So the hundred million dollar question now is... Is this just the first domino that falls on TTL as a genre, or is this just a new opportunity for those that are left?
Pachter said the TTL segment wasn't shrinking, if anything it's remained flat despite new players entering the business. So that means some of the established brands gave a little to the new ones, but on the whole the segment was solid.
In the US, Wii, X360, Wii U have been the biggest platforms for TTL to date. Xbox One and Ps4 are actually quite close, but haven't yet exceeded sales of the old gen, even now.
That makes sense given the market for TTL - younger players are likely to remain on previous generation platforms, which are cheaper and also have a larger base. So I would fully expect to see platforms selling in the last three years of their generation to sell more than those in the first three. It's a bigger market, easy as that.
The other question would be to look at the total sales across all platforms (old and new gen), and compare year over year to see how the segment is selling. If Pacther is correct, then you should see relatively flat numbers in sum.
Lego seem super weird. Walmart has all the non level pack figures 40% off and there seems to be more weeks when they're on sale than not.
Target had a 75% off deal for all Lego Movie and Chima packs I used to get all of those lines. At that price they were cheaper than actual Lego solo minifigs.
...
I don't know if it's smart not to release a new game and bundle considering those $100 starter packs could be had for $40 less than 6 months after release.
But that's no different, even when Skylanders was the only game in town. It seems from the get-go Activision's business model was to sell high from the onset, and heavily discount throughout the life of that particular version, until the next release, and so on and so forth. Razor and blade situation, get people to buy into the base game, sell them figures perpetually. TTL must have higher margins as well, because they have sustained the lower sale prices for years.
You must be thinking Marvel Playmation, which has also been killed.
I don't think they announced that. Only that Disney Infinity was written-off and Avalanche was closed. Playmation wasn't in the announcement. Disney Interactive will still continue, albeit just to oversee licensed product I imagine. Johnny V might still have a job at DI, who knows.
I've been pretty bearish on large media outlets getting into gaming.
There's been a pretty consistent trend from the mid-90s of failed attempts. Virgin, Disney (the first time, then the second time, then the third time, and now for a fourth time), FOX Interactive, Universal, Sony Imagesoft. Some of these failures are worse than others. But generally, video games are not hugely profitable for these companies and so they end up flip-flopping between "we need to get into gaming, if we have a hit it'll be huge and think of the brand synergy" and then "we need to get out of gaming, too high cost, too hit driven, we should just take the easy licensing cash".
One of the challenges is that as budgets increase, when these companies get into gaming they largely buy up studios to build up. Disney bought Avalanche, Black Rock (Climax Racing), Wide Load, and Junction Point in addition to picking up the EA Canada refugees for Propaganda. They also bought a lot of early mobile talent. That's a lot of talent to tie up and disrupt for a pretty futile goal. I can't say that these studios would have been stable or healthy without Disney's intervention, so maybe this is not a satisfying criticism, but to some extent it feels more tragic when an acquisition is shut down than when an independent studio fails to make it. Maybe the only silver lining of Disney's participation in gaming has been their post-licensing pivot after the LucasArts acquisition. I feel like both the future of LucasArts properties and the back-catalogue handling have dramatically improve, so kudos there. Hope that if they wind down Disney Interactive that they keep their licensing folks on.
WB has been a notable exception to my thinking. I think getting Midway for a song was probably good. I think having some early hits in the form of FEAR (and I guess to a lesser extent Condemned) and the unexpected smash success of Arkham Asylum helped make sure that WBIE is willing to do stuff that's either not licensed, or that is treated with some care. And the TT Games stuff has been managed pretty well from what I can see. So I'm comparatively bullish on Warner's chances. Plz don't go under, WBIE.
It's hard when it's not a core business unit. EA, Activision, Ubisoft - those companies can stomach development like this, because it's what they do. Disney was always going to treat it like a second child, because theme parks, studios and networks were going to get the attention and the money. As long as those were doing well, they would fund non-core business units like DI, which was probably more like an experiment to see what kind of revenue it could generate more than a staple of its future. Shareholders would likely see the spend across the board and say, why spend money on this business segment when it's marginal at best, when you can take that money and make another blockbuster movie with bigger returns? Or a new theme park ride? Or a new hotel?
It's a shame, because Disney would make a great publisher, but it's attention is elsewhere. That's also why you don't see Comcast jumping in, but rather licensing. WB is an isolated case, maybe big media companies can look at them and emulate for success. WBIE had revenue of $2.2 billion in 2015. EA, in comparison, had $4.5 billion in revenue in the same year. DI probably isn't anywhere near that, and was by all accounts
healthy last year.
Interactive was the only business segment to not grow its revenue in fiscal 2015. Gains in Disney Infinity sales with the release of Disney Infinity 3.0 were more than offset by a decline in its mobile business. After watching so many mobile-gaming specialists crash and burn it's probably not a surprise to find that smartphone gamers are fickle.
However, Disney's interactive arm still managed to post a double-digit percentage increase in operating profit. The same can't be said about the business segment that deserves the dishonor of being Disney's worst arm for fiscal 2015: media networks.
Disney Interactive, in comparison, does about $200-$250 million per quarter in revenue, so about half that of WB.
WBIE
has around 5-10k employees; DI has around 2k.
Disney has a market cap around $173B; WB has a market cap of around $58B. WBIE has a bigger share of the overall cap than DI does with Disney. And that's why I believe all this has happened as it has. Not as much to do with the sales or health of Disney Infinity itself.
FYI none of this is financial advice. I'm just reading what's been reported.
Shazaam, out of work just like that. If anyone needs a 3D/2D artist contractor, I have lots of free time now! Drop me a line.
https://www.artstation.com/artist/mutatedjellyfish
And thanks for playing, everyone. We were far from perfect, but we really did try.
You guys did, and it's been much appreciated. Thanks for the years of fun my family and I had with the games.