Speaking at GamesBeat 2012, Disney senior vice president of social games John Spinale admitted that the company hasn’t always done a great job with games. He thinks that the company is doing a better job now with its focus on social rather than AAA games.
“Historically, at Disney, we probably haven’t done the absolute best job of being a games company. We’ve started off as a film company, then television, parks, and continuing to broaden out the portfolio of things that we did. But I think games, until pretty recently, was more of an afterthought. It was viewed as a marketing extension of what we did. So, “Hey, here’s a movie, how do we make the game” said Spinale. “That worked okay for the company, but I think when you look at the growth in the entire games business, it’s pretty obvious this is a big piece of the media pie that’s just going in the right direction. Disney made a decision a couple of years ago to treat games as a first-class citizen. It really is quality first, consumer experience, what do people want And then we’ll worry about how the details play out later.”
“That was the mandate given to us in the games group a little while ago, and I think you’re starting to see the by-products of that just now come out in the marketplace. If you look at us in any channel right now, Disney went from ‘who are they ‘ in the games space to stealthily owning the top spot or, at least depending on what cycle we’re talking about, getting into a top 10 spot,” he added.
Source: VentureBeat.com
