In a deal worth four billion US dollars, the Walt Disney Company has bought out Marvel Entertainment lock, stock and barrel, now owning its entire stable of over five thousand comic book characters. The news will mean big changes for Marvel’s entire roterie of entertainment, but what does it mean for the gaming community? Marvel does not publish games itself, preferring to license out its characters to be used in other companies games, including Activision, CapCom and THQ, but Disney does publish its own video games, examples of which include titles such as “G-Force” and “Hannah Montana: The Movie”.
In a conference call with analysts today, Disney’s CEO and President Bob Iger fielded some of the questions as to what the buyout may mean for the future of Marvel video games. “On the video games front, (Marvel has) some what we see as smart licensing agreements with some of the best video game manufacturers in the business,” Iger noted, “and while we have been steadily moving in a vertically integrated direction, we don’t rule out the possibility of a blend of licensed games, as well as self-produced and self-distributed.
And what is nice about this is that as some of these deals near expiration, we have the luxury of at that time considering what is best for the company both from a financial perspective, from a quality perspective, and an exposure perspective.” What this all means of course will only be discovered in the fullness of time, but one thing seems certain – big changes are ahead for video games featuring Marvel characters.
