Connecting Game Players to Build a Sense of Loyalty

By SETH SCHIESEL Published: May 15, 2008, at The New York Times

Back in the analog era, delivering mass entertainment meant helping people connect with a character, a brand or a franchise. Few companies were more successful with that approach than Disney, with its stable of pop culture stars.

But these days that’s rarely sufficient. These days it’s all about helping people connect with one another. (Witness the rise of MySpace, Facebook and blogs.)

Disney’s video game division hopes to tap into that trend starting Thursday as the company opens DGamer, an online service and social network meant to connect players of Disney games across North America and eventually the world.

“DGames started from a realization we had in terms of what makes us unique from most game publishers,” Graham Hopper, the executive vice president and general manager for Disney Interactive Studios, said in a telephone interview. “Most game publishers have a collection of various franchises that don’t necessarily relate one to the other. We have a brand that incorporates a broad array of properties all under the Disney label. We know two things about someone who buys our games: One, they like Disney, and two, they like games. So with DGamer we saw a chance to build a community that brings together people who share those interests.”

The concept underpinning DGamer is the same as the theory behind Microsoft’s successful Xbox Live service and even the early days of America Online: If you tie consumers together in a social environment that goes beyond the actual content, they are likely to buy more in order to stay in touch with their friends.

Disney is introducing DGamer in conjunction with the Nintendo DS version of its new Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian game, which is timed to support the film’s debut on Friday. The DS is the most popular of the current generation of hand-held game machines and includes wireless Internet capability.

Disney plans to incorporate DGamer into all of its future DS games, including those in the popular kid-friendly Hannah Montana and High School Musical series. The service is meant to allow players of different games to chat with one another, compete on leader boards and earn rewards based on their progress. Mr. Hopper said Disney is the No. 2 game publisher on the DS behind Nintendo, though the studio does not break out separate financial results.

For Disney one of the major complications in developing an online social network is that many of the company’s most loyal fans are children. To prevent children from sharing sensitive personal information with potential predators, DGamer’s default settings allow players to communicate only through predefined phrases and answers along the lines of “How are you?” and “Yes.” Parents can log in to unlock more open forms of chat for their children.

Mr. Hopper said the service had cost less than $10 million to develop, partly because of investments already made in the company’s extensive Disney.com operation. He said that DGamer would become available internationally next year.