Disney and Marvel Games Showcase Is a Disney Gaming Renaissance Six Years in the Making

ign.com:

Six years ago, Disney announced it was shutting down its games publishing and development arms, seemingly exiting games for good.

Today, with a showcase stuffed with Disney and Marvel licensed titles, it’s like it never left.

Alongside new trailers and updates for known games like Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Disney Dreamlight Valley, Marvel’s Midnight Suns, Marvel Snap, and Disney Speedstorm, we just saw brand new reveals of games including Tron Identity from Bithell Games, Disney Illusion Island from Dlala, and Amy Hennig’s mysterious project with Skydance Media: a Captain America and Black Panther game set in World War II. Disney-loving gamers are eating well today.

But if you told any of us back in 2016 that this smorgasbord of Disney games was on the horizon, we might not have believed you. That year, Disney not only shuttered its massive toys-to-life franchise Disney Infinity, but it also announced it would be shutting down internal development studio Avalanche and leaving self-publishing for good, transitioning exclusively to a licensing model.

At the time, most people interpreted this as Disney essentially throwing in the towel on games in general. It’s understandable, as at the time Disney’s game output had almost entirely tapered off following the heyday of Disney Afternoon Collection titles and every animated film getting a licensed game. Most of its library in 2016 consisted of mobile games like Disney Emoji Blitz or Disney Crossy Road. Aside from its long-standing relationship with Square Enix for Kingdom Hearts, it looked like big, blockbuster Disney games might be done for good.

But now in 2022, it seems that was never the case. It certainly was never the plan for Disney VP of Disney, Pixar, and 20th Century