Virtual Worlds Forum

While at Mobile World Congress this week, I sat down for a chat with Alan Welsman, European marketing director at Walt Disney Internet Group. Although we were mainly talking about the company’s activities in mobile games, we did get onto the subject of virtual worlds, with Disney having acquired Club Penguin, launched Pirates Of The Caribbean, and announced plans to launch ten more in the coming months.

I was keen to find out what the scope is for these worlds – and specifically Club Penguin – to go mobile in some form. “Club Penguin is probably 6-10 in the UK, and it’s difficult, because do they have the handsets? Although in my focus group of eight year-olds the other day, four out of ten had mobiles.”

What form would it take though? Welsman says that in the past, there’s been a lot of talk about being able to take a character out of a console game, play with it on the phone, then take it back to the game somehow. “Those things are genuinely possible now,” he says. “We have to make sure that whatever you do on mobile is compelling. But because of the age thing, if we’re going to do it with Club Penguin, we have to think carefully how it works.”

Games would seem to be one logical approach, spinning some of Club Penguin’s mini-games off into standalone or collections of mobile games. Welsman highlights games as one of the two key pillars of Club Penguin online (the other is users interacting with their friends), although he didn’t confirm any specific plans on Disney’s part to bring this to mobile.

Something I didn’t ask Welsman about, as it only just struck me writing this, is the potential role virtual worlds could play in selling more mobile content – particularly games. For example, Disney could promote its range of mobile games within Club Penguin. The challenge, of course, is whether this would be seen as intrusive by the kids who use it (and their parents).