EconSM Video: Keynote Q&A: Steve Wadsworth, President, Walt Disney Internet Group

[JPL]

Thought some of you might be interested in this since it relates to Online Gaming

EconSM Video: Keynote Q&A: Steve Wadsworth, President, Walt Disney Internet Group

[Patricia]

Lame interviewer (does she even know who he is?) but when she let's him talk it's interesting.

[chrisb26]

It is an interesting interview. I do have to agree the interviewer didn't seem to know much about him and she kept saying things that made him not look very comfortable talking about like when she kept talking about the Hannah Montana pictures. Yet she kept doing it

It was neat to see what he was saying for some things and some others didn't make me so happy.

Cool find Jp! Thanks

[WDWfanatic742]

FYI - If you are only interested in the VMK part, it is in the last two minutes

My personal opinion about VMK after watching him talk about it and the numerous comments the corporation have said about it, is that they have some valid points. They saw how passionate the small amount of people who were playing VMK were. In order to get the amount of people they want playing, they would have to expand it. If they really wanted to make money off of this, they probably would have to re-design the game and the business model to include all of the Disney parks. They thought that VMK was going to be small and be like all of their other small games that usually bomb.

What I hope they are doing, is closing it down to put that pay to play option in there and have the ability to expand on it and the rest of the parks. The brand and the possibility's of the game were and are endless. I could go on and on and on about just some of the idea's that I have had over the past day or two while thinking about what VMK could become.

[JPL]

The problem with VMK is they never advertised it. Not one commercial on the Disney Channel or on Saturday Morning Cartoons. Even at the parks most of the CMs I ran into that were giving out the merchandise had no clue what it was or even where to send people to find out. They didn't even have links to it from the Theme Parks websites. The money that was earned from VMK through quests,hotel stays, merchandise purchases, and DVD sales never showed up in the bottom line of Disney Online it all went inot different areas of the company making it look the game wasn't making any money. This is a common problem with synergy the same thing happened with DDP at WDW the extra money was going to the resorts and not the restaurants since guest were paying rack rates for their rooms when on the DDP. They really need a formula to figure out excatly the amount of business VMK brought into the parks and how it affected DVD sales etc. I don't think this reporting was taking place and therefore the Game looked like an expense rather than a valuable asset.

[chrisb26]

The problem with VMK is they never advertised it. Not one commercial on the Disney Channel or on Saturday Morning Cartoons. Even at the parks most of the CMs I ran into that were giving out the merchandise had no clue what it was or even where to send people to find out. They didn't even have links to it from the Theme Parks websites. The money that was earned from VMK through quests,hotel stays, merchandise purchases, and DVD sales never showed up in the bottom line of Disney Online it all went inot different areas of the company making it look the game wasn't making any money. This is a common problem with synergy the same thing happened with DDP at WDW the extra money was going to the resorts and not the restaurants since guest were paying rack rates for their rooms when on the DDP. They really need a formula to figure out excatly the amount of business VMK brought into the parks and how it affected DVD sales etc. I don't think this reporting was taking place and therefore the Game looked like an expense rather than a valuable asset.

I believe your right about this. I mean the people that played VMK the "Small Passionate Audience" was there only because they had heard about it from friends or walked into VMK Central in WDW or the VMK section at DLR. There was never any advertising for the game so it never did see any numbers. If Disney would have taken the time to actually advertise for the game it really could have taken off and been huge.

I was saying that after I listened to what he had to say that yes the people who played were not huge numbers but they never gave it the opportunity to get huge. They stopped all in the park quests which basically means the only way any new players are going to come to the game now is by word of mouth. Which can only go so far.

[Patricia]

It was linked to only from Disneyland.com

It was only ever used for advertising by Disney Parks for Disneyland, which is why it was never advertised as an actual game. It's just like if you go to a cereal website and they have games kids can play.. but they don't advertise the games, except on the side of the box.

Without a plan, that went beyond Disney Parks paying for it.. it was going to be a struggle keeping it afloat.

Sad.

[JPL]

All my kids at school play Millsberry which is produced by General Mills and if you asked me this is true Advergaming with very few social aspects to it.

[Chescat]

What gets me was what I told JP about last night. That the target audience to the upcoming Cars game was Boys 6-9 or something. What type of audience is that going to get being so limited.

The thing still of interest is that SuLake was the ones that did VMK and the testing on POTC online in the beta phases. Virtual Reality is the one doing Toontown, Pirates online, Fairies and Cars. I still say the split between Disney and SuLake with the contract being up last week had something to do with this. I don't know who pulled the plug so fast, but somebody did.

And there are still rumors floating around that they are going to take all these games and make it a one fee a month, gets all of them for you. I believe that's what XD is going to give us. Interesting thing also is XD has been down since 2 weeks before VMK went away. They restarted pirates two hours after vmk closed and we got XD back for about half a day, then it was gone again. For at least the last few days we haven't been able to get into XD to check our pirate stats.

I've heard XD is more extensive in Toontown, but at least in Pirates, when its working our friends that we have in XD show up in our friends list on pirates and doesn't count against the total of 50, if you are using the XD title. What's nice is most of use have 2 or 3 pirates, so that way you get all our pirates with one title that's not counted against your 50. Bad news is, when its not working, you can't find anybody unless you do it through the guild list.