Rather than build their way into social gaming, Disney opted to acquire Playdom who is the creator of Mobsters, the #1 game on MySpace, and a lesser player on Facebook. It’s an easy move to second guess and say that Disney should have bought a larger social network game company. While that was indeed an option for Disney, that line of thinking ignores the leverage-able market positions available to them and focuses on an assumption that Disney will not be able execute.
Disney’s experiments in the micropayments market
Back in 2005, Disney was involved in a micropayments market experiment, and I was in the fortunate position of running the marketplace behind that experiment which also included Microsoft and HMV music among others. In that experiment, there were two major categories of content: branded and unbranded. I’ll focus on two components of those, music and games moving forward.
In the music category, we featured an independent music provider with a catalog of over 1 million songs alongside music provided by HMV music. Single songs were priced from $0.25 through $1.25 for indie tracks, set by the artists, while HMV music tracks were at approximately $1 or $1.50. When we measured sales across both music providers at the end of each week of the trial, branded HMV music outsold indie music some weeks by 10 to 1. Personally I was guilty of the same bias, since I tended to favor branded artists as well.
We also had games from other indie developers and publishers alongside games published by Disney in the marketplace. Again, we saw Disney games outselling non-branded games by at least 2 to 1 and often more. What was surprising was that even the best indie games rarely beat the Disney branded titles. Even more surprising, one of most frequent complaints was that some of the branded games were ‘crap’, and when we investigated further, people reported that they just bought the game because of some Disney character name they saw on it.
Why Disney branded games will triumph
Now, how does that behavior apply today? I ask you to name any character from the games by Zynga, Crowdstar, or Playdom. Can you name any strong traits of any characters in those games? Let me change the question up a bit. If your friends, or daughters played DisneyVille, would you play too? What about an X-men Wars game?
Wait you say, it’s about game play! To that I ask, what game play is so compelling on these social games? Do the cute characters have an impact? Is the music that important? Is cross marketing important? To that I say, you may soon play a game with Nemo and “Finding Nemo” movie related music, where you can get power-ups and virtual goods with your happy meal from McDonald’s where you also get Disney character figurine.
Is the social engineering going to be lacking? Probably not. Not even mighty Zynga could knock Playdom out of the #1 spot at MySpace, so Playdom must have been doing something right. Oh, and don’t forget that MySpace is still more about entertainment than Facebook. While many people don’t use MySpace as their primary social network, including myself, I can still find and access music and videos an order of magnitude faster and efficiently there than anywhere else. So while I might read status updates on Facebook, I find music, videos, and bands on MySpace – AND, I play games on both platforms.
So if games are supposed to be about entertainment, and Disney is about entertainment, then the Disney-Playdom deal has the potential to rock the social game world. In addition to the standard Disney stable of characters, Disney’s Marvel Studios also has the rights to 5000 Marvel characters as well. If the Playdom team made an X-men game that played across the entire comic’s time-line, would that have draw? If you think strategically about where a well executed plan from Disney would take you – it’s not a hard stretch to see integrated marketing dominating the cross-sells of the near future.
A Disney game campaign imagined
So what could this mean? How vast would this power be? Imagine the following scenario:
Imagine Disney creates a game. Let’s call it Happy Nemo World. The game the characters of Nemo, plus a few more personalities from the Finding Nemo movie. The following steps would come natural to a company that is versed at leveraging brand relationships to create advertising opportunities and buzz:
-As an in-game advertising deal, Disney partners with McDonald’s to launch with Nemo based happy meals w/partner McDonald’s, includes codes for special power-ups in the happy meal.
- ABC has a 2 hour holiday special featuring Happy Nemo World, adding the new characters, also offers special codes on TV.
- Disney radio also promotes the holiday special, game, and offers power up codes for special items.
- Disney stores nationwide find a new opportunity to sell Nemo plushies but this time with power-up codes.
- Disneylands and DisneyWorld introduce a new ride with characters from the game and special power-up codes on the ticket
- Disney introduces a new movie on DVD (like the nearly endless Aladdin series) – “Nemo finds a friend”, continuing the Nemo story, introducing characters from the game, and also providing power up codes.
- Disney runs a Twitter campaign where everyone who posts a link to the game also receives special gifts, with a similar one on Facebook
- Playdom games on Facebook and MySpace offer a cross-sell to the new game, and discounted movie tickets if you use play the new game.
Imagine the above scenario played out across Disney’s properties each already with their built in fanbase. Who else has that kind of marketing leverage and power to make those deals happen quickly? Certainly not Zynga. If/when Disney really wants to make an impact, they could bring to bear a tidal wave of marketing and leveraged brands that has yet to be seen in the social game space.
Disney is rapidly moving into a position where it will have the chance to dominate the entire social game industry by bringing recognizable brands and characters to new or even existing games, followed by cross-marketing in film, TV, radio, and other games. Such an endeavor is ambitious, requires massive cat-herding management skills from within Disney, but is well within the reach of the technology, business units, and existing footprint of its properties.
I say it’s Disney’s game to lose by failure to execute. It won’t be easy, but it’s usually dangerous to bet against the mouse.
See the original post here:
Disney To Use Playdom Acquisition To Redefine Social Games And Crush Zynga
