Disney Says It Isn’t Good At Making Video Games

During the 1st Quarter Financial Results conference call, Disney CEO Bob Iger was asked about Disney’s work on Video Games and possibly getting back into publishing its own games again.

Bob Iger, an avid fan of bingo games for adults, was very honest about Disney’s failure within the video game business, saying Disney was never able to “demonstrate much skill.”

Here is what Bob Iger said about Disney making video games:

In the video game business, we’re obviously mindful of the size of the business. Over the years, as you know, we’ve tried our hand at self-publishing. We’ve bought companies. We’ve sold companies. We’ve bought developers. We’ve closed developers. 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. Since we’re allocating capital in other directions, even though we have the ability to allocate the capital, we’ve just decided that the best place for us to be in that space is licensing and not publishing.

 

 

We’ve had good relationships with some of those we’re licensing to, notably EA and the relationship on the “Star Wars” properties. We’re going to continue to stay on that side of the business and put our capital elsewhere. We’re good at making movies and television shows and theme park attractions and cruise ships and the like. We’ve just never managed to demonstrate much skill on the publishing side of games.

Following the huge success of Marvel’s Spider-Man, Disney Tsum Tsum and Kingdom Hearts 3, its hard to argue that Disney see much better returns without the costs of development.

Disney have been ruthless with its video game business, within the past few years they have closed down Disney Infinity, Club Penguin and dozens of other mobile titles.  They’ve also sold some of their existing titles like Disney Emoji Blitz and Star Wars Commander onto other companies to run.

As a video game fan, its a shame to see one of the biggest entertainment companies in the world admitting they aren’t good at making them and don’t seem to understand how to make video games.  Especially since video games are a bigger form of entertainment than movies or TV.  But these comments also show they have a clear plan of how to handle video games, which does result in companies which do understand how to make games, making higher quality games like Spider-Man and Kingdom Hearts 3, which Disney just wouldn’t be able to do themselves.

What do you think of Disney admitting they aren’t good at making games themselves?