New Media, Old Media

Pretty good post here at the New York Times on the new "Epic Mickey" game.

It is not a happy review. It makes a pretty good point though about why companies like Disney or studios that pump out blockbuster movies, fail again and again to produce decent games.

This is basic technical and mechanical stuff that most of the game industry seemed to figure out a decade ago, but Disney hasn’t with Epic Mickey. 

How this could happen reveals a lot about why big international media companies like Disney generally continue to struggle to make great games. I believe it comes down to the fact that senior executive leadership at these companies generally has not had the inclination or the ability to engage with the creative reality of the product — actually to play the games. And that means they can’t make the final call on big-budget games with the same confidence they show in traditional media. 

Mickey Mouse, after all, is the embodiment of Disney. And yet here is a corporate symbol that has mostly been absent from popular entertainment for several decades. Epic Mickey, with such a grandiloquent name and its high profile on today’s most popular console, the Wii, is supposed to be part of Mickey’s reintroduction to a new generation of fans

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So if this game were a major Disney film or a big new series on the company’s ABC network, can you imagine how personally involved Mr. Iger and the rest of the Disney brass would be? How many screeners and rough cuts they would have watched? How much guidance would they have felt not only justified but also obligated to deliver? Perhaps Mr. Iger would even have solicited the personal reactions of the members of the company’s board of directors. 

That’s their job. At the end of the day, the top executive of a major media company is responsible for watching the movie or television pilot or listening to the album or reading the book and making the final call on whether it’s good enough. Not with every single product, of course, but certainly when the brand involved (Mickey Mouse) is synonymous with the entire company and when the game represents the company’s most important investment in that brand in one of the world’s most important forms of new media (video games).