Disney has largely shifted away from producing games for consoles and PCs in-house, preferring to license out titles like Star Wars Battlefront to Electronic Arts. The main effort in-house for Disney Interactive is Disney Infinity, which is seeing some good profits while supporting many of the company’s movies and long-time brands. However, Disney’s gaming strength really lies on mobile platforms, as VentureBeat has reported strong numbers for the company’s releases for iOS and Android.

With such titles as Where’s My Water, Star Wars: Commander and Marvel Avengers Alliance leading the charge, the company is seeing a huge turn-around on the mobile front.

VentureBeat sat down with Disney Mobile Games general manager Chris Heatherly regarding the turnaround in the division’s popularity. “We’re the no. 8 most downloaded publisher in the world on mobile,” said Heatherly. “We have about a million downloads a day and about 70 million monthly users in our network.”

The company boasted these numbers during the Game Developers Conference earlier this month, marking the first time it made full use of the show to talk about its success. “We’ve been sending people to GDC for years to do business development meetings and stuff,” he explained. “But we’ve never gotten up and really told our story.”

What sets Disney’s mobile approach apart from others “I think what Disney brings to the games business is this idea of storytelling. One of the thing we constantly – I don’t want to say struggle with, but one of the things we constantly push for is quality and storytelling and not just taking our characters and putting them in a game and calling it done, but telling an authentic Disney-quality story with heart.”

The company did have its hardships, laying off more than 700 people from its company last year. However, it’s providing a bigger outreach, according to Heatherly. “We’re broadening what we’re doing externally,” he stated. “We’re going to probably do about 15-to-20 titles across our brands a year. It’s not going to be a huge slate. We want to focus on quality.”

A third of these titles will be licensed to outside studios. This is a familiar practice, as Disney proved when it signed a deal with Electronic Arts to produce particular Star Wars games, including the forthcoming Battlefront, which will debut at the Star Wars Celebration next month. “When we talk about licensing, we have some pretty specific criteria,” said Heathery. “It’s not just about minimum guarantees and things like that. What we’re looking for is top-quality developers, first and foremost, folks who have network reach that we don’t. A good example of that is (mobile game company) Line.”

Line has been a proven success for Disney’s mobile games, particularly with the Disney Tsum Tsum puzzle release. “It’s done $300 million in revenue, and it couldn’t have done that without Line’s social network,” explained Heatherly. “That’s a great partnership for us because we’re able to reach into their social network with our IP.”

With the 70 million downloads, the company is in a “good starting place,” according to Heatherly. “We want to grow it. We think it’s a very strong position. We think there’s a lot of opportunity to grow beyond where we are today.”

More details on Disney’s mobile success can be found here.