulan going around with a shotgun and committing mass murder on Peter Griffin clones. That’s the Mandalorian’s job.

The introduction of a Disneyverse also means Fortnite can go full “who cares” in terms of monetization and theming. Up until now new characters in Fortnite always had to be Fortnite-ified, meaning they had to fit structurally to work with the game’s hitboxes. You can’t have fat Peter Griffin, tall characters like Thanos had to be made shorter, short characters had to be made taller, and proportionally characters had to be squished and stretched to make sense. And others I assume were just forgotten entirely.

The same goes for other brands who want to get in on the Fortnite audience without associating their brands with other brands that are on Fortnite.

My assumption is that the Disneyverse will have characters that won’t be usable in Fortnite BR or even creative mode, which means they don’t have to care about making them look like they fit within Fortnite. In the same way that a good number of licensed characters do not work in Lego Fortnite, a number of licenses simply won’t work in the Disneyverse. And of course that means one more thing; we’re going to have another concurrently running battle pass.

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