Disney Wings It Into The Local Online Market
The Age
Thursday June 26, 2008
Australian children will soon have many more online games from Disney as the entertainment giant begins to take the local market seriously.
The company is stepping up its efforts to capture the imagination of local children in the face of heavy competition from game and entertainment websites.Taking the lead from the popular children's website Club Penguin (clubpenguin.com), which it bought last year for $775million, it is now focusing more on games and virtual worlds rather than on promoting its movie andtelevision properties.Tokyo-based Duncan Orrell-Jones, managing director Walt Disney Internet Group (Asia-Pacific), was in Australia last week to spruik recent changes to the company's main property (disney.com.au) and to pre-empt the launch of three new virtual worlds for budding young cyber citizens."We've done a fair bit of research on this and there's an expectation by kids as well as parents that they will find great games and a lot of games (on the site), so we're very bullish on that being a core element of disney.com as well as disney.com.au," he says.Club Penguin, which already counts on Australia as the second biggest traffic generator outside the US, will earn its own .au domain and local staff to ensure its content is relevant for local audiences.Later in the year, pixies will be set loose with the launch of the Australian version of Pixie Hollow (pixiehollow.com), a world where children can create but fairies, decorate their hollows, play games, watch movies and make other fairy friends.Next year, the formula will be repeated when Cars (from the movie) is launched in the US and globally, followed by Pirates.However, the target age group for the latter has not yet been determined."We hope that we will have a portfolio of properties that appeal to a range of age groups," Mr Orrell-Jones says.He reiterated the company's commitment to online safety by hinting at a possible safety campaign with Australian authorities and ensuring parental controls and filters are in place on all virtual worlds.Commenting on the presence of M-classified movie trailers on the Disney site, the company's director, David Macdonald, said it was inevitable."We're always going to have trailers on the site, but we look to have balance and control in the deeper virtual worlds," he said."We need to make sure we can create tools to help parents."But to some degree parents have to make their own decisions to what they are comfortable with."-- LIA TIMSON
© 2008 The Age
