The big emphasis during Disney’s conference call discussing its acquisition of Lucasfilm for $4.05 billion was, not surprisingly, the enormous earnings potential of the Star Wars franchise. And that includes gaming — so one of the analysts asked for more details about Disney’s interactive strategy.
CEO Bob Iger responded that the company is “likely to focus more on social and mobile than we are on console.” However, he added that Disney will look at console games “opportunistically,” using licensing deals to allow other companies to create Star Wars games for cosnoles.
That might not seem too surprising, given the general excitement around mobile and social (uh, unless you count Zynga’s recent fortunes), as well as Disney’s recent success on mobile with the Where’s My Water? franchise. On the other hand, most of the big-name Star Wars games, most recently the massively multiplayer roleplaying game The Old Republic (published by Electronic Arts), have been made for consoles and PCs. Though again, Iger isn’t ruling out console games; they just probably won’t be made by Disney itself.
Disney executives also said that gaming accounted for a little less than 20 percent of Lucasfilm’s revenue in the past year. (Films accounted for 25 percent, consumer products for 25 percent, with the remaining 30ish percent made up of everything else.) And Iger said the acquisition should not affect the company’s goal to make its gaming division, Disney Interactive, profitable next year.