Disney has recently slowly moved away from the gaming space, at least as far as developing their own games are concerned. Now it seems the company will be selling its last big gaming studio.
According to sources who spoke to Bloomberg, Disney is in talks to sell FoxNext Games, which Disney acquired as part of the multibillion-dollar acquisition of Fox.
The developer was founded by Fox back in 2017 and worked on mobile games such as Marvel Strike Force and Futurama: Worlds of Tomorrow.
The decision to sell comes after Disney revealed back in 2016 that they would be moving away from developing their own games based on their properties. As Chief Executive Officer Bob Iger put it, publishing games was just not their forte. “We’ve just decided that the best place for us to be in that space is licensing and not publishing.”
Studios that were closed down due to this decision include Propaganda games, who worked on Tron Evolution, and Split/Second developer Black Rock Studios.
Disney and Marvel have been working with studios such as Insomniac Games that released the critically acclaimed Spider-man PS4 game and, more recently, they have been working with Crystal Dynamics and Square Enix on the Marvel’s Avengers game.
While it was sad to see Disney closing down various studios as part of their move to step away from self-publishing, as Spider-Man PS4 has shown, it seems it might have been for the better. Let’s hope the company keeps up the momentum and we see even more great games based on their properties in the near future.
