Six years ago, Disney announced it was closing its game publishing and development divisions, leaving games seemingly for good.
Today, with a showcase full of Disney and Marvel licensed titles, it’s like it never went away.
In addition to new trailers and updates for well-known games like Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Disney Dreamlight Valley, Marvel’s Midnight Suns, Marvel Snap and Disney Speedstorm, we just saw brand new game reveals including Tron Identity from Bithell Games, Disney Illusion Island from Dlala, and Amy Hennig’s mysterious project with Skydance Media: a Captain America and Black Panther game set in World War II. Disney-loving gamers eat well these days.
But if you had told any of us in 2016 that this Disney games smorgasbord was ahead, we might not have believed you. That year, Disney not only close its huge toy-to-life franchise Disney Infinitybut it also announced that it would be closing its in-house development studio Avalanche and leaving the self-published for good and moving exclusively to a licensing model.
At the time, most people interpreted this as Disney essentially throwing in the towel on games in general. It’s understandable, because at the time, Disney’s game output had almost completely dwindled after the heyday of Disney Afternoon Collection titles and every animated movie that got a licensed game. Most of the library in 2016 consisted of mobile games like Disney Emoji Blitz or Disney Crossy Road. Aside from Square Enix’s longstanding relationship for Kingdom Hearts, it looked like big, blockbuster Disney games could be done for good.
But now, in 2022, that never seems to have been the case. It was certainly never the plan for Disney VP of Disney, Pixar and 20th Century Games Luigi Priore, who has now been with the company for 27 years in the games space. According to Priore, the relative drought of games up to the last few years, followed by the sudden explosion of releases, is all part of a strategy that started in 2016 when the company dumped the publication of games. The fruits were just not visible until now.
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“Before 2016, this was the plan,” he says. “We wanted to get rid of the publishing house. We hadn’t succeeded. We had great studios making great content, but it just didn’t work. So we stopped publishing, we thought our strategy was to start making more licensed products, and the best part of that strategy is that it allows us to partner with the best out there.”
Priore goes on to say that it was “very difficult” for Disney to have its own in-house studios. But partnering with partners is not only a reasonable prospect for the content giant, but also allows them to produce games across a wider range of genres and scopes – everything from racing games to Animal Crossing-esque stuff, and everything from small indie endeavours. to huge AAA.
That range was on display at today’s presentation, and Priore says he sees many individuals, teams and companies approaching Disney with passion for projects for Disney properties they’ve loved for a long time. Often, he says, they have cherished Disney dream game ideas for years.
Once those ideas are green, Disney seems to be hitting a reasonable middle ground in terms of how hands-on it is with the studios. It’s not micromanaging its properties, says Priore; there are no “hard and fast rules” about what partners can do with Disney properties, nor does Disney dictate much about what it wants others to make. At the moment, for example, there aren’t many standalone games based on Pixar properties, but that’s not because Disney isn’t open to it. Priore says that if they have a partner with a great idea for, say, Toy Story, Disney would do it. “We are ready for that, it just has to be the right opportunity.”
But it gets involved. For example, in 2017, when Disney acquired 20th Century Fox, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora was already in development. “At first we were observers,” says Priore, “then we started to help as much as possible.”
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“At Lightstorm, we get to work with them and the filmmakers. John Landau is very involved, the producer of the film. It’s super exciting to have that creative mind that works on these movies also work on these video games.”
Priore goes on to say that this philosophy generally applies to Disney IP, where the original creators of the movie or TV show are available to help work on a game adaptation. “Every studio in the Walt Disney Company gets involved in the content they create,” he says. “We want it to be as authentic as possible.”
So this is Disney’s current and long-term strategy around games: it’s all about licensing. When I ask whether we’re likely to see Disney revive its in-house studios or publishing houses, Priore declines the question (and Disney didn’t respond to a follow-up request in time for release). But we’ll probably see many, many more Disney property customizations in the game space in the near future.
“The whole idea isn’t the number of things we do, but how important each thing is,” says Priore. “This showcase is a culmination of where we started at the end of the years to where we are today. You said 2016, 2017, think about it: it takes three to five years to make games. We are now working on those first games. We have to announce those things from a Disney/Pixar/20th century perspective to release now. So yes, you can expect us to grow, do more and hopefully have even more products that immerse you in Disney worlds.”
You can check out our recap of everything announced today at the Disney and Marvel Games Showcase at D23 here.
Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.
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