By now you may have heard the news that we have made the difficult decision to discontinue production of Disney Infinity. From the beginning, Disney Infinity was built for you—our fans—and I wanted to take a moment to thank you not just for your support over the years, but for creating a community that made Disney Infinity more than just a game.
If you’re wondering why, it’s because Disney didn’t make earnings today. Parks and games were down, movies way up, but the latter didn’t quite make up for the former. Stock prices took a hit, and I have no capacity to comment on this further but my kids are gonna be ticked.
Bloomberg reported that what really made Disney sad was the decline in cable revenue, especially ESPN. I guess blockbuster movies just aren’t enough any more.
Well, they’re going to get sadder. Cable is dying.
And ESPN is a major reason why.
I want to watch sports, not hear some leftist whine about race or sex.
Bought a bunch of the 2.0 figures last year for my kids but it couldn’t compete with Minecraft for their attention
Forgive my ignorance Moe – I always viewed Infinities as a Skylanders rip-off, but did it also have a Warcraft component such that you can’t play if you’re not online? ‘Cuz if the latter, there’s gonna be lawsuits…
Disney’s in house efforts with games have been a mixed bag. Infinity was probably the best product they made. (however, I bet they made extensive use of 3rd party devs for content) Still, kind of surprised it wasn’t doing better. The novelty of toy/video game hybrid products must have worn off.
From what I can see, they’re still selling pretty well.
But Skylanders has brand loyalty and sink costs in several previous editions of figurines (having gotten there first, by a substantial margin), and Lego is much more innovative.
As best I can tell, the only draw for the Disney system was intellectual properties.
Wonder if ESPN being blatantly politically correct has anything to do with the decline in cable revenue.
I briefly thought they were doing well when they dumped Olbermann years ago, but apparently that was more of a “he’s a prick” thing than a “too left-wing thing”
They can get lots of people with the same opinions, and a lot less of the drama.
ESPN’s model, like most sports stations, is to leverage the core of sports fans who will insist on getting the channel at all costs to charge absurdly high rates that are then passed on to every cable subscriber, including the majority who never or rarely watch. As more and more people cut the cord, the model becomes less valuable. As matters progress, cable companies have more leverage to refuse ESPN’s latest rate increase because the subscribers they will lose with yet another monthly rate increase outweigh the unhappiness of potential whining from sports fans. Actual viewership counts for much less than the monthly subscriber fees.
DOJ went after Microsoft hard for bundling its software and computer sales, I’ve been waiting for years for someone to do the same to cable for bundling channels.