CES: Disney’s New Virtual Worlds
Pirates of the Caribbean first of many MMOs. Sex, lies and videotape to come?
Disney’s CEO Bob Iger told the assembled crowd at his CES keynote address yesterday that the company plans to bring it’s hottest properties to ‘the virtual realm’ with the first major MMO-game being Pirates of the Caribbean due to launch later this year.
Iger told the CES audience, “We plan to build more virtual worlds like Pirates, based on a broad range of our properties, where we will invite our guests to become a part of our stories. Imagine living in Buzz and Woody’s toy universe; joining an epic adventure in the lands of Narnia; racing Lightning McQueen through Radiator Springs; sharing the superpowers of the Incredibles or entering the magic world of Cinderella and the other Disney princesses.”
SPOnG has just spoken with Sandra van Vreedendaal, Disney’s corporate communications director for Europe, who was cagier about the keynote, telling us, “Bob’s speech yesterday was more about imagining where we are going in the future. Of course, we have many IPs [Intellectual Properties] such as Toy Story, Cars, Narnia, The Incredibles. We are imagining that these things could be possible but at the moment have no firm plans.”
In short, while Pirates of the Caribbean is solid, don’t hold your breath in anticipation of playing the role of a stoned elephant from Fantasia or a John Mullany from sex, lies and videotape. Being a savvy company, it’s going to be waiting to see how Pirates fares before negotiating anything further. Obviously, its intellectual property (if you exclude Miramax Films and Hollywood Pictures) is aimed heavily at ‘family fun’ – and this is an area yet to be conquered by MMOs.
The news that Disney’s strategy is to focus on bringing its huge array of massively popular IPs to ‘the MMO space’ (or whatever you want to call it) – essentially making online games out of the most popular kid’s cartoon characters on the planet – follows Iger’s demonstration of a completely revamped Disney.com, which they hope will be more immersive for both children and parents.
When you consider that Disney.com is currently the number one destination for kids and families on the Internet, you understand the importance of this news.
The new Disney.com site goes live later this month, featuring new social networking features, more broadband content, and improved parental controls. The broadband area of the site is to be called ‘Disney XD’ ("Xtreme Digital") and will be one of the major gateways into the company's MMO games.
Let us know in the forums which Disney movies you want to see given the MMO-treatment next year.
Iger told the CES audience, “We plan to build more virtual worlds like Pirates, based on a broad range of our properties, where we will invite our guests to become a part of our stories. Imagine living in Buzz and Woody’s toy universe; joining an epic adventure in the lands of Narnia; racing Lightning McQueen through Radiator Springs; sharing the superpowers of the Incredibles or entering the magic world of Cinderella and the other Disney princesses.”
SPOnG has just spoken with Sandra van Vreedendaal, Disney’s corporate communications director for Europe, who was cagier about the keynote, telling us, “Bob’s speech yesterday was more about imagining where we are going in the future. Of course, we have many IPs [Intellectual Properties] such as Toy Story, Cars, Narnia, The Incredibles. We are imagining that these things could be possible but at the moment have no firm plans.”
In short, while Pirates of the Caribbean is solid, don’t hold your breath in anticipation of playing the role of a stoned elephant from Fantasia or a John Mullany from sex, lies and videotape. Being a savvy company, it’s going to be waiting to see how Pirates fares before negotiating anything further. Obviously, its intellectual property (if you exclude Miramax Films and Hollywood Pictures) is aimed heavily at ‘family fun’ – and this is an area yet to be conquered by MMOs.
The news that Disney’s strategy is to focus on bringing its huge array of massively popular IPs to ‘the MMO space’ (or whatever you want to call it) – essentially making online games out of the most popular kid’s cartoon characters on the planet – follows Iger’s demonstration of a completely revamped Disney.com, which they hope will be more immersive for both children and parents.
When you consider that Disney.com is currently the number one destination for kids and families on the Internet, you understand the importance of this news.
The new Disney.com site goes live later this month, featuring new social networking features, more broadband content, and improved parental controls. The broadband area of the site is to be called ‘Disney XD’ ("Xtreme Digital") and will be one of the major gateways into the company's MMO games.
Let us know in the forums which Disney movies you want to see given the MMO-treatment next year.
Companies:
Walt Disney Company
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