Disney to Shutter 10-Year-Old Toontown Multiplayer Game to shifts resources toward the larger Club Penguin and to mobile games; The change leaves Club Penguin as the only so-called virtual world operated by Disney

August 22, 2013 Leave a comment

Disney to Shutter 10-Year-Old Toontown Multiplayer Game

Walt Disney Co. (DIS) will close its Toontown Online video game for kids after 10 years, as the company’s interactive unit shifts resources toward the larger Club Penguin and to mobile games.

Toontown, in which monthly members form teams to fight evil robots, will stop operating on Sept. 19, according to its website. The game made its debut in June 2003 and Disney has said it was the first massively multiplayer online game designed for kids and families.“We are shifting our development focus toward other online and mobile play experiences, such as Club Penguin and a growing selection of Disney Mobile apps,” the Burbank, California-based company said in an e-mailed statement.

The change leaves Club Penguin as the only so-called virtual world operated by Disney. The site, acquired in 2007, is the largest of its kind, according to Disney. The company has been adding more themed content tied to characters from Star Wars and Pixar films such as “Monsters University.” On the Toontown site, Disney suggests players move to Club Penguin. The site had more than 200 million penguin characters created, according to a July report by Variety.

Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Robert Iger has been working to shore up Disney’s interactive unit, which lost $216 million last year. This week the company introduced its Infinity video-game system, which features characters including Pixar’s Buzz Lightyear and Captain Jack Sparrow from “Pirates of the Caribbean.”

Disney rose 0.1 percent to $61.88 yesterday in New York. The stock has climbed 24 percent this year, beating the 16 percent gain of the benchmark Standard & Poor’s 500 Index.

To contact the reporter on this story: Anthony Palazzo in Los Angeles at apalazzo@bloomberg.net

Filed under TMT Trends

Unknown's avatarAbout bambooinnovator
Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

Leave a comment