Disney hires veterans to expand further into gaming

Earlier this year, Disney announced that it had agreed to acquire a minority stake in Epic Games for $1.5 billion USD. Alongside this investment, Disney and Epic Games are also teaming up on a new multiverse project, which will feature all of Disney's major IP, like Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar, sports content through EPSN, all the way through to classic Disney.

Disney essentially wants Epic Games to aid it in building its own metaverse, although we'd still expect to see plenty of crossovers with Fortnite in the years ahead too. It is an ambitious project that is going to need a strong team behind it. With that in mind, Disney has now hired former video game industry executives to help with this project, amongst others.

For starters, Disney's current head of gaming, Sean Shoptaw, is being promoted to a Vice President position and will oversee the Disney x Epic Games collaboration. As for new hires, Disney is bringing on board a trio of veterans who have previously worked with Xbox, Blizzard, EA, Ubisoft and other companies.

Ray Gresko, who was the Chief Development Officer at Blizzard, will now join Disney and Epic Games' on-going project. Bjorn Tornqvist is leaving Ubisoft to take on the role of VP of Games Technology at Disney and Jay Ong, who previously led Marvel Games, will now lead Disney's entire games licensing business, overseeing all franchises.

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KitGuru Says: It'll be a long time before we see this project come to life, but aside from the Epic Games project, it also looks like Disney is gearing up to go further into the gaming market in the years ahead with third-parties picking up licenses.

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