Bringing Back The Retro Magic: How Disney Could Succeed in Gaming

Disney Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two was a flop selling only 529,000 copies in its first two months of release. When it comes to gaming, Disney has not shown much success recently. Though casual IOS and Android games like Where's my Water have done well, I think there is still a place for them on consoles and handhelds. What I believe they need to do, is come at gaming in a whole new old way. Go retro.


Looking at past popular Disney games what comes to mind? I think of Aladdin on the Genesis and SNES and DuckTales on the NES. Even though these are old games the quality they had can still be enjoyed today. Instead of focusing on big budget games, Disney should work on smaller downloadable experiences in the style of these classic games.

One game that successfully did this was Renegade Kid's Mutant Mudds. A retro style game, that oozes quality and sold well. With Disney Interactive being the least profitable branch of The Walt Disney Company the last thing they should be doing is spending a lot of money. Instead if they focused on smaller development teams on smaller games, they could have more releases and gain much more profit due to a low investment in each game.

It looks great, but will it sell well?

Sure, every once in awhile they can make a bigger game, be it a movie tie-in like Cars 2, where it makes sense to make a racing game, or Disney Infinity , the mouse house's attempt at the Skylanders formula. That is fine, but the problem Disney has been having is that they keep putting all their eggs in one basket. They are doing this again with a big push for Disney Infinity. The problem is that they end up losing a lot of money if it is not successful, and the Disney Interactive division will perform miserably if there are no other decent selling games, like small retro style downloadable ones.

To keep big retailers pleased like GameStop it still is important that retail releases happen, and that could be a possibility with small download games being collected into collections that can be at budget prices.

What do you think of my ideas? Do you think Disney Interactive should do something different? Leave a comment and let me know.