Disney Takes Aim at Movie Based MMOGs

eldavojohn writes "Disney has announced plans to launch more movie-based Massively Multiplayer Online Games. With plans already on the table for a "Pirates of the Caribbean" title, additional properties are apparently now under consideration for a similar treatment. They are aiming at teens more than the older crowd, and don't seem to be interested in fighting for players from World of Warcraft or Second Life." From the article: 'We plan to build more virtual worlds like "Pirates" based on a broad range of our properties,' Iger told attendees of the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas ... 'You can imagine living in Buzz and Woody's toy universe,' he added, recalling Disney Pixar's computer animated hit feature film 'Toy Story'."

This is hilarious

[Killjoy_NL]

They really think they can make more money like this?
The only good "Disney" games are the Kingdom Hearts series (in my opinion)

For this, I predict a 100% failure, unless there are no subscription fees like in Guild Wars.

Please Disney

[Anonymous Coward]

Please over-saturate this heavily over-done market as quickly as possible so that game developers might move on to making games that are actually entertaining instead of vain attempts to quickly garner monthly service fees from helplessly addicted users.

Re:repeat of earlier flops

[Nasarius]

It seems to me like a Pirates of the Caribbean MMORPG would just end up as a title tacked on to a game set in the era of the Spanish Main. There's not a whole lot of unique content or mythology in the movies, and therefore not many constraints. The possibilities are essentially the same as a MMO version of Sid Meier's Pirates!

Re:repeat of earlier flops

[Protonk]

This is an excellent point.

I figure the same arguments are going to be dredged up about how Disney can't succeed in the MMO field:

1. The market is too crowded.

2. Disney won't make a successful MMO until the master "X" esoteric element of the genre (e.g. economy, novel server design, etc.)

3. It won't work because Disney is for kids, and so on.

The real limitations here aren't those above, and they aren't the story, exactly. The pretense of strong and powerful game world characters can do serious damage to an MMO where the "story", or whatever you might want to call the pretense for interaction, is based on a number of roughly equally powerful customers. if the universe permits power held by a single person to affect others disproportionately, then you will find it is very difficult to manage. SWG failed for this reason, the world was replete with common interactions with chracters who were only common in the universe of film and movies because of necessity--the only reason we followed R2-D2 and C3PO in the movies were because they were witness to events of great gravity. If they were just droids, they would make for a boring narrative. MMO's provide just the opposite. No one is the hero of the game, the game is in interaction and struggle by everyone. The whole notion of persistence on a world shows that one character CANNOt be the hero of his own story.

As for the three arguments presented above, they are all silly:

1. WoW came along when the market for MMO's was saturated with hundreds of thousands of EQ, AO, and DAOC customers. Before EQ, there were claims that UO customers could not be lured away. When it premiered, there were dozens of other 3D MMO's in development or released that were clamoring for marketshare. There is some truth to the notion that the market is squeezed more tightly now than in 2001, but the dymanics are the same. The presense of a crowded market does not always eliminate the prospect of success.

2. The "silver bullet" argument is one deployed most often by armchair MMO developers. Pick a facet of an MMO that most annoys/interests you and declare that without the perfection of this facet, that MMO is doomed. The dictum is as useless as it is arbitrary. UO had a non-functioning economy and still attracted and kept a huge player base, even in the face of EQ. EQ lacked PvP in any real sense and was derided for this but still managed to become wildly succesful. The real trick to success is that there isn't one trick. It helps to have great IP, recognizable to casual gamers and MMO players (WoW). It helps to have an innovative world (Eve). It helps to be first--or close enough (EQ). It also helps to be lucky. That is a huge factor in this industry but goes unsaid because no analyst would keep his job if he told the newspapers that X company cornered the widget market through sheer chance

3. Disney's IP. Microsoft loved to deride nintendo as being for aged 6-18, and the XBOX for more mature gamers--the logic goes that everyone gets older, and "we'll just take them when they turn 18." Oops. Turns out that Nintendo is microsoft's serious rival in the console world and that cartoons and adolescent friendly characters have some traction. look at the sales for kingdom hearts, for Zelda (even Windwaker). Nintendo and Disney know what the ciggarette companies have always known. Hook them when they are young, and they'll stick around for the rest of their lives. Don't count Disney out here.

So don't look at the standard reasons for rejection! Think about the problem and the real troubles will appear soon enough.

Re:Please Disney

[TeraCo]

I expect we'll eventually reach the point where all games are MMO or MMOlike. Simply because with MMO style games, developers and publishers don't have to worry about piracy. They know for a fact that 100% of their customer base not only paid for the game, but are doing so over and over again.

Re:Tron?

[ClamIAm]

Even the game engine is ready to go. How much tweaking would it need to convert the Tron2.0 game into a MMORPG?

Sounds to me like somebody's never written an MMORPG. Not that I have, of course, but I have read interviews and articles about what goes into the engines used in them. And it's very different from what goes into a "regular" game.