Disney’s CEO Bob Iger says Disney is bad at video games, but actually, are they? Why aren’t they doing a better job?
The answer lies in Disney’s long and erratic approach to game development.
Their first crack at the game biz was Walt Disney Computer Software, founded in 1988.
They wanted to publish a game to coincide with Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which was due
in theaters in 9 months.
But they couldn’t find a developer willing to do it in such a short time.
So they had to do it in-house, the game dev equivalent of a shotgun wedding.
The Who Framed Roger Rabbit game was a success and made tons of money despite the short turn-around,
which gave Disney an idea:
what if….
more money?
Games at this time were mostly cartridge-based, which meant investing in manufacturing
and shipping, and that’s a great way to not get money immediately.
So Disney licensed out their IP for consoles and set WDCS to work on computer games and
software.
"Disney Presents The Animation Studio" was a big seller, and proved that there was something
to this whole software idea.
Early on, WDCS had a lot of freedom because they were small and could be ignored.
As they became more successful, and as games became a larger economic force, they drew
more attention from the higher-ups, like the Eye of Sauron turning on Frodo.
Sauron: I.... SEE.... YOU...
According to employees at the time, it was nearly impossible to get projects approved
because Disney didn’t know what it wanted to do with the whole concept of games.
WDCS would lay dormant with no projects for over a year in the early 90s.
Then in ‘93, Disney licensed out Aladdin to Sega.
But they did the animation in-house, with digitization from Virgin Interactive.
The Aladdin game made thick stacks, selling over 4 million copies, reminding Disney once
again that oh right, money.
So in ‘94, WDCS and its eight remaining employees became Disney Interactive.
All development moved in-house, more staff was hired, and they started cranking out both
entertainment and edu-tainment.
Pooh: [adorable laughter]
But then in 1997 the winds shifted again; game development costs were rising, but more
importantly, Disney’s new financial standards lead to a quarter of Disney Interactive’s
staff being laid off – about 90 people.
They went back to dealing with just PC games, and let other companies handle consoles.
In some cases, like Kingdom Hearts, the projects were quasi-collaborative; Disney provided
talent and guidance for their IP.
But quality was an issue – not every licensed Disney game was a Kingdom Hearts.
Plus PC games and edutainment weren’t exactly rich veins, compared to the console market.
So in 2002, new leadership took over and started to spin up the ol’ in-house development
windmill again.
Two Disney-developed Game Boy Advanced projects were published and did well, so Disney was
like, fuck it, go crazy.
And EXPAND THEY DID. Disney acquired Avalanche Studios in 2005, Black Rock Studios Limited
in 2006, Junction Point and the Club Penguin property in 2007, Gamestar in 2008, Wideload
Games in 2009, Tapulous and Playdom in 2010 and LucasArts in 2012.
[pained intake of breath]
Additional studios were formed too: Propaganda Games in 2005, Fall Line Studio in 2006.
It was like the Winchester Mystery House approach to studio development.
If you look at that list and think that’s too much, then, yeah, uh, that’s what the
non-game bits of Disney thought too.
This studio-golem had some successes: Hannah Montana on the Nintendo DS sold over a million
copies.
But Disney’s attempts to chase a young male audience with new IP never quite matched those
numbers.
And the animation licenses weren’t as valuable – gone were the halcyon days of Aladdin.
It was the mid-2000s bog of DOA franchises and low-quality sequels.
Remember Home on the Range?
No.
Nobody remembers Home on the Range.
Plus by the late 2000s, the gaming landscape had once again shifted: Facebook and mobile
gaming were lucrative markets that Disney wasn’t in.
Thus came the reaping: hundreds of jobs, and a myriad of in-development titles, with
Disney Interactive Studios itself officially closing in May 2016.
And we've found over the years that we haven't been particularly good at the self-publishing side.
But we've been great at the licensing side. Which obviously doesn't require that much allocation of capital.
And since we're allocating capital in other directions, we've just decided that the best place for us to be, in that space, is licensing.
That brings us roughly to the present and
to the question at hand: Is Disney just bad at games?
They’re often a few steps behind the rest of the industry – going in to PCs when consoles
are popping off, missing the moment on Facebook gaming.
On the other hand, Disney Infinity was successfully on top of the “toys to life” trend, before
that market fell out.
More than anything, Disney is big enough that it could weather changes in the game market,
if it wanted to.
It’s less about being “good” at games and more about a conservative business strategy.
Disney only really has three options.
One, license their properties out.
Two, stick their thumbs in the game pie and hope for a big ol’ plum.
Or three, some mixture of Disney oversight on licensed products,
like they had with Aladdin and Kingdom Hearts.
But pure licensing will always be the safest – if the least profitable – option.
Consider Star Wars Battlefront II; the fallout of the loot box debacle rained down on EA
Games, while Disney hung out in the fallout shelter of hands-off licensing.
So will Disney pivot back to self-publishing anytime soon?
Given that Iger is the wellspring for the “Disney is bad at games” water, probably not --
at least, until his contract is up in 2021.
Who knows what game plan for the next leader will be?
That said, it’s unlikely we’ll see any games, licensed or in-house, that are closely linked
to Disney’s movie franchises.
Take, for example, Square Enix’s Avengers game.
Avengers Trailer VO: The Avengers were everything I imagined.
Clearly - clearly - it has nothing to do with the multi-billion dollar franchise Disney
has developed for the last decade.
Who are these people?
Who are these strangers?
That is not my beautiful Hulk!
But honestly, there’s no way this game could connect to the MCU.
It was announced in January 2017.
Here’s all the movies that have come out in the Marvel Universe between that announcement
and this moment:
Wow! It's too many!
It would be impossible to anticipate the changes in the MCU far enough
in advance for the long triple-A game production cycle.
Not to mention adjusting for audience reactions.
Remember how Marvel released Black Panther in February
because they thought nobody would care?
Basically the game can’t be part of the same universe.
The best it can do is wait for characters to become big in the MCU and then ride that
wave into DLC content.
So if you can’t intimately tie your game release to your massive movie universe, why
not off-load it?
Let other developers deal with it.
Or maybe in another five years Disney will release a battle royale game, and then Thanos
can guest-star in that instead of Fortnite.