FEB. 7, 2012 • Alex Seropian resigned his position as senior vice president and general manager of core games at Disney Interactive. Seropian had held the position for one year, and is one of the founders of Bungie Software. Bill Roper, who joined Disney Interactive last July, will succeed Seropian.
Impact: Disney has seen quite a lot of top level talent come and go through its doors in the past few year. The company has focused on building both console games and online games. With the $563 million acquisition of Playdom in 2010, Disney made a major entry into the social game space. Unfortunately many of the company’s efforts have not panned out as expected. Despite decent sales for some products like Epic Mickey, Disney has wanted to move away from the high budget game space. However, on Facebook, Disney has not been able to compete with Zynga and their other online games have failed to capture an audience. The same day as Serpian’s resignation was announced Disney shut down the World of Cars Online browser game which had launched in 2010. Even with the success of the Cars 2 Pixar movie in 2011, World of Cars Online simply could not build an audience.
