Disney Rejected THQ Offer, Designing Toy Story 3 Game In House

Say you're in movies, your growth model's frittered away to break-even, and an industry pretty much symbolized by a butt-stomping plumber is effectively cleaning your clock -- what's a corporate dinosaur to do?

Easy: If you can't (sufficiently) milk 'em, depose 'em.

The Wall Street Journal reports that's essentially what Disney did when longtime Pixar partner THQ came pitching license rights to a Toy Story 3 game tie-in. Thanks but no thanks, said Disney and Pixar, opting instead to handle creation of the game (due in 2010) in-house.

You've heard plenty recently about how game sales were up 43 percent in 2007. Weigh that against box office revenues -- up a paltry 4 percent over the same period, and even then by way of ticket price inflation, not viewer growth. Home video sales -- still bigger bucks than gaming, but not by much -- were actually down 3.2 percent.

So when the authors of the WSJ piece suggest that "it isn't clear yet whether the media companies have the stamina to become serious competitors to heavyweight game publishers," I'd probably swap "stamina" for "inclination." Companies like Disney have oceans of stamina for substantial year-over-year revenue growth, and nothing suggests gaming won't be nailing that metric for years if not decades to come.

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