The Walt Disney Company announced its third-quarter results for the period ended June 27. Overall sales dipped 7% to $8.6 billion while net income fell 26% to $954 million, but it was the games business that saw the sharpest decline at Disney.
The Interactive Media segment experienced a 20% decline in revenues to $113 million and the group posted a loss of $75 million, which was actually a slight improvement from the $91 million loss posted during Q3 a year ago. During the nine-month period, however, total losses were up from $138 million to $181 million.
Disney blamed the poor economy for its downturn and Disney Interactive said it was up against a tough comp from last year when the Prince Caspian video game released. "Lower costs at Disney Interactive Studios were more than offset by a decline in unit sales of self-published video games at Disney Interactive Studios reflecting the strong performance of The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian in the prior-year quarter," the company said.
With Split Second, Spectrobes: Origins, Warren Spector's next project, Hannah Montana, the online Club Penguin virtual world, and more, Disney Interactive still has plenty going for it.
2 Comments
August 1, 2009
Disney's forte is animation, not gaming. They should put greed aside and actually have good movies like they used to; good as in Aladdin, Lion King, Snow White good. Kingdom Hearts worked out for Disney mostly because of Square Enix than Disney.
If you wanna succeed Disney, let the big dogs in gaming do their job and don't compete with them. I would rather play a game with Donald if I know a company like Bioware is involved than anything by Disney Interactive, no matter how cool (Pirates of the Caribbean MMORPG - which was a fail) seems to be.
August 3, 2009
Disney has some solid titles, but a lot of their marketing seems pretty bad. Not sure if this is an internal issue or if they hire outside people, but regardless, they need to get better at it.