You had mentioned the increasing challenges in the kids licensed movie genre, and of course your CEO had expressed some disappointment with the sales of some of the recent games. Do you think there is any kind of long-term future in kids licensed movie games? Do you think that you’re going to be significantly reducing the focus on that market?
If you look at it from an industry standpoint, the economics of the business that we have built just aren’t the same anymore. … Some movies perform at different levels at the box office, and some of the content is relevant and really meaningful to the context of the film and story. Some of them really transcend the experience beyond the theater. With [licensed movie] videogames, we want to be the first and foremost vehicle for that. We want our games to be the answer for people when they ask, “Hey, where can I spend more time with those characters in that world?” That’s what a videogame provides, and there’s always going to be an opportunity for those games. And there should be. They’re fun games to work on.
Everything that we’ve worked on here is part of the Disney Pixar stuff and the other licenses. They’re special because they’re meaningful to a huge audience out there, and I think the reasons why we’ve made good games is because we understand the sensibilities of the properties.
The important thing is to adjust the business plan, the spending and the expectations accordingly to what the market and the audience can support. It just isn’t what it used to be, it isn’t what it was like. That doesn’t mean it can’t get there again.
The Pixar games license is going to revert back to Disney, so they seem like an obvious company that you would be in talks with for future partnerships.
Yeah, we’d like to talk to anybody that thinks highly of our work, or thinks that what we’ve done would be meaningful to their business. We certainly have done a lot of good business with Disney and Pixar over the years.
smart move