MAY 29, 2008 • There is a great deal of interest around virtual world online games.  Much of this interest is occurring in companies that are not traditional players in the game space.  This includes the large media companies that are interested in the significant user numbers that popular online games are now able to command.

While big massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) like World of Warcraft and Age of Conan costs tens of millions of dollars to produce, and can take five years or more to develop, there is a proven attraction to simple online games that can attract a broad audience.  Perhaps no company has embraced this emerging market more than the Walt Disney Company (NYSE:DIS).  The Disney Online division of the Walt Disney Internet Group is actively using MMOG games as a way to promote some core Disney franchises.

The Walt Disney Internet Group (WDIG) is a separate entity from Disney’s traditional game publishing division, Disney Interactive Studios (formerly Buena Vista Games).   However, WDIG has a proven success in the MMOG/virtual world space with the long running MMOG Toontown Online, launched in 2003.  Toontown Online is notable as the first successful high-end subscription game targeted at an under 14-year old demographic.  At its peak, Toontown Online had over 100,000 subscribers paying a membership fee of about $10 a month.

Clearly the corporate leaders at Disney were happy with the performance of Toontown Online.  However, going forward, the inspiration for WDIG’s virtual world future is coming from Club Penguin, a product Disney acquired in mid-2007 for a whopping $350 million (plus the potential for another $350 million payable upon performance).  Club Penguin is a kids virtual world that started in late 2005 as a free to play game with an optional $6 a month subscription.  In less than 18 months, Club Penguin built up over 12 million users, including 700,000 that paid for a subscription.  Disney Online is clearly looking to follow the Club Penguin business model.

To learn more about Disney’s virtual world plans, DFC Intelligence recently visited the Burbank studios to speak with Mike Goslin, VP of Walt Disney Internet Group’s VR Studio and Steve Parkis, Senior VP of Disney Online Studios.  The core focus of our meeting was to look at how Disney plans to extend virtual worlds to classic Disney IP, most notably Pirates of the Caribbean, Peter Pan, and even Pixar franchises like Cars.  The twist that a company like Disney brings to the free-to-play virtual world model, is that they are using their virtual worlds as a way to market key Disney franchises.  In other words, the virtual world is not necessarily an end in itself, but more of a way to market other Disney merchandise.

The first of these virtual worlds was Pirates of the Caribbean Online, launched last October.  Pirates was originally planned to launch in May 2007 with the Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End movie.  Despite missing that release date, Pirates of the Caribbean Online is clearly designed to extend the Pirates universe and help sell movies, games and other merchandise.  To attract the largest possible audience, Pirates of the Caribbean Online is free to play with an optional premium subscription of $10 a month (this model also now applies to Toontown Online).

The core audience for Pirates Online is slightly older than Toontown.  According to Disney Online, the center of the demographic bullseye is 13 year old boys, followed by dads and older teens.  The free version constitutes about one third of the game (but only 5-10% of the storyline) and after that consumers will have to pay to unlock the rest.  Income cards are available in Target and Wal-mart and Disney Online has built a major marketing campaign around the game.

In January 2008 Disney started television advertising for Pirates of the Caribbean Online on MTV, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon and others.  This proved to be a huge driver of traffic to the site and in February, WDIG claims they had 26 million unique users to Disney.com.  In the past month, television advertising for Pirates Online has continued to ramp up.

Another major virtual world from Disney is Disney Fairies Pixie Hollow.  Disney Fairies is based on the Tinker Bell character from Peter Pan.  In October, Disney plans to release the first in a series of four direct-to-video Tinker Bell movies.  Pixie Hollow is clearly designed as a key promotional vehicle for this franchise.  The demographic for Fairies is a fairly untapped one as far as virtual worlds go, girls age six to 12.  The number one activity is flying and there is a focus on mini games such as baking in order to acquire acorns and leaves (the currency of the game).

Pixie Hollow also shows many of the lessons that Disney has learned from Club Penguin.  While Pirates requires a 350 MB client, Fairies is an in-browser game with no download.  Club Penguin also taught Disney the value of giving away a large amount of free content and keeping the subscription cost low.  Many users are playing on cheap hand me down computers, so even Pirates has very basic system requirements.

Disney Online’s virtual world games clearly do not represent competition to high-end products like World of Warcraft.  However, for the low-end developers of free to play virtual worlds Disney’s activities could be problematic.  Disney Online can afford to offer much of the game play for free because they can use the game as part of an overall marketing campaign.  Furthermore, Disney can keep development costs lower by leveraging technology across a number of products.

In other words, the ultimate goal is for Disney to aggregate worlds for the whole family and make it much like buying a ticket to an amusement park where everyone is free to enjoy their favorite ride.  Already billing and buddy lists are integrated between titles, and users can chat with Disney.com users, and between Toontown and Pirates.

Of course, the ultimate Disney vision is still a long ways off.  Right now there is little crossover between the audience for Pirates and that for Fairies.  The synergy would only work if a family happened to have a 13 year old boy and an 8 year old girl.   The next announced virtual world from WDIG is one based on Pixars Cars movie.  The demographic for this product should fall somewhere in-between Pirates and Fairies.

In the overall scheme of things, the Disney virtual worlds amount to little more than a rounding error in the Disney universe.  However, from the perspective of the virtual world market Disney’s activities are huge.  With dozens of companies, with no gaming experience and no established IP, now raising money to launch virtual worlds the key question for investors to ask is: how do you compete with the Disney’s of the world?

 

 

 

 

 

 

The above model is for a hypothetical free to play online game with an optional $5 a month subscription.  It is assumed that this game launches with a large marketing campaign to drive rapid usage. There is an assumption that digital distribution (DD) and advertising are a key driver of this free to play model. This model is not based on any Disney Online products, but is instead designed as a best case scenario for the type of product which would compete in this space.