Epic is reportedly cooking up a Disney extraction shooter, and suggestions staff are lukewarm on it are 'not reflective of the ambitions of the Disney collaboration'

In the wake of severe layoffs last month, Epic's increasingly looking to the House of Mouse to shore up its flagging fortunes, per a recent report from Bloomberg.

At the time of the layoffs, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney wrote that the company was "spending significantly more" than it was making thanks to a slump in engagement with Fortnite—far and away Epic's chief money-printing instrument—since 2025. "Despite Fortnite remaining one of the most successful games in the world, we've had challenges delivering consistent Fortnite magic with every season," wrote Sweeney.

But Sweeney and other Epic direction-setters hope Mickey can sort it, it seems. Disney's $1.5 billion investment in Epic two years ago will bear its first fruit in November, in the form of a Disney-themed extraction shooter starring the corporation's characters. Which sounds like a great way to get a lot more videos of Goofy melodramatically buying the farm, so I'm all in favour.

Per Bloomberg's unnamed sources, internal responses to the game have been, ah, a little underwhelming. In particular, there are concerns at the company that the game's mechanics might not be the most original, though Epic's senior director of global communications Liz Markman has come out and said that Bloomberg's description of the situation is "not reflective of the ambitions of the Disney collaboration. We are building a new games and entertainment universe of Disney experiences."

I've reached out to Epic to ask about all this, and will update if I hear back.

But whether Epic staff love Call of Goofy: Warzone* or not, it's not the only Disney-shaped basket the company's putting its eggs in. The extraction shooter is tipped to be the first Disney/Epic collab to break cover, but Epic is geared up to produce at least two more after that. No details on those, though, save that the second game has apparently also earned tepid internal reviews.

Me? I'm not sure how much room the world has left for more extraction shooters, but I will also cop to the fact that—as a rapidly ageing millennial man who spends most of his time thinking about how good Uplink was—I am perhaps as far away from the target audience of a Disney extraction shooter as its possible to be. I'm certainly ready for a deluge of clips of Winnie the Pooh execution moves, though, so put me down as a tentative 'aye'.

*Probably not the actual title. It should be.