Disney Interactive painted red, knocks down company earnings

Normally a money making powerhouse, Disney has posted a loss for the second year in a row. Is the gaming division to blame?

With overall console software sales on the decline for a while now, it’s not hard to imagine that it could be a big part of the company’s woes. Disney Interactive is the gaming wing of the Disney entertainment empire and it’s taken quite the ding this year. A ding which, in turn, has brought Disney on the whole down a bit even though the other sectors of the company are doing just fine.

The long and the short of it is that profits fell quarterly by 14%, making losses somewhere in the 76million area. Thats bad, but the full year is worse as losses in total are looking to hit 216 million. Ouch. But before you get all ‘doomy & gloomy’ (new dwarves for Snow White!) on me, this is actually not the worst news that the company could have gotten.

Basically, even though it’s still a loss (and that’s not great) it’s better overall than the company did last year when they posted a downside of 308 million.

For it’s part, Disney isn’t mincing words and in an official statement from the company said that the emerging ‘social games’ market had taken a bite out of traditional console title sales. They also cited the fact that they really had no marquee games on the market this year as reason for the dropping revenues.

When you take that into consideration (and I do believe that the latter is a definite reason for an company to post a loss) then you actually have to be optimistic about Disney Interactive’s performance. Though it’s only ‘less losses’ than last year, to be on a upswing of any kind in this dreadful global economic situation isn’t all bad- and to do it while you really have nothing on the market that screams ‘buy me’ to gamers is even better.

With the impending release of Epic Mickey 2, maybe we might even see a little of the color of Mickey Mouse’s ears creep into Disney’s financial reports for next year. Crazier things…

Source: Gamespot