Magic Playdom

Now, all of a sudden, there's a whole new area of videogames out there - social gaming, something which is happening online, attracting tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of players, profiting from new types of business model and generally upsetting apple-carts left right and centre.

Disney, which has struggled with traditional videogames, faces being left behind once again - and it was no doubt watching very carefully when Electronic Arts whipped out its chequebook for Playfish some time ago. Disney knew it had to do something to keep up with the market, and just as it was for EA, the most logical answer was to dig into its wallet and buy up a major player.

It remains to be seen just how well that investment is going to work out for Disney. Leaping into the social gaming space in order to prevent being left behind is one thing, but the more detailed plan, the one which involves leveraging Disney properties in the social space, is going to require very careful execution.

The fact is that as yet, we don't know how well existing IPs are going to play in the social gaming space. It may seem like a no-brainer that a social game carrying the Disney brand is simply going to work better than an unbranded game, but the reality is much more complex. Social game development is an unusual beast - when it's working at its best, it's a process of extremely rapid iteration and development, one in which games launch long before they're in anything resembling a "finished" state and in which users are constantly part of a wide-scale beta testing programme, of which they are rarely aware.

Is that a development model which can be made to work with Disney properties at its heart? Possibly, but I confess to being dubious. Watching the development of titles which used valuable IPs like that in the past, one thing has been consistent - the need for sign-off of almost every change by a whole chain of managers, a factor which slows down development significantly. For Playdom to be able to roll out Disney IP based games in the nimble, aggressive way demanded by social gaming, it will require not just hard work on the company's part, but a change in culture throughout Disney's handling of IP - a change which I find hard to see happening in the present climate.

Besides, if there's one thing which we're all slowly learning from the emerging platforms for videogame content, it's that licences are less valuable than we'd always believed them to be. When games cost $50, a licence can be seen by consumers as a guarantee, if not of quality, then at least that the content will be relevant to them. When a game costs 59 pence, or a couple of pounds - or, as with most social games, nothing at all - that guarantee is much less important, vastly reducing the market power of existing IP.

On the iPhone, for example, a vast proportion of the most successful games are original IPs, while on Facebook, existing IPs barely get a look in. Zynga, by far the most successful of the social gaming firms, is presently valued at around $5 billion, if the scale of recent investments is to be believed - a valuation which it has reached without ever having to use someone else's IP for any of its games.

Disney's expensive acquisition of Playdom is another milestone for this burgeoning sector, but it remains to be seen whether it will have a happy ending. Certainly, if anyone is expecting Disney to ride into the market and show everyone how it's done, they will be sorely disappointed. The challenges facing Disney - and to a lesser extent EA, with the implications of its Playfish acquisition yet to fully reveal themselves - are enormous. Zynga and other key players in the social gaming space won't be losing much sleep over Mickey Mouse just yet.