Disney has announced several additions to its Disney.com property, including a new portal for virtual worlds (as well as its other games) and mobile widgets. Both are significant because they point towards interesting strategic decisions which Disney will have to take.
Disney's business is based on creating brands that kids love, and its virtual worlds activities are part of that. The consequence of that is that it has ended up with a collection of very different virtual worlds, in exactly the same way in which it has created films which stand alone. However, with virtual worlds the possibility to join them up in some way exists in a way that it doesn't with other media, such as films. It is clear that the games portal is the start of Disney's work towards this. The key advantage of such an approach is cross-promotion. If they can build 'Disney' up as a virtual worlds brand, instead of just 'Club Penguin' or 'ToonTown', etc, then when and if a user becomes bored of one virtual world the natural decision is to play a different Disney world rather than jump ship entirely. The challenge is to achieve that without weakening the individual virtual worlds, however. It clearly doesn't make much sense for users to have a single avatar, for example; a fairy in Club Penguin or a penguin in Pixie Hollow would make little sense. Disney is, though, working on a single sign on, with multiple avatars in different games tied to one account.
The other interesting new feature is the creation of 'virtual worlds widgets'. These are widgets in the mobile content sense of the word, which will allow users to access and interact with virtual worlds from their mobile. The widgets aren't, at this stage, about full access to the whole virtual world; instead users will be able to interact with a little piece of the virtual world. An example is that players of Pixie Hollow will be able to look after a fairy on their mobile phone, which will presumably also exist in the full virtual world. Nevertheless, as data prices plummet and phones become more sophisticated, Disney could be one of the first to bring VWs to mobile devices in a big way, given that games such as Club Penguin and ToonTown only require flash, rather than a hefty 3D client.
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